At the entrance to Joan Miro: the Birth of the World, the stunning exhibition at Paris's Pompidou Centre which charts the career of one of the outstanding figures of twentieth-century painting between the years 1917-1934, the curators have placed a series of contrasting landscape photographs.

One set of images shows the scorched yet productive landscape of Montroig, the family farm outside Barcelona, where the artist was first sent to recover from illness as a young man of 17, in 1911, and where he went on to spend each summer. The other group shows the damp city of Paris: the rainwater cupped by the kerbstones of the Boulevard des Italiens and a clutch of dirty barges at the Pont Neuf as the morning fog rolls over the sluggish Seine.

These images depict the twin poles of Miro's life: seclusion in the elemental atmosphere of the Catalan countryside versus the close, claustrophobic community of intellectual Paris where he kept a tiny studio and had a steady flow of visitors from Andre Breton to Ernest Hemingway.

From these two he created a third place - what we might call Miro world - a deeply personal universe acclaimed by the surrealists and

by subsequent generations, where roosters and rabbits run across

a painting entirely untethered from the landscape. A world where a

sturdy policeman is reduced to a twirling moustache or a toreador to a red spot upon a spindly cruciform frame. A place of endless mutation and infinite possibility where the human form is no more than a wiggly line, a wriggling sperm or a tiny insect floating free.

Yet another world away is austere, classical Edinburgh, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, permanent home to three of some 240 works on show in Paris. The journey across the channel is short, but the distance that Scotland's Miros have travelled this spring is immense, because the Pompidou's exhibition is helping to rewrite the story of the artist's early development.

Scotland's three paintings; Maternity, Head of a Catalan Peasant II (shared between Edinburgh and the Tate) and Peinture, were all created within a period of around 18 months between spring 1924 and winter 1925. ''These were the years of breakthrough for Miro,'' says Patrick Elliot, chief curator at the SNGMA. ''The Pompidou was very keen to get hold of these works; they were key works, and they are big works, masterpieces.''

A show like Birth of the World is a triumph of logistics, with loans from institutions and private collections in countries across the globe, above all America, where many of Miro's most significant works are held. Around a third of the works in the exhibition have never been seen together in Europe. In this company, and under the detailed scrutiny of the curator, Agnes de la Beaumelle, and an international team of scholars, Miro's art emerges in a new light. Far from the light-hearted, childlike innocent we have been taught to expect, Miro turns out to be a much darker spirit.

There have been bigger Miro shows, most notably two major retrospectives, but never one that cast such searching light on these, his most significant creative years. Moving through the immense chronological exhibition, one is struck

by his zig-zag progress in dismantling our assumptions about painting. Sure, the cheerful farmyard animals are all there, the comical moustaches, the dots and stars and constellations, but in painting after painting, completed alongside his familiar poetic works, the violence of Miro's art becomes apparent.

His canvases are scraped and scarred, some punctured with tiny holes that are only visible under magnification, but careful and deliberate nonetheless. Miro emulates graffiti, makes constructions from wire and nails and feathers. In a series of ugly collages Miro uses bitumen, sandpaper and aluminium, all calculated to be abrasive both to the eye and the sensibility.

If this is a Miro who seems unfamiliar to us, he would be recognisable to his peers. ''Personally, I don't know where we're going,'' he declared in 1931. ''My only certainty is that I want to destroy, destroy all that exists in painting. I feel a deep contempt for painting . . . painting disgusts me. I can't look at any of my works.''

In the summer of 1924, the artist was first truly pushing himself to go ''beyond painting''. ''Starting from reality,'' he later said, ''I strove to lose touch with it.'' In the exhibition we see him grappling with the human form, breaking it up and boiling it down to its fundamental elements. This reaches its early climax in Maternity, a madonna suckling two ant-like infants. The female form is reduced to a mere diagram, a calligraphic cross, a pair of exaggerated breasts, a womb, a gaping hole. It is undoubtedly a breakthrough painting and, in this new light, a brutal fetishing one.

The process continued that autumn and winter and into the following spring with a further series of figures, based on the traditional Catalan peasant. He is cartoon-like: a pair of eyes, a red hat, a beard. The peasant is the artist's ironic double, the archetypal man of the earth that Miro, the city boy whose parents wanted him to be an accountant, both admires and mocks. He is also faintly and deliberately repulsive,

he elaborate attention paid to his shaggy beard, just one of numerous provocative references to body hair that crop up again and again in

the show.

By the time we reach the third Edinburgh painting we are in a world in which familiar references have almost disappeared. This is a dream painting, as close to a surrealist poem as the artist comes. From a graffiti scrawl we might make out a bird's beak, a foot, a pair of eyes and perhaps a breast, in lines that are as much written as drawn. '' How did these drawings and picture ideas come to me? I went to bed . . . I had not always eaten, I saw things . . . I saw shapes in the cracks in walls, on the ceiling.''

Miro's unique universe was grounded in real experience, even if it was only a crack in the ceiling. But it was also a world that flirted with destruction, where the conve tional laws of representation seem to have been blown away just as surely as the First World War blew away the vestiges of the old order.

These days Miro's images have become so familiar and so diluted by his later years that they may seem saccharine. Born in 1893, he lived for 90 years. He started as an artist with moderate talent, but, in his best years, he did as much to break the bounds of painting as any of his peers.

This exhibition and accompanying book restore the painter's best works to their original oddness, their instability and their fetishistic, violent qualities. They also confirm that in Edinburgh we have three very fine paintings, indeed.

''Museums become famous for their masterpieces and we wanted

to ensure that we would have top quality. It does mean making sacrifices and at times making a purchase is a bit of a gamble,'' says Patrick Elliot. ''Seeing our paintings in Paris it was striking that they did come out looking like the masterpieces of any other age.''

Joan Miro, the Birth of the World, is at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, until June 28. An accompanying book, Joan Miro 1917-1934: I'm Going to Smash Their Guitar, is available from Paul Holberton Publishing, (pounds) 40.

Greatness on loan

Ploughed Land, 1924, above, The Guggenheim, New York

A farmyard scene, in which assorted creatures and disembodied human forms are scattered across the scene like a modern version of Bosch. ''Working hard and full of enthusiasm,'' Miro wrote. ''Monstrous animals and angelic animals. Trees with ears and eyes and a peasant in a barettina with a rifle, smoking a pipe.''

The Farm, 1922, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The Catalan countryside is rendered in fine detail like a children's book. It was bought by Ernest Hemingway who hustled friends and boxing associates in Paris to raise the cash and send it home for his wife's birthday. The painting had, he said, ''all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No-one could look at it and not know that it had been painted by a great painter.''

The Birth of the World, 1925, below, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

A stained canvas of spills and scars on which the painted forms seem to float free above a primordial soup that might be air, earth or water. ''Not so much painted as dirtied, as blurred as destroyed buildings, as seductive as faded walls on which generations of bill-stickers and centuries of drizzle have written mysterious poems,'' wrote Miro's friend Michel Leiris.