Miró, Joan.
Works of the artist.
Joan Miró was a painter, sculptor, engraver and ceramist born in Barcelona in 1893. Today he is known as one of the most significant surrealist painters of the 20th century. [+]
Miró, Joan
Joan Miró was a painter, sculptor, engraver and ceramist born in Barcelona in 1893. Today he is known as one of the most significant surrealist painters of the 20th century.
He studied commerce and worked as a sales assistant at a drugstore for two years, until a sudden illness forced him to retire for an extended period in the family home of Mont-roig del Camp. Upon his return to Barcelona, he entered the Academy of Art directed by Francisco Galí, where he became acquainted with the latest European artistic trends.
Until 1919, his painting was dominated by expressionist, fauvist and cubist styles, creating landscapes, portraits and nudes. That same year he traveled to Paris and met Picasso and Jacob, as well as some members of the Dadaist movement, such as Tristan Tzara. He soon alternated between the French capital and Mont-Roig, transforming his works with greater definition of form, chiseled with a strong light that eliminated contrasts. These were the first glimpses of his dreamlike and phantasmagoric language, as well as his introduction to personal themes intertwined with popular ones, that would mark his entire career.
He was close to the principles of surrealism, signed the Manifesto (1924) and incorporated into his work concerns typical of that movement, such as the hieroglyphic and calligraphic sign. The other great influence of the time would come from the hand of P. Klee, from whom he would pick up the taste for the linear configuration and the recreation of ethereal atmospheres and nuanced chromatic fields.
In 1928, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired two of his canvases, which declared the first international recognition of his work. A year later, he married Pilar Juncosa. During the following years the artist questioned the meaning of painting, a conflict that is clearly reflected in his work. On the one hand, he began the series of Dutch Interiors, with varied recreations of 17th century paintings. These were characterized by their partial return to figuration and marked a tendency towards preciousness, which would continue to appear in his colorful, playful and poetic mannequins for the Romeo and Juliet of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (1929). In contrast, his later painting, flee towards a greater aridity, schematism and conceptual abstraction. While his sculptural works
opted for the use of recycled and waste material.
The Spanish Civil War highly accentuated this dichotomy between violence and dreams, gradually resolving a renewed serenity, animated by a return to Miro's naive and traditional symbols (the bird, the stars, the female figure), which reflected on a more positive view of the world. His occasional retreats to the island of Mallorca, where he built a studio in 1956 in Son Abrines, were not unrelated to this kind of spiritual renewal.
In the meantime Miró broadened the horizon of his work with the engravings of the Barcelona series (1944) and, a year later, with his first works in ceramics, made in collaboration with Llorens Artigas.
In the 1950s and 1960s he created several large-scale murals for various locations throughout the world: at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, at Harvard University and at Barcelona airport. From then until the end of his career he combined large-scale public works (Dona i ocell, sculpture) with the intimacy of his bronzes, collages and tapestries. In 1975 the Miró Foundation was inaugurated in Barcelona, in a building designed by his great friend Josep Lluís Sert.
