Joan Miró created some of the most original pieces of art during the 20th century. Generally regarded as one of the leading figures in the surrealist movement of the early and mid-1900s, Joan (the Catalan spelling of "Juan," pronounced hwan) Miró was very influential in the Surrealist and Abstract Movements. His works, described by Alexander Cirici, director of Barcelona's Museum of Modern Art, as "a song with many voices," have been made in a multitude of forms using almost every medium -- oil paint, watercolor, pastel, collage, sculpture, ceramics, mosaics, paint on copper, masonite, etchings, graphics and lithograph prints, book illustrations, tapestries, painted pottery pieces, and stage and costume designs for ballet.

Born on April 20, 1893 in Barcelona, Spain, Miró decided at an early age to become a painter. However, as descendants of cabinetmakers, blacksmiths, jewelry makers, watchmakers, and goldsmiths, his family wished for him to have a more stable job and forced him to take a job as an office clerk at 17 years old. Miró extremely disliked the work and his health suffered. Reluctantly accepting Miró's decision to become an artist, his parents sent him to his father's farm near Montroig ("red mountain") to recuperate where Miró first encountered an environment that would affect much of his later works.

Upon the restoration of his health, Miró enrolled in art school at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and the Akademie La Lonja in Barcelona, and at the Academia Galí under the tutelage of Francisco Galí. Galí instructed the students to "wear a crown of eyes around your head" and his teachings, including exercises as drawing objects by touch whilst blindfolded, influenced the young Miró greatly. By the age of 22, Miró had met two of his life-long friends, fellow artists Joan Prats and Joseph Llorens Artigas. Intrigued by the great artistic revolution occurring in Paris, Miró and his companions attended an exhibition of French paintings brought to Barcelona a year later. Also adding to his interest in the artistic revolution was his mother's friendship with the mother of Pablo Picasso. However, Miró's shyness prevented him from approaching the already-famous artist. Some influences on Miró's art were not other artists and their work. Rebellious poetry during World War I, by authors such as Reverdy, Apollinaire, Raynal, Eluard, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, and Alfred Jarry, also influenced the artist and reinforced his belief that painting and poetry were indivisible.

Miró's first showing was at the Falerías Dalmau of still-lifes and landscapes. Most of these works had a wide range of influences including Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, forms of cubism, Catalan folk art, the Romanesque church frescoes in Spain, and the Fauvist movement, a movement in the style of Matisse with vivid coloring with a decorative effect. Much of the public did not understand these works, but still recognized Miró's ability and talent. After this showing, Miró traveled to Paris in 1919 to experience and become a part of the artistic revolution.

While in Paris, Miró wished to meet Picasso, whom he had previously been too intimidated to approach. Miró contacted the older artist's mother and asked what he might bring to Picasso. Picasso's mother baked a large cake which Miró delivered when he met with the artist. Picasso was intrigued by the younger artist and his work and tried to arrange it to be shown in Paris. There is also speculation that some of Miró's dream-like paintings influenced some of Picasso's own abstract works.

After his adventures in the Parisian environment, Miró returned to Montroig and began work on a new technique in painting. Previously, Miró had depended on heavy brushstrokes and bright colors to create his works, but viewing other artist's works in Paris, Miró altered his style, using a firmer outline with an almost realistic approach with Miró's own interpretation of old-age Catalan paintings and a geometric type of cubism. With this new approach, Miró began his piece, The Farm, in a nine month-long process. Despite Miró's tireless effort, the Parisian public rejected the painting. However, this painting was the birthplace for many of the symbols Miró used in his later works, such as a ladder with a bird on it, and the idea of using lettering in the paintings.

The Farm did create interest in the mind of young Ernest Hemingway, an American author and expatriate, who purchased the painting on his visit to Paris. Hemingway and Miró met at the American Center in Paris where they would exercise and box with each other. The Hemingway family still holds the painting in their private collection. (The Farm, 1922, Hemingway Collection, Havana.)

