The exhibition Peinture-Poésie brings together for the first time three important illustrated books by Joan Miró Il était une petite pie of 1928, Parler seul of 1948-50 and Mà de Proverbis of 1970.  These books demonstrate the full range of Miró's development as a graphic artist, his close relationship with poets, and his lifelong interest in the word/image matrix in his painting and in his graphic work. Miró’s first book of 1928 illustrates children’s songs by Lise Hirtz, a poet and close associate of the French Surrealists. The second book represents a collaboration between Miró and the Dada poet Tristan Tzara. The third book represents a collaboration between Miró and the Japanese poet Shûzô Takiguchi, a key figure of the Japanese avant-gardes, who wrote the first monograph on the Catalan artist in 1940.

As with the exhibition, in its catalogue the artist’s books by Miró are supplemented by paintings and works on paper from the Serralves Museum, the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. The essays by experts Robert Lubar Messeri, Teresa Montaner (Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona), Kenji Matsuda (Keio University, Tokyo) provide an insight into Miró’s work between 1924 and 1928, when he developed an iconic language of multivalent signs and pictograms, Miró’s approach to lithography, the “calligraphic turn” in his work and his increasing economy of means, as his figuration alternates between sign formation and pure gesture.