Joan Miró
The Surrealist of signs and play.
Joan Miró from Catalonia created a visual language of his own from stars, eyes and birds in bright colours.
Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893. His father was a goldsmith and watchmaker. His parents wanted him to go into business, and he worked as a clerk until he suffered a breakdown. He recovered on the family farm in Mont-roig in Catalonia and was then allowed to study art in Barcelona. His love of Catalonia and its landscape stayed with him all his life.
In 1920 he came to Paris. The Farm of 1921–22, a highly detailed picture of the farm at Mont-roig, was bought by the writer Ernest Hemingway and is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Shortly afterwards his style changed completely. He joined the Surrealist circle and began painting from dreams and free association. Harlequin's Carnival of 1924–25, in the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, teems with tiny creatures, eyes, ladders and musical instruments.
Miró created his own sign language of stars, moons, birds, eyes and women, with black lines and bright fields of red, blue and yellow against light backgrounds. He said he wanted to “assassinate painting”, that is, to break with earlier conventions. During the Spanish Civil War his pictures grew darker. He made a poster in support of the Republic and a large mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, the same year as Picasso's Guernica. The mural has been lost.
In the first years of the Second World War he painted the small, intense series Constellations. After the war he worked increasingly in ceramics, printmaking, sculpture and textiles. Together with the ceramicist Josep Llorens Artigas he made ceramic walls for the UNESCO building in Paris. From 1956 he lived on Mallorca.
Miró died in Palma in 1983. The Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona opened in 1975. His imagery is also part of everyday life, for example in the Spanish tourism logo with a sun. He is regarded as one of the most important Surrealist artists and a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism.