The Policeman

This is a very large painting, almost two and a half metres tall, made with oil paint on canvas. At first it may not look like much of anything. Two pale, curving shapes float against a flat, dull yellow-brown background, which the museum calls ocher. The shapes are drawn in thin white paint. Look closely and they begin to turn into creatures. The one on the left is a policeman, and the other is his horse. There is no street, no uniform, no ground beneath them. The figures seem to drift in a watery, open space.

Start with the shape on the left. Along its edge, five small buds have sprouted, and they work as fingers. Both shapes also push out curved lines. These could be torsos, or they could be mouths, and the painting does not tell you which. Now look at the heads. Small dots and squiggles, drawn like quick sketches, make the eyes. On the policeman, a few marks also make a mustache. With just these simple touches, a blob becomes a face with a personality.

Joan Miró moved to Paris from his native Barcelona in 1920. There he met avant-garde painters and writers, people who wanted to break with tradition. They believed that daily, sensible life and the world of dreams should be joined together to reach a higher reality they called surreality. To get there, they used automatism, which means working spontaneously, much like saying whatever comes into your head. Miró tried it too. He said that even a few casual wipes while cleaning his brush might suggest the start of a picture. He painted this canvas in 1925.

The Policeman belongs to a group Miró made between 1925 and 1927, known as the dream paintings. They sit halfway between abstraction, where shapes stand for nothing in particular, and representation, where we recognize real things. Lines move freely, almost like handwriting. The result is a policeman and a horse that feel alive, even though they are barely there. Before you leave, look again at the thin white outlines against the ocher. Notice how little paint it takes for each shape to turn into a character.