Short resume:

Once more, Spain 'produced' a legendary figure in painting. After endowing universal art with painters such as Velasquez, El Greco, Dali or Picasso, Spain reshaped painting once again with Joan Miro. Born in a family that could not accept his calling as an artist, he had to study business and even work as a clerk. But this was no life for an inborn talent such as Miro, who, unhappy with his daily routine, soon suffered from a nervous breakdown.

Joan's parents had to accept his choice - he wanted to be a painter, so he studied art and soon his talent was obvious for everybody. After completing his studies, he moved to Paris, every artist's paradise, where he soon became friends with the foremost avant-garde artists, ranging from the Surrealists to the Dadaists.

The artist led a very tranquil, but poor life which left its imprint on his paintings - he later recollected he used to paint under the influence of the hallucinations deriving from the lack of food. What resulted is a complete refreshing and unique vision: his painting has a childlike quality. The objects and human beings depicted are very symbolical - and usually distorted into simpler shapes. They are either stretched or swollen or forcefully turned into abstract geometric shapes. His paintings have the adorable naïveté of those drawn by infants and, at the same time a dreamlike quality - they seem to spring directly from the unconscious.

Later in life, he is known for having experimented with odd and unlikely materials in his paintings, and he even integrated found objects in his works.

Nonetheless, once you've seen one of his paintings you are doomed to be haunted by their poetic imagery: the stars, the fantastical creatures that populate them or the playfully distorted forms, most of them drawn in sharp lines. And, to give them more 'strength', he chose bright colors, mostly blue, yellow, red, green and black. These being said, Joan's painting transcends all sorts of interpretations and is basically aimed at the receptor's soul and not his mind.

His artistic credo is explained by the painter: ' My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details'.

Biography:

Joan Miro, one of the foremost painters of the past century was born on the 20th of April, 1893 in Montroig, a Catalan region in Spain as the son of a goldsmith and jewelry maker. He began painting when he was a child, and eventually never gave up his love of art. Due to his origins, he was exposed to Catalan's rich folklore and the interiors of ninth to twelfth century frescoed churches, which left a deep impact on his youth and would later be the sources of his unusual manner of painting.

Although he wanted to study arts, his parents would rather have him study something 'safer' in pecuniary terms. Hence, in order to please them, Miro studied at a business school for three years and shortly thereafter took up a job as an accounting clerk in a drugstore, where he worked for about two years. This eventually led him to a nervous breakdown, followed by a bout of typhoid fever. Seriously ill, he was taken by his parents to a country farm where he could do what he most wanted - paint. In the end, his parents had to accept their son's choice, even if somewhat half-heartedly. So, the Catalan-bred artist studied painting in the Gali Academy from Barcelona, where he had the opportunity to meet other contemporary aspiring artists, such as the highly-appreciated Man Ray.

His first works are mostly influenced by two of the most 'fashionable' artistic movements in the beginning of the 20th century: Fauvism (especially Matisse) and Cubism. Apart from that, as any aspiring, young artist, he had to move to Paris (where he had settled in 1921), the quintessential city of arts - here he met some of the 'pillars' of modern painting.

An inborn talent, the Spaniard soon befriended Surrealists such as Louis Aragon, Andre Breton or Paul Eluard. But, although often pigeonholed as a Surrealist by the posterity, he never officially adhered to this movement, which gave him more freedom. At the time, Miro had already begun 'geometricising' the forms and using brilliant, non-mimetic colors, as he himself later stated: 'what interests me most is the calligraphy of a tree or a rooftop, leaf by leaf, twig by twig...This does not mean that these landscapes will not end up being Cubist or wildly synthetic. But we shall see...'.

Miro's work has been categorized as encompassing a dreamlike quality and an innocent vibe, and this is perhaps why Andre Breton, the Surrealist genius claimed that the Spanish painter was 'the most Surrealist of [them] all'. Apart from that, the fact that he was interested in automatism and intensive use of sexual symbolism was another reason for being so easily labeled.

The Surrealists were very influenced by their need of transfiguring the unconscious, and they did such by a variety of methods, but Miro's was by far the most original - he used to paint under the grip of hunger. Being very poor, he did a lot of his paintings while hallucinating from lack of food - 'compared to the use of ether, cocaine, alcohol, morphine, or sex, Miro's hunger-hallucinations look almost like a monkish fasting' (Janic Mink).

