Joan Miro

Spanish, 1893 - 1983

(not assigned)Catalonia, Spain, Europe

BiographyJoan Miró was the son of a goldsmith and the grandson of a cabinet-maker. He started to draw at the age of eight and, a poor student at school and at business school, abandoned his studies in order to enter the Escuela de Bellas Artes de la Lonja in Barcelona in 1907. His parents had purchased a farm in Montroig near Tarragona, and there Miró became aware of his attachment to Catalonia.

In 1911-1912 he entered the art school of the Baroque architect Francisco Gali in Barcelona. He stayed there for three years and then attended the academy of El Círculo de Artístic de Sant Lluc, where he drew nude models until 1918. At that time he started to discover modern painting both at the Dalmau gallery in Barcelona, which from 1912 had been exhibiting works by Impressionists, Fauves and Cubists, and at the large exhibition of French art organised by Vollard in 1916. At the same time he also started to paint his first canvases. In 1915 he decided that traditional teaching did not give him what he had expected, and set himself up in a studio which he shared with his friend Ricart. In 1917 he met Picabia. The dealer Dalmau took an interest in Miró from the start and, in 1918, organised the first exhibition of his paintings. These included works of very diverse inspiration and influences, such as his Portrait of E.C. Ricart (1917), Expressionist nudes, and Vegetable Garden with Donkey (1918). In 1919 Miró undertook his first trip to Paris, where he settled more permanently from 1920, returning to Spain only for the summer. In Paris he participated in the Dada movement and renewed his acquaintance with Picasso, whom he had known in Barcelona and who introduced him to Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob and Tristan Tzara. In 1921 his first exhibition in Paris took place at La Licorne, with a catalogue preface provided by Maurice Raynal. After this exhibition, which marked the end of his Poetic Realism period, he experienced a crisis of doubt. He overcame this with the help of André Masson, Michel Leiris, Jacques Prévert and Henry Miller. Dadaism, which was soon to develop into Surrealism, gave him confirmation of his own instinctive beliefs regarding the failure of speculative intelligence and the preeminence of the forces of intuition.

In 1924 Miró met André Breton, Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, who welcomed him into the Surrealist group, whose manifesto he signed. In 1925 Benjamin Péret wrote the catalogue preface for his solo exhibition at the Galerie Pierre (Loeb) in Paris. In that year at the same gallery, Miró took part in the first exhibition of the group of painters called Surrealists, in which paintings by Paul Klee, who had a great impression on him, were also shown. A year later he was one of the artists whose work was on permanent show at the Galerie Surréaliste.

Miró married in 1929 and had a child in 1931. In 1930, after his first solo exhibition in the USA, he exhibited his first collages in Paris, again at the Galerie Pierre. His catalogue preface was written by Aragon. He learnt lithography, a technique which was to become of prime importance in his future work. He exhibited 'sculpture-objects' at the Galerie Pierre in 1931. In 1932 he exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants with the Surrealist group, and had an exhibition in New York at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. In 1933 a large exhibition in Paris featured paintings produced by Miró after his own collages. Concerned by the Spanish Civil War, he stayed away from Spain between 1936 and 1940. He supported Republican Spain unreservedly and in 1937 created the poster Help Spain (Aidez l'Espagne), and composed The Reaper (18 x 12 feet/550 x 365 cm) for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, which was shown next to Picasso's Guernica. In 1939 he stayed in Varengeville, where he met Raymond Queneau, Braque and Calder.

The occupation of France by the Nazis made him return to Spain, firstly to Montroig, then to Palma in Majorca, and, from 1942 to 1944 (the year of his mother's death), to Barcelona. The first retrospective exhibition of his works took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941. From 1944 he started work on ceramics in collaboration with Artigas, and shared his time between Barcelona and Paris, concentrating on the development of his work. In 1947 he stayed in the USA for the first time, followed by other visits during which he produced mural paintings. In 1954 he received the prize for engraving at the Venice Biennale, the prize for painting having been won by Max Ernst and the prize for sculpture by Jean Arp. In 1960 the Guggenheim Foundation in New York awarded him its Grand Prize.

Miró's first paintings were marked by various influences: by Van Gogh, Matisse and the Fauves; then by Gauguin and the Expressionists; by Cézanne; and finally, to a certain extent, by Cubism. After 1919 Miró's style changed appreciably, and from 1919 to 1923 he produced works such as Montroig Landscape (1919), marked by a realism which was precise to the smallest details of stones in a wall or leaves on a tree, with light, delicate colouring. Perhaps as a result of what he had seen during his first stay in Paris in 1919, his paintings, while remaining for a while faithful to reality, once again began to reveal the influence of Cubism, particularly in the harsher, more angular drawing and the composition with jagged planes, while the colour remained lively and clear, as in his Self-portrait (1919), the whole series of still-lifes produced in 1920 (including Table with Rabbit), Farm (1922), and Ear of Corn (1923).

