In the late 1920s Joan Miro's attacks on the grand tradition of painting became more pronounced, and none was more notorious than the claim that he wanted to assassinate it. Just what he might have meant by this curiously aggressive salvo - and the radical changes his work underwent at that time - is investigated in Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937, which explores twelve series of his works from that decade, along with the single painting that acts as its affecting coda. With close attention paid to the materials he used and to the political, biographical, and intellectual context in which he worked, Miro's paradoxical nature emerges: an artist of violence and resistance who - despite his assassination tactics - never cease to be a painter.