Blue II

A vast, calm field of pure blue is interrupted only by a horizontal line of small black dots and a single short red bar, the rest left as open, breathing color. Joan Miro, late in life, pared his playful Surrealist vocabulary down to these spare, meditative expanses. Now in the Centre Pompidou, Blue II belongs to a triptych of near-empty blue canvases - among his most radical and serene works, the teeming creatures of his earlier art distilled to a few quiet marks adrift in a boundless blue, silence and emptiness made the subject itself.