Joan Miró

Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramist

• Born: April 20, 1893
• Birthplace: Barcelona, Spain
• Died: December 25, 1983
• Place of death: Palma, Majorca, Spain

The work of Miró is acclaimed for its highly individualistic style, abstract as well as figurative, and is characterized by its vivacious fantasy. Many critics regard Miró as the greatest artist of the Surrealist movement.

Early Life

Joan Miró (mee-ROH) was the first son of Michel Miró Adzirias and Dolores Ferrá. Descending from a strong family tradition of craftsmanship, Miró’s father was a prosperous goldsmith and watchmaker, his paternal grandfather a blacksmith, and his maternal grandfather a cabinetmaker. The young Miró, although a poor student at school, began to draw at the age of eight and announced soon thereafter that he wished to become a painter. In 1907, he was enrolled at the Escuela de Bellas Artes (school of fine arts), the same official academy in Barcelona where, some twelve years earlier, Pablo Picasso had studied. Modesto Urgell and José Pascó, his teachers at the school, recognized Miró as a promising pupil and encouraged his interest in primitive painting.

Miró’s family, convinced that an artist’s life was too precarious, insisted that he take an office job; he obediently accepted a job as a store clerk in 1910, when he was seventeen years old. Bored, depressed, and demoralized by the position, however, he suffered a nervous breakdown, and his father sent him to recuperate at a farm overlooking the coastal plain, south of Tarragona. This farm and the nearby hill town of Montroig (red mountain) were to become places of great importance and inspiration in Miró’s life.

The artist’s parents eventually realized that they had no choice but to allow their son to pursue an artistic career, and in 1912 he was enrolled in a Barcelona art school operated by the architect Francesc Galí. During his years at Galí’s school, where he painted his first canvases, Miró discovered the work of Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne, as well as the Fauves and cubists. In 1915, however, dissatisfied with traditional art instruction, Miró established himself in a studio that he shared with his friend, E. C. Ricart. During this time, Miró’s paintings, influenced by van Gogh and the Fauves, and later by the expressionists, were already marked by a hint of humor. Among these early canvases were his first Self-Portrait, Portrait of Ricart, and The Chauffeur, all dating from 1917, some expressionist nudes, and Landscape with a Donkey. The dealer José Dalmau took an interest in his work and gave Miró his first showing at the Galeria Dalmau in Barcelona in 1918.

Life’s Work

After his first exhibition in Barcelona, Miró’s work exhibited a dramatic change. He began a series of paintings that combined minutely realistic detail with light and subtle color. Critics have compared the earliest of these, Montroig Landscape (1919), with works by the Italian primitives. Among Miró’s neoprimitive yet sophisticated Catalan landscapes is The Olive Grove (1919).

In 1919, Miró briefly visited Paris, to which he would return every year from then on. There he was welcomed by Picasso, whom he had seen previously in Barcelona, but whom he had never dared to approach. Picasso, who in 1921 purchased Miró’s second Self-Portrait , introduced him to the avant-garde poets Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob, and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara. It was during this Paris visit that Miró also became acquainted with the work of Henri Rousseau. After his return to the Barcelona area later in 1919, his works, though still faithful to reality, began to show cubist influences, especially in his basic drawing style, which became more angular and formalized, with greater emphasis on planes. A series of still lifes, among them Still Life with Toy Horse and Table with Rabbit , both completed in 1920, combine cubist influences with colorful imagery inspired in part by Catalan folk art and the Catalan landscape. These still lifes were shown in Miró’s first Paris exhibition, held in 1921 at the Galérie La Licorne.

The outstanding work of Miró’s early career, and later referred to by Miró as “the crowning work” of his life, was The Farm , completed in 1922, a painting on which he had worked for nine months. (It was later purchased by Ernest Hemingway.) The work possesses Miró’s typical freshness of approach, and while it reflects his admiration for Rousseau, it also reveals an intricate calculation of compositional effect. It marks the end of Miró’s “poetic realist” period.

Several months of doubt and self-searching followed the completion of this work. The artist finally emerged from his despair after meeting in Paris with the painter André Masson, and the writers Jacques Prévert and Henry Miller, among others. In The Farmer’s Wife and The Carbide, both of 1922-1923, realism blends with a strong element of fantasy and greater intensity of mood.

