Joan Miró

JOAN MIRÓ I FERRÀ (Barcelona, 1893 - Palma de Mallorca, 1983).
"Ode to Juan Miró", 1973.
Lithograph on Guarro paper, copy XIX/XV.
Signed and justified by hand.
With certificate of authenticity on the back.
Bibliography: Joan Miró. Lithographer, V. 1972-1975, pp. 39, 45, rep. 908.
Publisher: La Polígrafa, Barcelona
Measurements: 104 x 77 cm.

This work is part of "Ode to Joan Miró", a set of nine lithographs, made in 1973 and printed by Polígrafa, in which the artist illustrates the poems of Joan Brossa, whom he had known since the forties through Josep Vicenç Foix, and to whom he also had a great friendship.in Brossa's words, Miró's contribution to his visual poetry was to be a kind of music that flowed in parallel, but maintaining the independence of both manifestations. In this lithograph we observe genuine Miró elements: a semi-figurative being that combines human and animal forms, which we associate indistinctly with childhood, fantasy and creativity; the curved lines that represent fluidity, the primary colors in contrast with the black of the silhouette, the cosmic elements such as the stars... All this, enriched with the conceptual symbiosis with Brossa's poems.

Joan Miró was trained in Barcelona, between the Escuela de la Lonja and the Galí Academy. Already in the early date of 1918 he made 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. There, under the influence of surrealist poets and painters, he matures his style; 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. He returned to Spain in 1941, and that same year the museum 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.