Joan
Miró
Barcelona (1893 - 1983)
Spanish painter, whose surrealist works, with their subject matter drawn
from the realm of memory and imaginative fantasy, are some of the most
original of the 20th century.
Miró was born April 20, 1893, in Barcelona and studied at the
Barcelona School of Fine Arts and the Academia Galí. His work
before 1920 shows wide-ranging influences, including the bright colours
of the Fauves, the broken forms of cubism, and the powerful,
flat two-dimensionality of Catalonian folk art and the Romanesque church
frescoes of his native Spain.
He moved
to Paris in 1920, where, under the influence of surrealist poets and
writers, he evolved his mature style. Miró drew on memory, fantasy,
and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues
of surrealist poetry. These dreamlike visions, such as Harlequin's Carnival
or Dutch Interior, often have a whimsical or humorous quality, containing
images of playfully distorted animal forms, twisted organic shapes,
and odd geometric constructions.
Amorphous
amoebic shapes alternate with sharply drawn lines, spots, and curlicues,
all positioned on the canvas with seeming nonchalance. Miró later
produced highly generalized, ethereal works in which his organic forms
and figures are reduced to abstract spots, lines, and bursts
of colours.
Miró
also experimented in a wide array of other media, devoting himself to
etchings and lithographs for several years in the 1950s and also working
in watercolour, pastel, collage, and paint on copper and masonite. His
ceramic sculptures are especially notable, in particular his two
large ceramic murals for the UNESCO building in Paris (Wall of the
Moon and Wall of the Sun, 1957-59). Miró died in Majorca, Spain,
on December 25, 1983.
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