After his period of doubt, in the summer of 1923 during a stay at Montroig, he painted the canvases which were to prove decisive in the development of all his subsequent work: Ploughed Soil and Catalan Landscape, also known as Hunter. In a pictorial space freed of the third dimension, people, animals and vegetation are reduced to simple symbols such as an eye, a flying spark, a foot or a cone, and they borrow and exchange attributes while at the same time being placed on the canvas according to a two-dimensional logic.

From the moment he became a Surrealist, Miró was in possession of all the elements which were to characterise the originality of his work. After the few paintings of 1924, such as Hermitage and Reversal, which are reduced almost to colourless drawings through the introspective ascetism of Miró's own thought processes, his imaginary world became, according to Frank Elgar, 'capricious, comical, containing larvae, madrepora, restless amoebas, long and sinuous threads, wandering lines terminating in sorts of cup-and-ball games or kites, blood-red or electric blue half-moons, black expanses languidly dotted about, protoplasms bearing their nuclei like a target, childish silhouettes daubed with an affected negligence, hairy placentas, tangled with their cords...'.

Colour reappeared gloriously and joyfully in his Harlequin's Carnival (1924-1925) and in Birth of the World (1925). In 1926-1927 he abandoned weightless spaces to rediscover the idea of the ground, and painted the series Imaginary Landscapes, Hand Holding a Bird and Dog Barking at the Moon in Montroig.

In 1928, following a trip to Holland during which he admired Vermeer and the lesser masters who painted interiors and whose reproductions he purchased as postcards, he painted the series Dutch Interiors, extravagant interpretations of the originals.

The ease with which he produced several of his most beautiful masterpieces led Miró to a period of reflection on his art. He attempted to forgo the elements which appeared to him to give his paintings prestige, such as easy, elegant drawing and lively, light colours, declaring that he wanted to 'assassinate painting'. In 1928 he painted Spanish Dancer with its more laboured Surrealism, a series of Imaginary Portraits after paintings by the masters, including Queen Louise of Prussia after an advertisement for a German diesel engine, and La Fornarina after Raphael, reduced to a few marks.

In 1933, again in reaction to his earlier fluency, he engraved his first etchings and began his first collages of paper and objects. He undertook the series of large paintings produced from collages of various vignettes cut out from catalogues, a procedure already used by Max Ernst but achieving a totally different result by virtue of the difference between their internal worlds. In the search for a preliminary, fortuitous departure point for his imagination, Miró became interested in the most diverse techniques, such as pastel, painting on sandpaper, watercolour, gouache, egg tempera, painting on wood where the presence of veins and knots enhanced the result, and painting on copper. These were almost hazardous experiments in which his vigour was at risk of exhaustion. He produced a series of paintings from 1935 to 1936 called 'wild paintings', prepared for by numerous studies, nudes drawn at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, watercolours and gouaches, produced on copper or masonite, with terrified figures in natural but tragic backgrounds. The series reflected Miró's concern about the impending Spanish Civil War, as may be seen in Man and Woman in front of a Pile of Excrement (1936). In 1937 he produced the poster Help Spain (Aidez l'Espagne) in which a figure brandishes an enormous fist. For the Exposition Universelle in Paris he painted the large composition The Reaper, which holds a sickle in one hand, the other raising a fist to the sky, symbolising the drama of the Spanish people.

From 1938 to 1940, as if going against his political concerns, he produced works showing perfect mastery of his methods, which blossomed fully in Constellations, a wild ballet of the moon, stars and butterflies around indeterminate yet sexual beings. The first of these, 22 gouaches to illustrate a text by Breton, were begun in Varengeville in 1940. When he returned to Spain during the occupation of France, he continued the Constellations series. From 1942 to 1944 in Barcelona, he produced almost solely paintings on paper. After these two years of reflection, he returned to France and began to work on ceramics. In 1944 and 1946 he painted the series of large 'slow paintings', such as Women and Bird in the Night and Women and Bird in Moonlight (1949), compositions which were clearly less a result of spontaneous inspiration, more controlled and elaborated, more complete and more sumptuous. He also painted the series of 'spontaneous paintings', including Composition with Ropes (1950), which was, by contrast, composed of spots, splashes and various materials, a forerunner of the series of 'thrown-together paintings' of 1960.

