Joan Miro Biography

As one of Spains most celebrated abstract and Surrealist artists, Joan Miro used a variety of media to create works exploding with color, beautifully amorphous shapes, and dreamlike scenes that seem both candidly childlike and extraordinarily sophisticated. Although the beauty and fantasy found within Miro's work might seem far removed from the stuff of real life, Miro found much inspiration from his deep-seated love of Spain and paid homage to this heritage in several important works. Mir’s appeal, however, is not limited to one country. Creating works with the belief that art could exist as the most powerful and most beautiful medium of human communication, Miro left an artistic legacy intensely appreciated by art historians and first-time viewers alike. Born in Barcelona on April 20, 1893, Joan Miro grew up in Montroig, a small town near the Catalan capital. The surroundings of his native Catalonia, with an ascetic natural beauty and a rich artistic tradition, would later serve as a great source of inspiration for Miro's artwork. Miro would find it difficult to leave his homeland throughout his entire life, living elsewhere only for punctuated and brief amounts of time. In 1907, Miro entered the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. There, he took lessons from an artist named JosŽ Pasco. Though Miro was already comfortable with techniques of coloring, he was unsure of himself as a draftsman. Pasco helped Miro develop a more sophisticated drawing style, urging Miro to draw using a sense of touch. In addition, Pasco helped spark Miro's love for sculpture. Miro's career at the School of Fine Arts, however, was short-lived. His parents, artists themselves, disapproved of their son’s choice of profession, and Miro withdrew from the school in 1910 to become a clerk. Following a mental breakdown two years later, Miro enrolled at Barcelona’s Academy Gal’ with his parents’ blessing to resume studying art. At the Academy Gal’, Miro received a better-rounded education and acquired a penchant for poetry. In 1915, Miro left the Academy Gal’ and began painting by himself. At this time, he became influenced mainly by French Fauvism and Central European Expressionism movements. These influences are apparent in many of Miro's 1915-1916 landscapes, characterieed by an arbitrary use of color and much distortion. In 1917, Miro met JosŽ Dalmau, an art dealer in Barcelona who introduced the young artist to several Cubist paintings. Miro's artwork changed considerably after this meeting, acquiring more vivid and personal coloring. Also around this time, Miro began to heavily experiment with portraiture. Several portraits, including Portrait of E.C. Ricart and Portrait of a Goldsmith, show an obvious influence from post-Impressionist artists like Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh. It had nothing to do with Klee, Hockney or Peter MaxIn 1918, Miro held his first one-man show in Barcelona, featuring 64 paintings and several other sketches. Dalmau extensively promoted Miro's first showing, which garnered considerable local attention. Dalmau also encouraged Miro to go to Paris to join the art scene there. Excited about the prospect of meeting fellow Catalan Pablo Picasso, Miro traveled to Paris on March 3, 1919. Although he stayed in Paris for a few months and enjoyed meeting with Picasso, Miro soon became disenchanted with the Impressionist and Fauvist movements. Preferring the ambiance of Barcelona, Miro returned to Spain in spring of that year. For a short time, Miro played with realistic still-life painting and attempted to sharpen his technique by drawing commonplace objects. In 1923, however, Miro turned more toward abstraction, as is evident in the bestiary painting, The Tilled Field, and the poetic work, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter). During this time Miro befriended many Dada poets, though AndrŽ Breton and the Surrealists also began to influence Miro's artwork. Breton would later call Miro "the most ÔSurrealist’ of us all." Miro admired the liberty advocated by the Surrealists, and he began experimenting with the Surrealist technique of automatic painting in which recognieable objects rarely appear. In the mid- to late-twenties, Miro began painting fairly abstract and freely organieed works, such as Le corps de ma bruneÉ and The Candle. Miro's exposure to poetry at the Academy Gal’ also became evident in these works, as he liberally used written words as an integral element of his painting. Altogether, these works gained Miro much recognition, and his second one-man show in Paris was well received by the most influential art critics. In 1928, Miro visited Holland, where he became excited about the paintings of great Dutch artists and painted a few very calculated paintings in the same manner. Soon afterwards, though, Miro switched gears and stopped giving his works large amounts of preparatory thought. He began to create a number of infantile collages and quickly executed