His first major work, 'Harlequin's Carnival' (1925) - often considered the climax of his Surrealist phase - is a dreamlike vision that contains many of his future trademark features: images of distorted animals, twisted organic shapes and weird geometric constructions. From then on, his works are more abstract, and the organic forms and figures are reduced to abstract lines, spots and colors - Miro was often called a 'form-giver'. On recollecting how he had painted this chef d'oeuvre, Miro remembered: 'How did I think up my drawings and my ideas for painting? Well I'd come home to my Paris studio in Rue Blomet at night, I'd go to bed, and sometimes I hadn't any supper. I saw things, and I jotted them down in a notebook. I saw shapes on the ceiling'. In fact, what he did was to make use of 'reality as a point of departure, never as a stopping place'.

Even if he maintained his independence from any art movement, Joan in fact exhibited with the Surrealists in 1928 in the Pierre Gallery and also in Paris, but it wasn't until the 1930 that he gained international recognition. But Miro's goal was to produce an original art that defied all conventionalism: he wanted to 'rape', 'murder', 'kill' any traditional painting methods.

After the 1930s, Joan Miro started experimenting with all sorts of materials - he integrated odd materials and found objects in his woks. He painted and collaged on paper, copper, masonite and sandpaper. Between 1932-1936, the painter created a series of collages in which various everyday objects were cut out of magazines and arranged onto the paper - all these works served as the origins of some of his most original paintings.

Apart from being a gifted painter, Miro also worked on the designs of various plays, such as the 1926 ballet 'Romeo and Juliet' - for which the Spaniard and Max Ernst designed the costumes and the set. Six years later, he would design the curtain, sets and costumes for 'Jeux d'Enfants', another ballet, performed by the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo.

In terms of his personal life, Miro was never the Bohemian type - he was a disciplined, hard-working man who used to come to his exhibitions in dark business suits. And to further destroy the myth of the Boho artists - he was considered the perfect little bourgeois. Even so, he was a modest man who had struggled with poverty for many years, but, eventually, fulfilled his dream of moving into the house of his dreams. Hence, after WWII, when his financial situation improved, Joan afforded to move into a villa designed by the avant-garde architect Josep Luis Sert and located in Palma de Mallorca - which is now known as the Miro Museum. And, in order to complete the portrait of a serene, calm life, Miro lived alongside lifetime companion Pilar Juncosa (the two had married in Palma de Mallorca in 1929), with whom he had a daughter named Dolores.

Throughout the 1940s, he had already become internationally famous, and, consequently, he had several one-man shows in America, out of which the most notable was a retrospective of his work at the MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Here, he executed a number of murals for prestigious buildings such as the one for the Terrance Hilton Hotel in Cincinnatti or the one for Harvard University.

In terms of his other preoccupations, the most notable is his activity as a ceramic sculptor - Joan executed two large ceramic murals for the UNESCO building in Paris - Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun. One of his greatest accomplishments is his being bestowed at the Venice Biennale in 1954.

In his last creative period, which started around the 60s, Miro was chiefly preoccupied with the symbol and leaving aside the representing theme, he was fascinated with finding new ways of depicting humans and animals, because what he was most concerned about was 'to rediscover the sources of human feeling'.

At his death in 1983, on the 25th of December, we were left with an impressive number of works: 2000 oil paintings, 500 sculptures, 400 ceramic objects and 5000 drawings and collages. And, his words will defy time: 'I'd like to get beyond easel painting, which in my opinion pursues a petty aim, and find ways of getting closer, in terms of painting, to the broad mass of human beings who have always been in my thought'.

What do you think about his style? IN or OUT?

Major works:

Les Agulles del Pastor - 1973

Woman at Night - 1970

Ubu Roi - 1966

The Skiing Lesson - 1966

Painting III - 1965

Blue I - 1962

Silence - 1961

The Red Disk - 1960

The Dog Barking Awakens the Cock - 1952

Dragonfly with Red Wings - 1951

The Bullfight - 1945

Snob Party at the Princess's - 1944

The Poetess - 1940

Nocturne - 1940

Constellation: The Morning Star - 1940

The Nightingale's Song at Midnight and the Morning Rain - 1940

Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails - 1940

The Escape Ladder - 1939-1940

Head of a Woman - 1938

Still Life with Old Shoe - 1937

The Circus - 1934

Swallow/Love - 1934

Peinture Collage - 1933

Painting - 1933

Siesta - 1925

Dialogue of the Insects - 1925

Harlequins Carnival - 1924-1925

Hermitage - 1924

The Tilled Field - 1923-1924

Catalan Landscape, The Hunter - 1923

The Carbide Lamp - 1922

The Farmhouse, Mont Roig - 1921-1922

Montroig Vineyards and Olive Tree - 1919

House with Palm Tree - 1918

The Waggon Tracks - 1918

Vegetable Garden with Donkey - 1918

Ciurana, The Path - 1917

The Village of Prades - 1917

Abstraction - ????

Mural - ????