By the early 1920’s, Miró had become acquainted with the Dadaist poets. During this period, he also met the painter and sculptor Max Ernst and the poet André Breton and through them was introduced to Surrealism. In 1923, during a stay in Montroig, Miró worked on two canvases (completed in 1924) that determined the future course of his art: The Tilled Field and Catalan Landscape (The Hunter). In the former there is still Miró’s favorite sunshine-yellow tonality, but there is also a wild, almost Boschlike transposition of images and animal shapes loosely derived from nature. In the latter canvas, Miró moved closer to a kind of Surrealist abstraction, his imagery sometimes suggesting organic forms observed through a microscope, sometimes evoking the sense of realistic objects through symbolic shapes. Among the signers of Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” of 1924, Miró was hailed by the poet as “the most ’surrealist’ of us all.” One of Miró’s most engaging paintings of 1924-1925 (and one of his most significant works) was The Harlequin Carnival , with its tiny allusive figures, more “signs” than forms, and its playful poetic fantasy and festive color.

In 1925, Miró participated in the first Surrealist group exhibition, held at the Galérie Pierre, Paris. There he was impressed by the work of Paul Klee. The following year Miró, in collaboration with Max Ernst, worked on costumes and settings for Sergei Diaghilev’s production of Romeo and Juliet. This concession to so-called bourgeois modernism, however, infuriated Breton and the orthodox Surrealists, who condemned him for his lack of seriousness. Miró’s essentially intuitive approach was indeed far removed from the more rigid, intellectual attitude of Breton, although the two were able to maintain a friendly relationship. Miró painted one of his most celebrated and impressive pictures in 1926 Dog Barking at the Moon . Sometimes interpreted as symbolizing the link between the physical and the intellectual world, the painting has also been regarded as an almost absurdist statement about the human condition.

In 1928, Miró was married to Pilar Jonosca and traveled to Holland. His admiration for Jan Vermeer and the intimate realism of the Dutch genre paintings led to a series of works entitled Dutch Interiors . Next, Miró deliberately sacrificed elegance of line and festiveness of color in such subsequent works as Spanish Dancer (1928) and his series of dream-vision “Imaginary Portraits.” In the early 1930’s, he began to experiment with collages, papiers collés, lithography, and etchings, and, in years to come, he illustrated many books with color lithographs. He exhibited his first Surrealist “Sculpture-objects” at the Galérie Pierre in 1931. They were characterized, like his paintings, by great freedom of form and mocking fantasy. The best known of these sculptures of the 1930’s is Object poétique (1936), a construction of found objects, including a derby hat, a toy fish, a doll’s leg, and a map, topped by a stuffed parrot.

Miró exhibited with the Surrealist painters in the Paris Salon des Indépendents in 1932, and in 1933 produced some of his most masterful paintings, including Composition, a large, elegant canvas in which silhouetted free forms, analogous to some of Jean Arp’s reliefs of the same period, were executed in rich black against subtle background tones. Like others of Miró’s best paintings of the early 1930’s, this work contains an intense primitivism that links it to the prehistoric cave-paintings of northern Spain.

A brutal eroticism accompanied by monstrous forms invaded Miró’s work beginning from about 1934, accompanied by a note of intense anxiety reflecting his awareness of the imminence of civil war in Spain that appeared in his paintings of 1935-1936. Although rarely overtly political, Miró, like Picasso and unlike Salvador Dalí, supported the Spanish Republic in its resistance of fascism. In 1937, the year of Picasso’s Guernica, Miró worked for five months on Still Life with an Old Shoe , a painting in which he expressed his anguished feeling for his country and the poverty of the Spanish people. His large mural, The Reaper , painted for the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Paris Exposition of 1937 was an anguished and savage protest, as was his anti-Franco poster of that year, Aidez l’Espagne (help Spain). In Nocturne (1938), Miró’s favorite yellow-colored earth is overwhelmed by a stark, black sky, relieved only by some amorphous stellar shapes.

Between 1936 and 1940, Miró lived in France and did not return to Spain. In 1939, when residing in the village of Varengeville, Normandy, he abruptly turned away from his so-called wild paintings and the horrors they evoked and began a series of small lyrical paintings on burlap. These were followed by a group of twenty-three gouaches entitled Constellations, on which he was working when the Nazis approached Paris in 1940. At this time, Miró managed to get himself, his wife, and their one child, Dolores, on the last train leaving for the Spanish border. The family went first to Montroig, then settled in Palma, Majorca, with Miró’s wife’s family.

From 1942 to 1944, Miró, having returned to Barcelona, painted almost entirely on paper. In 1944, he began to work in ceramics, in collaboration with the Catalan ceramist Joseph Lloréns Artigas. Miró divided his time between Barcelona and Paris from 1944 on. His painted compositions became more elaborate, often containing repetitious and self-perpetuating imagery. Such paintings as Woman and Little Girl in Front of the Sun (1946), however, did exhibit much of his former energy and exuberance.

