Catalan painter Joan Miró and American sculptor Alexander Calder met in Paris in 1928 and became lifelong friends. Although Calder embraced the abstract and Miró the surreal, their friendship proved influential: a few years after their meeting, Calder's forms became more biomorphic, like those in Miró's paintings, and in the 1940s both artists made series entitled Constellations.

Calder's work was collected by both the Musé national d'art moderne and the Guggenheim even though it did not neatly fit the mission of either. Hilla Rebay disdained the purchase of sculpture for the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, but she and Solomon R. Guggenheim were nevertheless fond of Calder's work, which she purchased for the museum. In 1950, Calder's sculptures became the first American works to enter the MNAM, a logical distinction given that he split his time between the United States and France and exhibited his work frequently in Paris.

Miró's work came into the Guggenheim in the 1950s under the direction of James Johnson Sweeney. Although Peggy Guggenheim was a strong supporter of Surrealism, Rebay had for the most part rejected Miró's work for Solomon R. Guggenheim's collection. It was not until the 1970s that the MNAM began to collect Miró's work in depth. In the 1980s, through a gift from the American-based Menil Foundation and an increased budget, the museum acquired Miró's Blue series (March 1961), one of the most impressive of his late career.