Miró's first Parisian exhibit was arranged by Dalmau in 1921 at the Galerie La Licorne with a catalogue preface by Raynal, one of Miró's poetic influences. The showing was a disaster.

Through Miró's many friendships with prominent figures in the literary and artistic world such as with André Masson, he was able to meet many of his heroes, mainly the poets. Miró stated that these poets interested him more than the artists he met while he was in Paris. The interest was often mutual; poet André Breton was fascinated by Miró's ability to create such "common but disturbing images." Under the influence of the surrealist authors, Miró evolved his mature style, often called biomorphic abstraction or biomorphic surrealism. This method uses shapes with small bursts of sharp colors against neutral backgrounds in order to direct the viewer's eye around the painting. Characteristically, Miró's pieces have a sense of "gaiety, sunshine, health, color, humor, and rhythm," using imagination and spontaneity to combine the abstract with partially recognizable shapes. The paintings often contain images of "distorted animal forms, twisted organic shapes, and odd geometric constructions, along with "amorphous amoebic shapes . . . [and] sharply drawn lines, spots, and curlicues, all positioned on the canvas with seeming nonchalance."

In the mid-1920's, Miró spent several difficult years in which he often went hungry. He tried to capture the senses and feelings of the hallucinations caused by this, leading to Harlequin's Carnival (1925, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo). Miró developed a set of symbols to portray a large number of subjects which he used frequently in his art. Miró joined the Surrealist Movement shortly after its official formation in 1924 by signing the Surrealist Manifesto. However, Miró was not an active member of the group and did not participate in the actions typical to the surrealists of the day, such as attending the meetings and gathering at Café Cyrano. Some of the surrealists were disgusted by his lack of outrageousness (the surrealists often committed acts of public provocation), but no one attempted to enforce the group's set of rigid rules upon Miró. Even Breton once stated, "Miró may rank as the most Surrealist of us all."

In 1925, Miró had his first successful showing with dealer Pierre Loeb. Many of the pieces showcased in this exhibit included these symbols and also incorporated lettering in the images. Miró also experimented with automatism with his Birth of the World (1925, Museum of Modern Art, New York City). In this piece, Miró applied paint to the surface of the canvas and allowed the paint to travel as it may across the canvas to create an unpredictable effect. He then added forms and abstract shapes to create the finished work. This technique foreshadows the later American Abstract Expressionism Movement of the 1940s.

Soon after, Miró switched dealers to Jacques Viot and moved to another studio. He met and befriended several of his peers including René Magritte of Belgium, Max Ernst of Germany, Jean Arp of France, and poet Paul Eluard, one of his influences, and participated briefly in Arp's Dadaist Movement. Although some of Miró's shapes echo Arp's Dadaist forms, Arp denies that he influenced Miró. The works of Paul Klee, on the other hand, did influence Miró to some extent. Also, in 1926, Miró worked on costume and stage designs with Max Ernst for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. In October of 1929, Miró married Pilar Juncosa from Majorca. They had a child Dolores two years later in Barcelona.

In the early 1930's, innovative Miró shocked the public with his collages which used objects such as hatpins, springs, feathers, linoleum, nails, scrap metal, string, and other odds and ends on canvas. Choreographer Léonide Massine, however, was not shocked by Miró's collages; instead, Massine commissioned Miró to design the sets and costumes for his upcoming ballet Jeux d'Enfants. Miró later used his collages as models for actual paintings in which he enlarged pictures of machinery parts with oil on canvas and superimposed them on floating forms, such as in Paining, 1933. Also in 1933, Miró created his first etching, Daphnis et Chloé.

