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Miró’s semiabstract shapes, although stylized, always playfully alluded to real objects. Brilliantly colored and whimsical, they seem like cartoons from another planet. “What really counts is to strip the soul naked,” Miró said. “Painting or poetry is made as one makes love — a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.”

ERNST: MOTHER OF MADNESS. Both a Dadaist and Surrealist, Max Ernst (1891-1976) best exemplifies how Surrealists employed ambiguous titles. With labels like “The Preparation of Glue from Bones” and “The Little Tear Gland That Says Tic Tac,” Ernst tried to jolt the viewer to mental attention. In one of his most well-known works, “Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale” (1924), the title induces a shocked double-take. Although it seems straight out of a Hitchcock scenario, Ernst said the picture derived from his pet cockatoo’s death when he was a child and that for years he suffered from “a dangerous confusion between birds and humans.”

Ernst referred to himself as “the male mother of methodical madness.” He first experienced hallucinations when he saw fevered visions during a bout of childhood measles. He found he could induce similar near-psychotic episodes (and adapt them in art) by staring fixedly until his mind wandered into some psychic netherworld. With so many unusual inner sights to see, it’s not surprising Ernst described his favorite pastime as “looking.” Ernst invented “frottage,” a new method for generating surprising imagery. He placed a sheet of paper over rough surfaces like wood planks and rubbed with a soft pencil. He then elaborated on these patterns to produce fantastic, sometimes monstrous, imagery.

CHAGALL

Chagall, “I and the Village,” c. 1911, MoMA, NY. French painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was inspired by two sources of imagery: the Jewish life and folklore of his Russian childhood and the Bible. Although his imaginative fantasies were hailed as a precursor to Surrealism, Chagall insisted he painted actual memories, not irrational dreams.

Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” 1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

The most significant art show in American history, called the Armory Show because it took place in New York’s 69th Regiment Armory building, burst the bubble of American provincialism in 1913. It included works by the most controversial modern mosters of Europe. Americans were clearly unprepared for Matisse’s bold colors, Picasso’s fractured forms, and Duchamp’s Dadaist spirit. “Nude Descending a Staircase” was the show’s runaway sensation. A portrait of a nude in overlapping stages of movement, it came to symbolize the essence of modern art. An “explosion in a shingle factory, one journalist dubbed it.

Unprecedented ridicule, hostility, and indignation greeted the show, called “pathological” by the New York Times. Critics lampooned the artists as “bomb-throwers, lunatics, depravers,” calling the room of Cubist paintings a “Chamber of Horrors. ” Public officials demanded the show be shut down to safeguard public morals.

The show had two major, lasting effects. On the positive side, American artists learned of the artistic revolution happening in Paris studios an ocean away. “Progressive” art became a force to be reckoned with, modern galleries sprang up, and artists experimented with abstract forms. The downside was that the American public initially perceived modern art as a bad joke, even a fraud — a perception which partially continues today.

DALI: PAINTING PARANOIA. The painter who based his technique, which he called “critical paranoia,” on exploiting his own neuroses was Salvador Dalí (1904-89). When Dalí came to Paris in 1928 and joined the Surrealists, he had plenty of obsessions to draw on. He was terrified of insects, of crossing streets, of trains, boats, and airplanes, of taking the Métro — even of buying shoes because he couldn’t bear to expose his feet in public. He laughed hysterically and uncontrollably and carried a piece of driftwood at all times