Art: Voyager into Indeterminate Space

A Joan Miró retrospective in Washington

Art historians have never been comfortable with Joan Miró. A surrealist? The admirers of Dali or Magritte would not agree. An abstractionist? Miró says he never painted an abstraction in his life. Everything "is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else," he insists. The Miró admirers who have now mounted a selection of 45 of his paintings at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum have another proposition: Miró is simply a great painter. Says Hirshhorn Director Abram Lerner: "Miró's place is alongside...