With the year 1936 also came the civil war in Spain. This war, which inspired Picasso to create the terrific Guernica, also affected Miró greatly. During this period, Miró experimented with large painting using crude materials on masonite and his works exhibited less light and motion, but instead gave a sense of terror and foreboding. As World War II erupted in Europe, Miró left Paris and moved to a little cottage in Normandy. There, due to the continual bombings, Miró had to blacken his windows and slid into depression. In a serendipitous act, Miró found that the blotches on the papers upon which he cleaned his brushes inspired images of the heavens and celestial bodies, and the Constellations series was began. Fortunately, Miró was able to save these paintings by returning to Barcelona, a mere eight days before enemy troops overtook the area. The paintings were sent to New York and displayed at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. In 1937, Miró designed wall decorations for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World Fair. and posters for the Spanish Republic.

In 1939, Miró began another phase in his artwork. He immersed himself in the art of lithography, the process of printing from a plane surface, such as a smooth stone or metal plate, on which the image to be printed is ink-receptive and the blank area is ink-repellent. Using this different medium, Miró created the Série Barcelone, a total of fifty works published by his long-time friend Joan Prats. These prints were done in black and white to allow the purity and beautiful simplicity of his drawings shine through.

After the death of his mother, Miró traveled to the United States and in 1941, the Museum of Modern Art presented a retrospective of the artist. He came to New York in 1947, where he met Marcel Duchamp and reunited himself with several old friends including José Luis Sert and Alexander Calder. Miró was commissioned to create a mural for a hotel in Cincinnati (which was later moved to the Cincinnati Art Museum) and, later, on for Harvard. After being away from Paris for almost eight years, Miró returned with a warm welcome. He began a new series of very detailed paintings using simpler, sparer oils. He received a commission for a painting from the Guggenheim Museum in 1953 and six years later, Miró returned to New York for the Museum of Modern Art's second retrospective of the artist. In Los Angeles, Miró was awarded the Grand Prize for Engraving at the 1954 Venice Biennale and the Grand International Prize of the Guggenheim Foundation, which was given by President Eisenhower.

In 1956, Miró commissioned Sert to create a large, spacious studio in Palma de Majorca, a dream for him since the time he worked in small, cramped quarters. (In 1992, his studio was transformed into the Miró Museum and opened to the public.) In his new studio, Miró executed numerous projects that he had long desired to work on, such as a ceramics collaboration with his long-time friend Joseph Llorens Artigas. He also began work on many large sculptures which often incorporated objets trouvrés -- artifacts not originally intended as art but held to have aesthetic value when displayed as a work of art. Such items included sticks pots, garden implements, and others which Miró turned into works of art then cast them in bronze. Miró also made several public monuments such as two ceramic walls at UNESCO in Paris (Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun,1957-59) and one at Fondation Maeght, and a 10 meter by 50 meter mural at the Barcelona airport. Miró also created a large tapestry that now hangs in the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington. Inspired by texts by Surrealist author Alfred Jarry, Miró created a series of thirteen lithograph prints in 1966 known as Ubu Roi or King Ubu, considered to be one of the masterpieces in lithographic arts today.

In 1978, a mosaic mural by Miró was unveiled at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas, which pleased Miró greatly due to the large amount of young student traffic past the mural. His wish to become a great influence is reflected in the following quote from the artist himself: "What I want is for my work to become part of the consciousness of those young people, the men and women of tomorrow. One of them -- who knows? -- may become President of the United States and will have been touched by my mosaic. That is what makes it worthwhile. It's the young people I'm working for . . . "

Indeed, Miró has become a great influence for many artists in the 20th century. Distinguished artists including Antoni Tàpies, Alexander Calder, William Baziotes, Julio González, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, the lyrical abstractionist of the New York School, and Cobra artists (also known as the "International of Experimental Artists") in Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands all claim Miró as a predominant influence and are known for their great contributions to the art world.

Miró died in Mallorca, Spain, on December 25, 1983.

"What really counts is to strip the soul naked.
Painting or poetry is made as one makes love –
a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back."

||Birth of the World||
Joan Miró, 1925.

"The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me.
I'm overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky,
the crescent of the moon, or the sun.
There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces.
Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains -
everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me."

Joan Miró

|| Sources Used ||

© maliciousfaerie, 2002
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