Joan Miro first started experimenting with printmaking techniques in 1920s Paris but took up the medium more seriously after 1945. Printed in 1954, The Smile with Flamboyant Wings is a lithograph based on a painting of the same title he produced the previous year. The image features some of Miro's most recognisable stylistic emblems, such as large, rounded shapes, filled with blocks of primary colours and long black lines trailing from the edges, and figures which are both Surrealist and abstract.