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Miro, not quite top quality painter. I liked the early ones in naive style of farms and animals. I liked the big ones where he draws a line on a huge orange picture. I liked the late ones where he burnt the canvas. He really was quite good. But they are perhaps a bit stiff. What if he had never gone modern and just painted farms. No that's not right, you have to go with history. The show was crowded on a tueday afternoon. What is the difference between good and great, think you can see it.

His real strength is drawing. Those biomorphic shapes that Kandinsky and all those Americans borrowed in the 30s/40s - Miro's little 'Constellation' drawings set all that in train, seriously advance the field or all-over picture so loved by Greenbog. But like so many artists that excel at drawing (like Picasso, Michelangelo) their drawing often leaves no room for painting. It becomes a sort of afterthought - Oh yeah! facture! gesture! colour! - but like you say, there's a slight false note to it that you can't miss when you see them face to face.

I love Mirō (hey you can paste in those accents from word!) and the way he steers all those pictograms between biomorphic blobs and subliminal notation, or abstract writing - Surrealism! At its most insouciant! - but at the certain point a lot of it did get swallowed up by graphic design, became a victim of its own popularity. He's an artist too easily imitated. He's reason enough to go to Barcelona, let alone the Tate.

When Picasso painted Guernica for The Spanish Pavillion at the World Fair in 1937, Mirō contributed a huge screaming peasant head mural, about 30' high. Afterwards it got trashed. Sigh. No one remembers it now. But even crappy photos show it was AWESOME!

good points well put mr cap