Miró's paintings are expressions of astonishment and joy

After just a few steps in the brightly lit, spacious rooms of the Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden, which has mounted this exhibition of works by Joan Miró , we were already wondering which other 20th century artists could be as generous towards their fellow humans. What other painter deploys so light a touch and so much variety to enchant us with his whirling forms, while remembering more serious subjects and powerful emotions? At this level of seemingly inexhaustible inventiveness we have Picasso, Klee, Kandinsky – and without a moment's hesitation, Miró too. The Colours of Poetry exhibition is a succession of astonishment and joy. Although there have been plenty of Miró retrospectives recently, this offers some unexpected novelties. A collage from the early 1930s, combining bits of cut and torn cardboard, catches us unawares with its deceptive casualness and perfect composition. No less surprising is another work, from 1953, this time involving thick board, etched with a gouge then enhanced with colours that run into the incisions. Private collectors in Germany, the US and Switzerland have loaned canvases not even mentioned in the literature, as well as rare works on Masonite or sanded paper. The Miró Foundation in Barcelona and the artist's legatees have been equally helpful. The result amounts to about 100 works: paintings, drawings, sculptures, assemblages and ceramics. This is largely thanks to Jean-Louis Prat, who knew the man himself and his studio. During his time at the Maeght Foundation, at St Paul de Vence in France, he showed that he was just as good at obtaining difficult loans as he was at assembling them. Each work has the space it needs and all sorts of relationships develop. For this show he has decided to reverse the chronology, making a splendid opening with works from the 1960-and 70s – Miró died in 1983 – then going back, one decade at a time, to the 1920s, when Miró first met the surrealist poets and launched into the unknown. This approach would not be advisable with less coherent pieces. Here it works so well you soon forget you are putting the clock back. There is no longer any sense of belonging to a particular year or period, or fitting into a specific trend. All you know is that this is Miró, for whom it was quite normal for the night sky to be green or an intense blue, and for women to be smaller than birds. When he started as an artist in about 1916, several visual languages were predominant: photography and advertising, and the traditional artistic representation, including post- Impressionism. But by 1922-23 Miró had no further use for them. They prevented him from seeing and feeling. They blocked his view, much as platitudes are an obstacle to speech. In just a short time, without realising that André Breton was simultaneously doing the same thing in poetry, he cast off all the usual, worn-out graphic and pictorial turns of phrase, and began to invent other shapes and arrange them together. For example, it seemed to him that at a certain level of awareness a triangle and a few circles could be sufficient to represent the female body. But the triangle might open too and metamorphose into an oval divided in two by a centre line, making it look like the leaf of a tree. Similarly he had the impression that when human beings look at one another or touch, we perceive qualities such as the elasticity of flesh or the texture of skin. We only think of the skeleton or skull when forced to do so. Miró consequently stretched the anatomy of his figures, made them sinuous and flowing, with no concern for ordinary proportions. He proceeded in much the same way with animals, deciding it was more important to highlight essential functions – a bird's flight, the sexual potency of a bull – than morphological characteristics. Because he developed a new language of his own he achieved amazing intimacy with both beings and objects. He thus had no need for fantasy or symbols. He painted very simple things, but because he painted them with a hitherto unknown simplicity he endowed them with an almost physical presence. With Miró every work is a first-time event – and he carried on in this vein for 50 years. This article orginally appeared in Le Monde