Now the news has worsened. We've entered the blasted terrain of Goya's Disasters of War and Guernica. Three or four figures are divided by a coil of real rope, hung on hooks protruding from cardboard. The gagging figure on the upper left looks away in horror, with a parallel figure like an echo in the upper right corner. A Matisse-like idealized nude below has a grotesquely distended foot that exactly echoes the lower tangle of rope. What does the rope signify? A public hanging? A tied-up prisoner? And, yet, there's a vigor to the whole red, white, and blue composition that has its own weird beauty and coherence. "I give greater and greater importance to the materials I use in my work," Miró told an interviewer at around this time. "A rich and vigorous material seems necessary to me in order to give the viewer that smack in the face that must happen before reflection intervenes."