Joan Miró

Spanish, 1893–1983

BiographyThe son of a goldsmith, Miró was born in Barcelona on 20 April 1893. In 1907 he began a business course as well as art classes at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de la Lonja. Illness ended his brief turn as a bookkeeper and his business career. After recuperating at the family farm in Montroig, in Tarrogona, an area to which he returned throughout his life and from which he drew much imagery, Miró devoted himself to making art. From 1912 to 1915 he studied at Francesc Gal’'s Escola d'Art in Barcelona. He was also exposed to trends in international contemporary art, and his early work consists of a highly personal fusion of avant-garde pictorial practices (Cézannist, Fauvist, Cubist, etc.) and Catalan content.

Miró went to Paris for the first time in 1920, and moved there the following year. He set up a studio (next to that of André Masson), and had his first solo exhibition. By 1924 his work had changed crucially from descriptive realism and illusionistic space to his individual style of imaginary abstraction and biomorphic sign. He associated, exhibited, and published with the Surrealists at this time, and André Breton wrote that "he [Miró] could perhaps pass for the most 'Surrealist' of us all."16 An individualist and largely apolitical, however, Miró never officially joined Surrealist movement, or engaged in its polemics.

During the next fifteen years, moving seasonally back and forth between Barcelona, Montroig, and Paris, he worked in investigative series, each pushing the limits of how paintings could be made: dream paintings (1925-27), imaginary landscapes (1926-27), collage objects (1928), Dutch interiors (1928), imaginary portraits (1929), paper collages (1929), constructions and assemblages (1930), painting-objects (1931-32), paintings based on collages (1933), tapestry cartoons (1934), peintures sauvages (1935), and paintings on copper (1935-36). Several works of the late '30s appear to refer to current events in Spain and Europe in their violent color, increasing proportion of black, and tortured imagery. He also designed sets for the Ballet Russe (1926 and 1932), and learned etching (1938).

On the eve of the Second World War, Miró was living at Varengeville, on the Normandy coast. The Nazi invasion of France forced him to return to Spain, where he lived during the war (see Main Text). In 1941, however, his first major retrospective was held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in 1942 his work was included in the opening of Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery. In 1945 his Constellations were shown in New York, and in 1947 a group of the drawings and paintings of 1944 were shown at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. At that time Miró came to New York, and out of isolation. He was commissioned to do murals for Cincinnati's Terrace Plaza Hotel (1947) and Harvard University's Harkness Commons dining room (1950), and ceramic walls for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1955). He continued to paint on canvas, and also became deeply engaged with the creative possibilities of printmaking, ceramics, sculpture, tapestry, and stained glass.

Miró's unique achievements have been recognized with many major exhibitions: London (1965), Paris (1956, 1962, 1974, 1993), New York (1941, 1959, 1986, 1993), Barcelona (1968, 1992), and elsewhere. He died on 25 December 1983 in Palma de Mallorca.