Joan Miró, Le Lézard aux plumes d'or (The Lizard with Golden Feathers) (detail), 1971, colour lithograph

Picasso, Miró, Dalí: Unbound

Now showing1 August 2026 – 24 January 2027$30

The livre d'artiste as a revolution in book-making, seen through Picasso, Miró and Dalí — extravagant, experimental volumes that turned the printed page into an art form.

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On now All of October 2026

In Picasso's Chevaux de minuit, the horses run and so does the type: words angle diagonally, scatter across the page or stack vertically around his engravings of horses in motion. The pages are shown unframed, with no glass between you and them.

These are livres d'artiste, books Spanish artists made with French poets, printers and publishers, often issued loose in boxes rather than bound. Beside the three headliners are Juan Gris, whose lithographs for Pierre Reverdy's poems were planned in 1915 and printed in 1955, and Óscar Domínguez, who etched Domaine in occupied Paris in 1942. The MFA last gave the form a show in 1961.

Lauren Kaufmann wrote in the Arts Fuse that it "succeeds admirably in making an exacting, specialized genre accessible." The catch: the books' texts are mostly in French, and the curators chose not to translate them. It's in Gallery 184 and included with $30 admission; the $5 Third Thursday on 15 October runs 5 to 10 pm.

Look for

Picasso's Chevaux de minuit (1956)
Look for engravings of horses in motion, with Roch Grey's words tilting diagonally, scattering and running vertically across the page as if they were galloping too.
Dalí's Le paradis perdu (1974)
Ten drypoints scratched straight into copper for Satan's first sight of Eden in Milton's Paradise Lost, loose and quick next to Dalí's polished Surrealist paintings.
Miró and Tzara's Parler seul (1948-50)
Miró's lithographs and Tzara's poems were printed at different times on different presses, yet the pages read as one act of invention; Miró spent two years on it.
Gris and Reverdy's Au Soleil du plafond (1955)
Twelve lithographs for short poems about a lamp, a book, a guitar, a pipe, a coffee grinder and sunlight on the ceiling.
Domínguez and Éluard's Poésie et vérité (1947)
Thirty-three etchings with Éluard's poem Liberté, the call to resistance that British aircraft dropped on leaflets over occupied France.