Joan Miró

Joan Miró (born April 20, 1893, Barcelona, Spain—died December 25, 1983, Palma, Majorca) was a Catalan painter who combined abstract art with Surrealist fantasy. His mature style evolved from the tension between his fanciful, poetic impulse and his vision of the harshness of modern life. He worked extensively in lithography and produced numerous murals, tapestries, and sculptures for public spaces.

Early life and artistic training

Miró’s father was a watchmaker and goldsmith. Both his father’s background as an artisan and the austere Catalan landscape would be of great importance to Miró’s art. According to his parents’ wishes, Miró attended a commercial college. He then worked for two years as a clerk in an office until he had a mental and physical breakdown. His parents took him for convalescence to an estate they bought especially for this purpose—Montroig, near Tarragona, Spain—and in 1912 they allowed him to attend an art school in Barcelona. His teacher at this school, Francisco Galí, showed a great understanding of his 18-year-old pupil, advising him to touch the objects he was about to draw, a procedure that strengthened Miró’s feeling for the spatial quality of objects. Galí also introduced his pupil to examples of the latest schools of modern art from Paris as well as to the buildings of Antoni Gaudí, Barcelona’s famous Art Nouveau architect.

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From 1915 to 1919 Miró worked in Spain—in Barcelona, at Montroig, and on the island of Majorca—painting landscapes, portraits, and nudes in which he focused on the rhythmic interplay of volumes and areas of colour. He experimented with the boldly colourful Fauvist style, but his treatment of form was geometric, influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne and the Cubist artists.

From early in his career Miró sought to establish means of metaphorical expression—that is, to discover signs that stand for concepts of nature in a transcendent, poetic sense. He wanted to portray nature as it would be depicted by a child equipped with the intelligence of an adult; in this respect, he had much in common with the Surrealists and Dadaists, two schools of modern artists who were striving to achieve similar aims by more intellectual means than those used by Miró.

Paris and early work

From 1919 onward Miró lived alternately in Spain and Paris. He was one of the many artists who made their way from abroad to Paris during the first two decades of the 20th century. Most of these foreign artists elected to become French citizens after coming into contact with the exciting French artistic metropolis, but Miró remained attached to his Catalan homeland.

In the early 1920s Miró combined meticulously detailed realism with abstraction in landscapes such as the renowned Farm (1921) and The Tilled Field (1923–24). He gradually removed the objects he portrayed from their natural context and reassembled them as if in accordance with a new, mysterious grammar, creating a ghostly, eerie impression.

From 1925 to 1928, under the influence of the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Paul Klee, Miró painted “dream pictures” and “imaginary landscapes” in which the linear configurations and patches of colour look almost as though they were set down randomly, as in The Policeman (1925). In paintings such as Dog Barking at the Moon (1926), he rendered figures of animals and humans as indeterminate forms. Miró signed the manifesto of the Surrealist movement in 1924, and the members of the group respected him for the way he portrayed the realm of unconscious experience. The poet André Breton, the chief spokesman of Surrealism, stated that Miró was “the most Surrealist of us all.”

After a trip in 1928 to the Netherlands, where he studied the 17th-century Dutch realist painters in the museums, Miró executed a series of works based on Old Master paintings titled Dutch Interiors (1928). In the 1930s Miró became more experimental, working with techniques of collage and sculptural assemblage and creating sets and costumes for ballets. He designed tapestries in 1934, which led to his interest in the monumental and in murals. His paintings began to be exhibited regularly in French and American galleries.

At the time of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, Miró was living in Paris. Although he typically was not political in his work, the turmoil in his native country inspired him to embrace social criticism. For example, he depicted a peasant revolt in The Reaper, a mural he painted for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Paris World Exhibition of 1937. He also imbued his pictures of this period, such as the nightmarish Head of a Woman (1938), with a demonic expressiveness that mirrored the fears and horrors of those years.

Mature work and international recognition

During World War II Miró returned to Spain, where he painted Constellations (1941), a series of small works scattered with symbols of the elements and the cosmos, expressing the happy collaboration of everything creative. During the last year of the war (1944), Miró, together with his potter friend José Lloréns Artigas, produced ceramics with a new impetuosity of expression: their vessels were often intentionally misshapen and fragmented.

Beginning in 1948, Miró once again divided his time between Spain and Paris. That year he began a series of very poetic works based on the combined themes of woman, bird, and star. In 1949 and 1950 he created some paintings that were wildly spontaneous in character, while executing others with punctilious craftsmanship. He used both approaches in his increasingly large sculptures, amalgamating all of his earlier figurations to form erotic fetishes or signals towering into space.

In the years following World War II Miró became internationally famous; his sculptures, drawings, and paintings were exhibited in many countries. He was commissioned to paint a number of murals, notably for the Terrace Hilton Hotel in Cincinnati, Ohio (1947), and for Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1950). His ceramic experiments culminated in the two great ceramic walls in the UNESCO building in Paris (1958), for which he received the Great International Prize of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In 1962 Paris honoured Miró with a major exhibition of his collected works in the National Museum of Modern Art. The Catalan architect José Luis Sert built for him the large studio of which he had dreamed all of his life on Majorca. Among his later works were several monumental sculptures, such as those he executed for the city of Chicago (unveiled 1981) and for the city of Houston (1982).

In spite of his fame, however, Miró, a taciturn, introverted man, continued to devote himself exclusively to looking and creating. His art had developed slowly from his first attempts at expression to the apparently playful masterpieces of his later period. In his late works Miró employed an even greater simplification of figure and background; he sometimes created a composition merely by setting down a dot and a sensitive line on a sea-blue surface, as in Blue II (1961). The whimsical or aggressive irony of his earlier work gave way to a quasi-religious meditation. In 1980, in conjunction with his being awarded Spain’s Gold Medal of Fine Arts, a plaza in Madrid was named in Miró’s honour.