Joan Miro

BIOGRAPHY
April 20, 1893 – December 25, 1983

{hoh-ahn' mee-roh'}

Joan Miro, b. Montroig, near Barcelona, Spain, April 20, 1893, d. December 25, 1983, was one of the foremost exponents of abstract and surrealist art.  While enrolled at La Lonja School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, he studied with Modesto Urgell – from whom he acquired a quality of solitude that persisted in his mature works – and with José Pasco – from whom he learned the fine draftsmanship and the taste for free expression that became hallmarks of his style.  His good fortune in teachers continued when he enrolled (1912) in the Academy Gali, whose director, Francisco Gali, insisted on the importance of music and poetry in developing aesthetic sensibility and of integrating the arts on a spiritual level.  Another formative influence on the young artist was José Dalmau, a modernist art dealer who introduced Miro to Fauvism and Cubism.

Although he enjoyed close contact with his countryman Pablo Picasso after moving to Paris (1919), Miro was influenced much more by the Fauves and the primitivism of Henri Rousseau than by the rigors of Cubism.  His first paintings in Paris combined extreme realism and geometrical abstraction, often inspired by the austere Catalan landscape of his homeland.  Contacts with the Dadaist poets in the early 1920s acquainted Miro with Surrealism, and he began to experiment with hallucinatory and dream-inspired art.  From 1924 on he was a key figure in the circle of André Breton and other surrealists.  Miro brought to the surrealist movement a humorous sense of fantasy and a startlingly fresh palette, as in his poetic and color The Harlequin's Carnival (1924-25; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.) and Dog Barking at the Moon (1926; Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Throughout the late 1920s and '30s, Miro experimented with ever freer compositions whose organization results from the interplay of their individual elements rather than from a schema imposed from the outside.  In works such as Painting (1933; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) his debt to collage art is noticeable in the loose organization of the composition.  After executing a group of paintings reflecting the anguish and tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, Miro turned his intensely individualistic style to ceramics, tapestry design, and mural painting – fields to which he made significant contributions after World War II.

Irma B. Jaffe

Bibliography:  Bernier, R., Matisse, Picasso, Miro (1991);
Chilo, Michael, Miro:  the Artist, the Work, trans. by Margreth Schultze (1977);
Diehl, G., Joan Miro (1988);
Dupin, Jacques, Miro, trans. by Norbert Guterman (1962);
Maier, R.M., Joan Miro (1984);
Penrose, Roland, Miro (1970; repr. 1985);
Rowell, Margit, Miro (1970);
Rowell, Margit, The Captured Imagination (1987) and, as ed., Joan Miro (1986);
Solby, James T., Joan Miro, trans. by Ricardo Gullon (1959);
Sweeney, James J., Joan Miro (1941; repr. 1970).