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"Luminous Art & Design :: Art & Artists"
Joan Miró :: Biography and Books"
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Joan Miró i Ferrà (1893 –1983) was one of Spain’s most celebrated abstract and Surrealist artists. His paintings, sculptures and ceramics are characterized by simple flattened forms and bright colors and remind of childlike drawings.
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Joan Miró i Ferrà (1893 –1983) was a Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramist born in Barcelona, Spain. His work is characterized by flattened pictures in pure and bright colors, simple forms drawn with sharp lines and has an impression of naïve, childlike drawings or even prehistoric cave paintings.
Joan entered the Lonja School of Fine Arts in 1907 and studied under artist José Pascó. Joan’s parents, who were artists themselves (goldsmith and jewelry maker), disapproved of the choice and forced him to take business classes parallel to his art classes. In 1910, Miró withdrew from the school and became an office clerk. He worked as an accountant for two years until a nervous breakdown persuaded his father to let him pick up his art classes again. In 1915, Miró left the Academy Galí and began painting by himself.
Joan Miró’s first solo exhibition in Barcelona in 1918 featured 64 paintings and several sketches. One year later he traveled to Paris to meet Pablo Picasso and other great painters living in the French capital.
From 1924 on Miró befriended many Dada poets and André Breton and the Surrealists. This influenced Miró’s work in varying degrees. Breton even called Miró ‘the most ‘Surrealist’ of us all.’ However, Miró did not want to become an official member of the movement and was free to experiment with any style. He developed a personalized symbolism derived from prehistoric sources.
After developing this signature style, Miró began to add poetry to his works. He used written words as important elements in his paintings. Joan Miró tried to create poetry by means of painting and used a vocabulary with signs and symbols to express his themes and feelings. Miró never signed his work by writing his name. His name was always part of the work of art.
In the 1930s the artist became internationally recognized and his work was even being exhibited in the United States. He settled in Palma de Majorca in 1940 and started to experiment with different media and started to work with ceramics, tapestries, woodcuts and murals.
Joan Miró was a modest and hard working man. It was only after getting popular in the USA that his financial situation started to change and could live like the bourgeois that he wanted to be.
Among Miró's most famous monumental works are the two ceramic walls (1957-1959), Night and Day, for the UNESCO building in Paris. He won multiple awards in his lifetime; the Venice Biennale print making prize (1958), the Guggenheim International Award (1959), the Gold Medal of Fine Arts from King Juan Carlos of Spain (1980). He also received the Miro Memorial Award after his death.
In the last years of his life Miró explored the possibilities of gas sculpture and four-dimensional painting. Joan Miró died bedridden and suffering from heart disease on 25 December1983 in his home in Palma, Majorca. He is buried nearby the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona where many of his work is exhibited today. Some of Miró’s etchings and lithographs were published in large print editions and is nowadays even available on a limited budget.
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