“Painting I” is the first of three expressive black, white and red paintings created by Joan Miró on April 12, 1967. Since the early 1960s, as a sign of a new phase in the artist's work, Miró has examined the influence of recent American painting and Japanese calligraphy on his own uniquely poetic, instinctive and gestural painting style. After temporarily giving up painting in favor of ceramics in 1956, Miró returned to painting in 1959 after his stay in the USA, during which he also visited his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In his again intensive painterly work, Miró's forms became bolder, more open and more expansive. Inspired by the works of Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, whose works he saw in New York, Miró's painting style became more dramatic and fluid and also testified to a growing interest in Japanese calligraphy. Although the vocabulary of his images remained the same, Miró condensed his themes into ideograms by reducing complex forms to their essential linear aspects.
