Joan Miró's colorful woodcut illustrations for À toute épreuve by Paul Éluard, 1958

Legion of HonorLincoln Park, Outer Richmond

Miró: Proof Against All

Now showing25 July 2026 – 25 July 2027$25

A focused look at À toute épreuve (1958), the Miró and Paul Éluard book for which Miró cut more than 230 woodblocks, the high point of his work as an illustrator.

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On now All of October 2026

You start reading one of Paul Éluard's poems and one of Miró's colorful biomorphic shapes lands on top of it. That happens all through À toute épreuve (1958): the pictures overlap the verse and sometimes interrupt it. They look offhand. Miró cut 233 woodblocks to make the book's 80 prints.

This is a small display in the Legion's Logan Gallery, built around the museum's bound copy, the first artist's book David and Reva Logan ever bought. (The museum owns an unbound copy too.) Around it, the show sets the book within Miró's wider work on artist's books, some 250 of them according to Apollo, and the printers, publisher and poet each one needed.

Apollo called it one of Miró's most charming creations. Come for printmaking and the art of the book, not for paintings. It's included in general admission, Tuesday to Sunday, 9:30am to 5:15pm, until 25 July 2027.

Look for

The bound À toute épreuve
Look at how Miró's colored shapes sit on the same pages as Éluard's poems, crossing over the text and sometimes breaking into it.
There Was a Little Magpie (1928)
Thirty years earlier, Miró's gouaches were reproduced as eight stencil-colored pochoir illustrations for Lise Hirtz's book, printed on Japanese paper.