MIRÓ, Joan (Barcelona, 1893 – Palma de Mallorca, 1983)
Joan Miró attended the La Llotja School while studying commerce. In 1910 he began working as an accountant assistant in a shop selling cleaning materials and other household goods. After a short convalescence, his parents allowed him to devote himself entirely to painting. Between 1912 and 1915 he attended the Francesc Galí Art School, where he was taught with a modern and complete approach. In 1918 he held his first individual exhibition at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona, with works showing the influence of different movements, from Impressionism to Cubism.
He first travelled to Paris in 1920, and returned in 1921, spending from then on the winters in the French capital and the summers in Mont-roig. Around the same time he painted The Farm (1921–1922) in an ingenuous language. Having taken up residence in rue Blomet, Miró befriended André Masson and the group of poets living in that same Parisian street (Michel Leiris, Antonin Artaud, Georges Limbour, etc.), who influenced his search for a poetic painting based on the use of visual metaphors. In 1924 Miró met André Breton, who published that same year the first Surrealist Manifesto. The following year he took part in the first exhibition of Surrealist painting held in the Galerie Pierre in Paris. His “dream paintings” (1925–1927), filled with schematic shapes on nuanced backgrounds, date from the following years. Between 1928 and 1933 Miró radicalised his language under the pretext of “murdering painting”, by employing non-traditional materials such as sandpaper, strings, pins, etc. His first “objects” date from 1930.
In 1937 the government of the Second Republic commissioned Miró a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, entitled The Harvester. His Still Life with Old Shoe, an allusion to the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, also dates from that same year. During the Second World War Miró abandoned Paris and moved first to Varengeville, and later to Palma de Mallorca, where he concluded his series of Constellations.
At the end of the war, Miró painted works of great expressive simplicity in a larger format. He also experimented with new mediums such as printing, bronze sculptures and ceramics. During those years he also painted many mural decorations such as those for Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1950–1951), the UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1956–1958) and the Palacio de Congresos (Congress Hall) in Madrid (1980) all in collaboration with the ceramics artist Josep Llorens Artigas. In 1975 The Joan Miró foundation opened in Barcelona. The building was designed by Josep Lluís Sert, a Catalan architect and a close friend of Miró.
Miró died on 25 December 1983 in Palma de Mallorca, at the age of ninety.
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