In 1938, Joan Miró was introduced to the printmaker Louis Marcoussis by the poet Tristan Tzara. Although Miró had sporadically made prints since the late 1920s, it was through his close work with Marcoussis that he came to fully appreciate the possibilities of printmaking, particularly etching. That same year, Miró also experimented with the layering of graphic imagery through the creation of his "Black and Red Series" of eight etchings. The subject of the image includes several figures that have been interpreted as a family of three responding to the presence of a monster at lower left (a symbol of General Francisco Franco, the leader of the Fascist forces who would become the military dictator of Spain in 1939). The mother at left stretches out her arms to protect the frightened child at center while the father stands helplessly at right.