Carnival of Harlequin

A small room teems with whimsical, weightless creatures - a guitar-strumming cat, winged biomorphs, a ladder, an ear, musical notes, an eye drifting on a stalk - dancing in a playful, hallucinatory carnival. Joan Miro, half-starved and hallucinating from hunger in his Paris studio, said the visions fed the painting. Now in Buffalo, Carnival of Harlequin is the great masterpiece of his early Surrealism - a buoyant, comic universe of invented signs and dream-creatures, the artist's private language of shapes set loose in a joyful, slightly delirious festival of pure imagination.