When in the 1920s and 1930s Miró developed his signature style of star shapes, bird forms, attenuated figures, squiggles and primary colours, in order to depict what he called "an extrapictorial reality", he also turned them into a symbolic language through which to comment on the Spanish Civil War and the wider European conflict. While there is no such thing as a Miró glossary, in the Constellations series c1940, for instance, his marks and patterns can be decoded. They are a palimpsest in which birds stand for warplanes, figures represent Spain or humanity, the Moon is the last night of beauty before the triumph of fascism, dogs are folk memories, and so on. It is an insinuating disjunction that for all their beauty these paintings represent an explicit commentary on militarism. 

Overtly didactic exhibitions are not always successful because they can distort the balance between message and medium but in Miró's case it is important to counteract what André Breton, the father of the Surrealists, identified as Miró's "partially arrested development at the infantile stage". The painter may have taken refuge on his farm, fled Civil War Spain for Paris, wartime France for Spain, Franco's mainland for Majorca, but his pictures are not innocent and they are not escapist. Whichever fastness he settled in he kept an eye on what he had left behind and his art is always one of engagement rather than disengagement. The ladder of escape — a recurring motif in his paintings — was as much to give himself a means to find a new perspective on the developments of history as a way to flee them. 

While Miró failed to bring about his famously expressed desire to pull off "the assassination of painting" — by which he meant to stop it being a bourgeois chattel — he was nevertheless a successful rebel in other ways. His Surrealist experiments in automatic painting grew into a coherent language that combined Modernism, content and a means of bringing "a world to birth". And he kept up a running criticism on the iniquities of that world while keeping them aesthetically palatable. It was no mean trick. While some exhibitions reveal their subjects to be lesser figures than often thought, this adroit exegesis succeeds in freeing Miró the artist from Miró the brand.