Joan Miró

JOAN MIRÓ I FERRÀ (Barcelona, 1893 - Palma de Mallorca, 1983).
"Personnages, oiseux, étoile", 1977.
Pencil on cardboard.
Signed in the lower right area.
Measurements: 23 x 19,5 cm; 53,5 x 48,5 cm (frame).
Joan Miró was one of the great figures of the art of the 20th century at international level, and developed a personal language close to surrealism that powerfully influenced both his contemporaries and the following generations. He trained in Barcelona, first at the Escuela de la Lonja and later at the Academia Galí, with a more innovative spirit. At that school and at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, also in Barcelona, the young Miró met some of his great friends, such as the critic Sebastià Gasch, the poet J.V. Foix, the painter Josep Llorens Artigas and the artistic promoter Joan Prats. Thus, since his formative years he was directly related to the most avant-garde circles of Barcelona, and already in the early date of 1918 he held his first exhibition in the Dalmau Galleries in Barcelona. In 1920 he moved to Paris and met Picasso, Raynal, Max Jacob, Tzara and the Dadaists. These would be the crucial years of his artistic career, in which Miró would discover his personal language. In Paris he became friends with André Masson, around whom the so-called Rue Blomet group, the future nucleus of surrealism, was grouped. Thus, under the influence of surrealist poets and painters, with whom he shared many of his theoretical approaches, his style matures; he tries to transpose surrealist poetry to the visual, based on memory, fantasy and the irrational. From this moment on, his style began an evolution that led him to more ethereal works, in which organic forms and figures were reduced to abstract dots, lines and spots of color. In 1924 he signed the first surrealist manifesto, although the evolution of his work, too complex, does not allow him to be ascribed to any particular orthodoxy. His third exhibition in Paris, in 1928, was his first great triumph: the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired two of his works. From the thirties onwards, Miró became one of the most outstanding figures on the international art scene, as well as one of the key artists of the twentieth century. It was precisely at this time that the artist, a non-conformist by nature, entered a phase he called the "murder of painting", in which he voluntarily renounced being a painter and experimented with other media, such as collage, drawing on paper of different textures or the construction of "objects" with found elements, his first approach to sculpture. Thus, although he soon resumed painting, Miró never abandoned his desire to experiment with all kinds of materials and techniques, including ceramics, bronze, stone, graphic techniques and even, since 1970, tapestry. He returned to Spain in 1941, and that same year the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a retrospective to him that would be his definitive international consecration. During the fifties he experimented with other artistic media, such as engraving, lithography and ceramics. From 1956 until his death in 1983, he lived in Palma de Mallorca in a sort of internal exile, while his international fame grew. Throughout his life he received numerous awards, such as the Grand Prizes at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and the Guggenheim Foundation in 1959, the Carnegie Prize for Painting in 1966, the Gold Medals of the Generalitat de Catalunya (1978) and of the Fine Arts (1980), and was named Doctor Honoris Causa by the universities of Harvard and Barcelona. Today his work can be seen at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, inaugurated in 1975, as well as in major contemporary art museums around the world, such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the MoMA in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the National Gallery in Washington, the MNAM in Paris and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.