Joan Miro

With its mane blowing in the wind as it gallops through an imaginary landscape, a white horse with an enormous neck seems to float in a sky studded with multicoloured stars. We find ourselves in a circus—a cosmic, dreamlike circus where the star-studded ring is a dark quadrilateral. Coloured balls have slipped from the hands of imaginary jugglers. The space around the horse is infinite. A minimalist intensity emerges from the canvas. Joan Miró’s Circus Horse is part of a series of around ten canvases of the same name, of which he said: ‘[…] it took me a long time to make them. Not to paint them, but to meditate on them.” It was in Paris, in the mid-1920s, that the Spanish painter and sculptor settled and joined the circle of the Surrealists. André Breton, one of the leading figures of this artistic movement, would say of him that he was “the finest feather in the Surrealist cap”. It was a fruitful period, with the world of dreams opening up to interpretation. Miró invented a repertoire of simple forms that resembled a coded language. He developed a personal representation of the unconscious. Forms and symbols float weightlessly against a monochrome blue background, reflecting the artist’s inner world.  This painting by Miró represents a ‘happy accident’ in the history of acquisitions at the Musée d’Ixelles, originally dedicated to Belgian art. Having entered the collections by chance through donations, it joined the museum in 1977 following the bequest of Max Janlet, a dealer and collector from Ixelles.

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