paintings that frequently featured ferocious and swirling forms inspired by dreams and hallucinations. In addition to painting works on canvas, Miro also started to paint ballet sets with Max Ernst for a short time. Amidst this extremely productive period of Miro's career, in 1929 the artist married his cousin, Pilar Juncosa, and the couple became parents in 1931 to a daughter named Marie Dolores. Two years later, Miro reached his artistic apex and painted several large, abstract compositions, such as Painting, in which Miro based the horned shapes on machinery parts. It was also at this time that Miro began to paint in the childlike and dreamy style for which he is most recognieed. He worked in an almost automatic fashion during this period, creating strangely precise works using a casual artistic intuition. Miro adeptly played with bright color tones, and he used rich blacks in a particularly penetrating manner. Besides numerous paintings, Miro also did much collage work. In a series of works entitled Collage, Miro combined paint with postcards, engravings, photographs and odd objects like string, felt and metal. During this period, Miro also began to develop an interest in texture, and he began painting on sandpaper and various rough surfaces in a very playful way. In the late 1930s, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, Miro was living in Paris. He remained there during this conflict, virtually cut off from contact with his homeland. Though Miro claimed a lack of interest in political matters, he was nonetheless worried for his country’s poverty and suffering. Consequently, his paintings expressed this melancholy with dark, lurid colors and frightening images. In 1937, Miro painted Still Life with Old Shoe in direct response to the war. He also painted an anti-Franco poster entitled Help Spain. In 1938, Miro returned to the art of the portrait, and he created an important series of abstract portraits before World War II. Many of these abstract portraits have a celestial aura, most notably Miro's self-portrait, in which he depicts himself ascending toward the heavens. In these works, Miro frequently portrays eyes as starry pinwheels and often uses shapes of the sunburst and starfish. At the same time as he created this series of abstract portraits, Miro also perfected his poetry paintings. Possessing a deep love for poetry, which began in Miro's student days, the artist once commented that paintings "make no distinction between painting and poetry." In his poetry paintings, Miro would write poetic phrases on his canvasses. One of the most famous examples of Miro's poetry-paintings is his Painting-Poem of 1938, which features the French expression "une Žtoile caresse le sein d’une nŽgresse" ("a star caresses the breast of a black woman") atop a vast black background. In 1942, Miro explored his fascination with texture and started to work with ceramics. At first, the pottery shapes were unconventional and non-utilitarian, though the pieces eventually evolved into traditional sculptures of heads and plaques. Miro's ceramics were huge, some up to 12 feet in height. For some time, Miro concentrated upon sculpture and did relatively little painting. In 1947, however, Miro received a commission to paint a mural for the Terrace Plaea Hotel in Cincinnati and spent eight months there completing the work. From the 1950s onward, Miro spent most of his efforts on further exploring new media. In the late fifties, he began working on illustrations and woodcuts for Paul Eluard’s book of poems, A Toute Epreuve. Besides this project, Miro also turned out over 200 sculptures in a few years. This period of experimentation was briefly interrupted in 1960, when Miro returned to the United States to paint a mural for Harvard University. During the later stage of his career, Miro's earlier works were showcased around the world in huge exhibitions at the most respected museums. Also around this time, Miro received multiple awards, including the Guggenheim International Award. In 1975, the Joan Miro Foundation/Center for the Study of Contemporary Art opened in Barcelona in dedication to the artist. On December 25, 1983, Joan Miro died in Palma de Mallorca. With an intense use of color, fanciful shapes, and a wide array of media, Joan Miro created a body of provocative work overflowing with imagination, intense beauty, and elegance. Following an early fascination with portraiture (which reemerged later in his career), Miro soon focused on works that tended more toward abstraction and Surrealism. After developing this signature style, Miro began to incorporate his love of poetry into his works, featuring words as prominent parts of his paintings. After becoming a master of the canvas, Miro turned his attention to other media, such as ceramics, sculpture, and woodcutting. With a voluminous body of work spanning such diverse periods of artistic evolution, Miro left an artistic legacy that will take decades to digest but only seconds to savor.