Joan Miro Ferra was born in Barcelona in April 20th, 1893. Joan’s father was a watchmaker and a his mother a cabinetmaker. Miro was a Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramist, who is a major player in modern art.
Fascinated by drawing and painting from a very early age, he nevertheless entered the Barcelona Business School at the age of fourteen under the guidance of his father, but he continued to take an interest in painting by attending classes at the Llonja School of Fine Arts (1907-1910). After various jobs in this sector, he had a nervous breakdown and gave up everything in 1912 to devote himself to his true passion: art, despite his parents’ reluctance. It was in his convalescent home in Montroig that he realized that his future laid in painting.
Delighted by his first trip to Paris in 1920, Miro decided to divide his life between the capital and Spain. There he frequented Picasso and took part in the Dada movement. His exhibition in 1925 in Paris, which was closely linked to the Surrealists, was a major event in this movement. But of all genres, it was Dadaism that particularly upset him. He showed great imagination, humor and fantasy to give new life to the objects and forms that surrounded him.
Miro painted the Birth of the World in 1925. In 1926, he collaborated with Max Ernst on sets for Serge de Diaghilev. The technique of “scraping” is then experimented. The artist explores other avenues, he leaves painting aside for a while in order to undertake works of a new character: collages, drawings, sculpting, assembling various materials (The Spanish Dancer, 1928). He wants to revolutionize his art and gets closer to literature and poetry. Miró married Pilar Juncosa in Palma de Mallorca on October 12, 1929 and became friends with Pablo Picasso and Kandinsky.
One of the most radical theorists (and founders) of surrealism, André Breton, described Miro as “the most surrealist of us”. Miro then asserts that he wants to “murder painting”, expressing his provocative contempt for painting (at least that which is conventionally considered) and his desire to kill and murder it in favor of new means of expression. Miro does not want to represent reality, his paintings become more and more abstract and the forms more organic, more cellular.
In his later years, he accelerated his work on various media, producing, for example, hundreds of ceramics, including the Wall of the Moon and the Wall of the Sun on the UNESCO building in Paris (1958). He wrote down his most radical and least known ideas, exploring the possibilities of gas sculpture and four-dimensional painting.
Miro died at the age of 90 on 25 December 1983 in Palma de Mallorca. He is buried in the Barcelona cemetery. Painter, ceramist, sculptor, the work he leaves behind is immense, simply commensurate with the talent, imagination and creativity of this exceptional painter. Throughout his life, he claimed total freedom and thus escaped any cubist, surrealist and abstract convention that might have locked him up.
The Miro Foundation in Barcelona was inaugurated in 1976; the artist had donated 5000 drawings, sculptures, painting, lithographs and etches. The Joan Miro Museum in Palma de Mallorca was opened in the artist’s studio ten years after his death.