In 1947, Miró, now world famous, went to the United States for the first time and was impressed by the country’s vitality. He received commissions for two large murals, one of which was eventually hung in the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the other, executed in 1950, was commissioned for the Graduate Center at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1956, Miró settled once again in Palma, Majorca, where he lived and worked until his death. In 1957-1958, he designed two walls for the garden of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization headquarters in Paris. A series of large painted mural compositions followed in 1961-1962; the unifying motif of these was the development of a single line on a monochrome ground.

Following his ceramic sculpture of the early 1950’s, some of which displayed a primitive totemic quality, sculpture in bronze played an important role in Miró’s work in the 1960’s and 1970’s. His sculptures were included in a large Miró show at the Galérie Pierre Matisse, Paris, in the spring of 1973.

Significance

Although Joan Miró himself rejected any attempt to categorize his art, especially disdaining the label “abstract,” the artist is, nevertheless, most often identified with the abstract Surrealist movement, of which he was one of the most original and sensitive exponents. His highly personalized idiom, replete with great charm and wit comparable in a general way to the art of Klee, remained entirely and recognizably his own.

Miró’s free-form, associational, highly colored, and decorative art has influenced countless other artists in both the fine and the applied arts, who have profited from the imaginative possibilities of his artistic language. A Catalan who always clung proudly to the language, culture, and landscape of his native province, Miró worked forms of nature into his own personal vocabulary of sign images.

Many future currents of painting were anticipated in Miró’s work. Several critics have even maintained that it is Miró, and not Henri Matisse or Picasso, who was the most visionary of the early modern masters. The beauty of nature, rustic folklore, symbols of age-old fertility cults, subtle psychological experiences, and highly sophisticated literary concepts were all embraced within Miró’s cosmic scope. What is likely to ensure the artist’s immortality is his irony, risqué puns, humor, vitality, and the fascinating realm of assorted creatures that were produced by his inexhaustible imagination and reproduced on his canvases.

Bibliography

De la Beaumelle, Agnés, ed. Joan Miró, 1917-1943: I’m Going to Smash Their Guitar. London: P. Holbertson, 2004. Published in conjunction with an exhibit of Miró’s work, this book features six essays exploring the seventeen-year period in which the artist developed his visual language. Also features numerous high-quality reproductions of Miró’s art.

Greenberg, Clement. Joan Miró. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1969. In this 133-page work containing a list of exhibitions, a bibliography, and numerous monochrome reproductions, Greenberg ranks Miró with Matisse, Picasso, and others as one of the formative masters of modern painting. He describes the artist’s early years, the influences of cubism and Surrealism, his mastery of Art Nouveau, and his reach beyond Surrealism to comedy and hedonism in his later years.

Miró, Joan. Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews. Edited by Margit Rowell, translated by Paul Auster and Patricia Mathews. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Rowell, in this work, offers the reader a fascinating firsthand account of the complex weaving together of the life and work of an artist. Through the artist’s letters, statements, interviews, notebook entries, and poems, Miró is allowed to speak for himself. The lengthy work contains photos of the artist, some monochrome reproductions, and a biographical chronology.

Penrose, Roland. Miró. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970. A biography of Miró that is interspersed with critical commentary and numerous reproductions, both in color and black-and-white. Includes a bibliography, a list of the illustrations contained in the book, and an index.

Perucho, Joan. Joan Miró y Cataluña. New York: Tudor, 1968. Perucho succeeds admirably in analyzing the impact of Miró’s native land on the artist’s life and work in this book. The work, written in interfacing Spanish, English, French, and German text, contains a chronology of the artist’s life and work, an index of works, a bibliography and many black-and-white and color plates.

Soby, James Thrall. Joán Miró. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959. Soby maintains, in this somewhat dated book, that Miró was one of the most instinctively talented artists of his generation and that he advanced the art of his predecessors (such as Picasso) in a new and valid direction. Although brief, this interesting book also contains a list of exhibitions, a bibliography, and numerous black-and-white and color reproductions.

Stich, Sidra, ed. Miró: The Development of a Sign Language. St. Louis, Mo.: Washington University, 1980. The aim of this well-written exhibition catalog is to clarify the origins of the many elements of Miró’s style and subject matter. It examines the sources of the artist’s neoprimitivism and clarifies the nature and consequences of his contribution to a sign language, a pictorial element envisioned at a primary sensory level. This very brief work also contains numerous monochrome reproductions of the artist’s works.