In 1947 Miró produced a mural painting for the Hotel Plaza in Cincinnati in the USA, and in 1950 another for Harvard University. In 1957 he produced the two ceramic walls for the UNESCO Palace in Paris. In 1961-1962, continuing to break away from his natural fluency, he painted a series of very austere, monumental compositions, comprising the development of a single line against a monochrome background: Blues I, II and III (1961), and Mural Paintings I, II and III (1962) against an orange background. In 1973 Miró, with all the youthfulness of his 80 years, again nearly provoked scandal with his Sobretexeims, jute canvases on which were affixed brooms and buckets, ropes, skeins of wool and a pair of scissors, linked by a few touches of paint. In 1974, continuing the theme of the 1961-1962 monochromes, his triptych Hope of a Condemned Man consisted solely of a black arabesque against a white background.

Miró was also a sculptor throughout his life, from the time when his master Gali made him aware of volumetric form in 1912, but it was not until 1944 that he really commenced his work as a sculptor, producing his first ceramics in collaboration with Artigas, whose Chinese method of 'great fire' gave colours an exceptional strength, and executing his first bronzes, cast between 1944 and 1950. He was in the habit of collecting all sorts of objects with which he created sculptures of assemblages in the spirit of Picasso, such as Man and Woman (1956-1961), made up of elements of wood and iron and subsequently moulded in terracotta or plaster, or cast in bronze. From 1967 he became more discerning in his choice of objects to be used in his assemblages; he wanted to use common, everyday items. For example, from Fork (1967) onwards, he produced a series of very different sculptures in which the initial fork reappears, and produced Clock of the Wind in which a spoon becomes the essential detail. When he produced bronze sculptures, he sometimes kept them in their raw state once removed from the mould, and sometimes carefully polished them. He may have realised the contradiction in painting bronze, and his monumental sculptures from his last period were often produced in synthetic resin decorated with large flat areas of colour, punctuated with the graphic symbols of archaic origin which mark all his work, such as those in Labyrinth at the Fondation Maerght in St-Paul-de-Vence and Monument in the square in La Défense in Paris (1978).

As well as his painted work, mural paintings and sculptures, Miró produced an immense output as an engraver, lithographer and illustrator of works by Georges Hugnet, Breton, René Char and Éluard; he also made 75 lithographs for Speaking Alone (Parler Seul) by Tzara (1950), and those for Mirror of Man by Animals (Miroir de l'Homme par les Bêtes) by André Frénaud (1972). He embarked on scenic decoration several times. In 1926, in collaboration with Max Ernst, he created the décor and costumes for the ballet Romeo and Juliet by Serge de Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, which aroused the ire of Breton, and in 1931 he designed the décor and costumes for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo's Children's Games (Jeux d'Enfants).

The many facets of Miró's work converge on his association with Surrealism. However, if Miró conformed to the processes of automatism and favoured the domain of the dreamlike over reality, it was to emerge into the marvellous rather than into the fantastic; and poetic, comic humour reigns in his creations more than the black humour dear to the Surrealists. Unlike almost all Surrealists, with the exception of Max Ernst, pictorial values take precedence over meaning in Miró's paintings. He later said 'It is the material which decides. I prepare a background by, for example, cleaning my brushes on the canvas. Spilling a little spirit would do just as well... The painter works like the poet; the word comes first, then thought.'

Miró painted like a child at the dawn of the world. Like a child, he scribbled 'little men' and, unconcerned with likeness, rejoiced in his findings: 'My figures have been subjected to the same simplification as colours. Thus simplified, they are more human and more alive than if they were depicted with every detail... I find my titles as I work. And as I give a title, it becomes still more alive.... ' In a period saturated with fragmented demonstrations by professionals of the avant-garde, Miró, unique, unclassifiable and innocent, rediscovered the freshness of the very sources of expression through image, the very thing which compels the child to draw. His work, remarkable for its unity of recognisable constants moving from one period to another, is isolated in the context of his time. What could Surrealism have brought to Miró? Perhaps an encouragement to give free rein to his poetic imagination, on the subject of which he stated: 'I make no distinction between painting and poetry', in a playful tone which could belong only to him. What did Miró bring to Surrealism? Without forethought, almost in spite of himself, he brought himself as much as his work. His work, too distinctive, too personal, did not give rise to direct followers and yet, despite its apparent simplicity, its influence was as widespread as it was diffuse. After Alexandre Calder invested it, and the movement, in the four dimensions of his own works, Miró's work influenced the new American School that was emerging in post-war New York, in particular Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock who were sensitive to Miró's use of the subconscious. It then influenced the young CoBrA painters in Paris who were seduced by the primitive spontaneity of Miró's inspiration, and Antoni Tàpies in Spain who was convinced of the mystical or magical virtue of the graphic symbol. Without having sought to, Miró, in ways unique to him, became one of the major painters of his time, and one of the most irreplaceable.

Since 1975 the Fondación Miró, built by Luis Sert in Montjuic near Barcelona, has held a large collection of his works.

"MIRÓ, Joan." In Benezit Dictionary of Artists. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/benezit/B00123465 (accessed April 16, 2012).

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