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narrowed its angle even further and focused on the nail of the big toe, which then got conflated with the crescent moon: a small step for mankind, but a big one for a foot.) Time and again, looking at carved Romanesque capitals and tympana in Catalan churches, from Ripoll in the north to Tarragona in the south, you catch yourself breathing his name. His bestiary of images, wild and swarming and drawn with a line as exact as a knife's cut, comes from multiple sources. One, obviously, was Hieronymus Bosch. Another was the decorative art of Islamic Spain, with its precise yet often hallucinatory stylization of animal and vegetable shapes; the first sign of its incursion into Miro's work is the 1918 Standing Nude, whose sturdy body, pleated with Cubist (or at any rate, cubified) wrinkles, poses against a drapery covered with arabesques and birds. And then there were the mosaic inventions of the Catalan artist Josep Maria Jujol, who was working for Gaudi when Miro was a teenager, and whose wandering line and isolated words set in tile clearly stayed in Miro's mind when he was doing his poem-pictures. Miro's work thereafter would stay populated with images of specifically Catalan identity. ''Hard at work and full of enthusiasm,'' he reported to a friend from Montroig in 1923. ''Monstrous animals and angelic animals. Trees with eyes and ears All the pictorial problems resolved. We must explore all the golden sparks of our souls.'' The Hunter (Catalan Landscape), 1923-24, is full of such sparks, starting with the figure of the hunter himself, with his floppy cap -- the traditional barretina, which is to Catalunya roughly what Stetsons are to Texas -- and his heart, burning with neat little flames of patriotic ardor, somewhat resembling an anarchist's grenade about to go off. The letters that spell out SARD in Miro's loopy calligraphy refer, of course, to the traditional dance known as a sardana. Much barer works followed: the astonishing series of a dozen or so large landscapes that Miro produced in Montroig in 1926 and 1927, which include Dog Barking at the Moon, Animated Landscape and Landscape with Rabbit and Flower. It is as hard to account for the spell of the last of these as it is to evade it. It is quintessential Miro -- a field divided roughly in half by a rambling horizon line, the earth featureless and red, the sky equally featureless (except for the ceremonious care with which the paint has been deposited) and blue. In the sky hangs a thing like a bladder, with a thin black line dangling to Earth: the ''flower.'' The ''rabbit,'' a sort of yellow Shmoo, regards it from below. There is nothing else. It ought to be ridiculous, but it is profoundly haunting, full of an indefinable melancholy provoked by what Miro identified as the main motif of his work: ''tiny forms in vast empty spaces.'' And you are always struck by the sheer amount of work that he lavished upon those tiny forms. The bugs and dogs, even the genital hairs, of Miro's imagination live because of the graphic care expended on them: his solicitude makes them vibrant, his consciousness becomes theirs. Miro claimed that his landscapes ''have nothing whatever to do with outer reality. Nevertheless they are more Montroig than if they had been painted from nature.'' His work was to have an immense influence on abstract painting -- What would American artists in the '40s, from Arshile Gorky onward, have done without him? -- and yet it never lost its sense of wonder at the world or ceased to anchor itself in sharp little signs and pictographs denoting the specific. Its utter conviction is furthered by Miro's resort to painstaking, almost old-masterly construction and technical effects: in the mid-'30s he produced a series of tiny oils on copper, such as Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement, 1935, in which grotesqueness and scatology collide with an enameler's decorative sense. The climax of Miro's talent for oscillating between the general and the particular was his series of 23 modestly sized paintings known, collectively, as the Constellations, most of which he painted in Mallorca, after fleeing from occupied France, in 1940-41. MOMA has managed to assemble all of them -- a real feat of curatorial borrowing power. The recurrent shapes in these are two black forms -- the circle and a bow tie, or diabolo -- which overlap and dance in deep space in swarms, with uncanny and magical precision, alternating with other signs from his repertoire: eye, face, star, vagina, hairs, moon, bird. They are defined and linked by a wonderfully stringent and rhythmic play of black lines. These virtually define Miro's vision of cosmic unity, and they are a pictorial feat of the highest order. You can imagine Miro's Gothic ancestors nodding in approval at such miniatures. Their concentrated energy seems to have carried the artist along for another decade. But though he painted many a good picture afterward, he was never to repeat this sustained burst of inspiration. See the Constellations now: it will be a very long time, if ever, before they are all lined up again.
