Surrealism, which Joan Miró encountered firsthand in Paris in 1919, inspired him to create not as he saw but as he felt. From then on, he shaped his art as a poet. During the years of the Second World War, while taking refuge in a village in Normandy, he began a series of works that revealed his most personal language: a universe populated by recurring icons—birds, women, moons, stars—pared down to their essence. In them, Miró captured both life and the order of the cosmos. Women, heads and birds draw on the ancestral simplicity of lines, emotional states and an energetic exchange between beings inhabiting the duality of earth and sky. With their pronounced orifices (mouths, eyes, vaginas) these figures embody a worldview in which atavistic instincts, deeply rooted in the earth, coexist within the symbolic space of art.