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 As one of Spain’s most celebrated abstract and Surrealist artists, Joan Miró 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 Miró’s work might seem far removed from the stuff of real life, Miró found much inspiration from his deep-seated love of Spain and paid homage to this heritage in several important works. Miró’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, Miró left an artistic legacy intensely appreciated by art historians and first-time viewers alike.
Born in Barcelona on April 20, 1893, Joan Miró 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 Miró’s artwork. Miró would find it difficult to leave his homeland throughout his entire life, living elsewhere only for punctuated and brief amounts of time.
In 1907, Miró entered the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. There, he took lessons from an artist named José Pascó. Though Miró was already comfortable with techniques of coloring, he was unsure of himself as a draftsman. Pascó helped Miró develop a more sophisticated drawing style, urging Miró to draw using a sense of touch. In addition, Pascó helped spark Miró’s love for sculpture. Miró’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 Miró withdrew from the school in 1910 to become a clerk. Following a mental breakdown two years later, Miró enrolled at Barcelona’s Academy Galí with his parents’ blessing to resume studying art. At the Academy Galí, Miró received a better-rounded education and acquired a penchant for poetry.
In 1915, Miró left the Academy Galí 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 Miró’s 1915-1916 landscapes, characterized by an arbitrary use of color and much distortion.
In 1917, Miró met José Dalmau, an art dealer in Barcelona who introduced the young artist to several Cubist paintings. Miró’s artwork changed considerably after this meeting, acquiring more vivid and personal coloring. Also around this time, Miró 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 Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh.
In 1918, Miró held his first one-man show in Barcelona, featuring 64 paintings and several other sketches. Dalmau extensively promoted Miró’s first showing, which garnered considerable local attention. Dalmau also encouraged Miró to go to Paris to join the art scene there. Excited about the prospect of meeting fellow Catalan Pablo Picasso, Miró traveled to Paris on March 3, 1919. Although he stayed in Paris for a few months and enjoyed meeting with Picasso, Miró soon became disenchanted with the Impressionist and Fauvist movements. Preferring the ambiance of Barcelona, Miró returned to Spain in spring of that year.
For a short time, Miró played with realistic still-life painting and attempted to sharpen his technique by drawing commonplace objects. In 1923, however, Miró 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 Miró befriended many Dada poets, though André Breton and the Surrealists also began to influence Miró’s artwork. Breton would later call Miró "the most ‘Surrealist’ of us all." Miró admired the liberty advocated by the Surrealists, and he began experimenting with the Surrealist technique of automatic painting in which recognizable objects rarely appear. In the mid- to late-twenties, Miró began painting fairly abstract and freely organized works, such as Le corps de ma brune… and The Candle. Miró’s exposure to poetry at the Academy Galí also became evident in these works, as he liberally used written words as an integral element of his painting. Altogether, these works gained Miró much recognition, and his second one-man show in Paris was well received by the most influential art critics.
In 1928, Miró 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, Miró 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, Miró also started to paint ballet sets with Max Ernst for a short time.
Amidst this extremely productive period of Miró’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, Miró reached his artistic apex and painted several large, abstract compositions, such as Painting, in which Miró based the horned shapes on machinery parts. It was also at this time that Miró began to paint in the childlike and dreamy style for which he is most recognized. He worked in an almost automatic fashion during this period, creating strangely precise works using a casual artistic intuition. Miró adeptly played with bright color tones, and he used rich blacks in a particularly penetrating manner. Besides numerous paintings, Miró also did much collage work. In a series of works entitled Collage, Miró combined paint with postcards, engravings, photographs and odd objects like string, felt and metal. During this period, Miró 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, Miró was living in Paris. He remained there during this conflict, virtually cut off from contact with his homeland. Though Miró 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, Miró painted Still Life with Old Shoe in direct response to the war. He also painted an anti-Franco poster entitled Help Spain.
In 1938, Miró 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 Miró’s self-portrait, in which he depicts himself ascending toward the heavens. In these works, Miró 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, Miró also perfected his poetry paintings. Possessing a deep love for poetry, which began in Miró’s student days, the artist once commented that paintings "make no distinction between painting and poetry." In his poetry paintings, Miró would write poetic phrases on his canvasses. One of the most famous examples of Miró’s poetry-paintings is his Painting-Poem of 1938, which features the French expression "une étoile caresse le sein d’une négresse" ("a star caresses the breast of a black woman") atop a vast black background.
In 1942, Miró 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. Miró’s ceramics were huge, some up to 12 feet in height. For some time, Miró concentrated upon sculpture and did relatively little painting. In 1947, however, Miró received a commission to paint a mural for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati and spent eight months there completing the work.
From the 1950s onward, Miró 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, Miró also turned out over 200 sculptures in a few years. This period of experimentation was briefly interrupted in 1960, when Miró returned to the United States to paint a mural for Harvard University. During the later stage of his career, Miró’s earlier works were showcased around the world in huge exhibitions at the most respected museums. Also around this time, Miró received multiple awards, including the Guggenheim International Award. In 1975, the Joan Miró Foundation/Center for the Study of Contemporary Art opened in Barcelona in dedication to the artist. On December 25, 1983, Joan Miró died in Palma de Mallorca.
With an intense use of color, fanciful shapes, and a wide array of media, Joan Miró 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), Miró soon focused on works that tended more toward abstraction and Surrealism. After developing this signature style, Miró 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, Miró 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, Miró left an artistic legacy that will take decades to digest but only seconds to savor.
Click to buy Miro posters here!
Click to buy the BBC interview of Miro, Portrait of an Artist - Joan Miro
Click to buy Schildkraut's Depression and the Spiritual in Modern Art: Homage to Miró, exploring the link between depression and creativity in the lives of Miró, Pollock, Rothko, and others
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