Joan Miro

Joan Miro was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1893. At a very young age , he showed great interest and ability at painting, but his father, a goldsmith , disapproved. At the age of seventeen, Miro took a job as a clerk in an office, but was so unhappy that he became seriously ill. After recovery, he was allowed to enter an art school in Barcelona. In 1915, he met Joseph Llorens Artigas, who became a lifelong friend of Miro's. He began to exhibit his work soon after, and in 1918, he had his first solo exhibit. The paintings at this first showing consisted of still-life, landscapes, portraits and nudes painted with brilliant colors and and almost cubist sense of form and (lack of) perspective.

In his 1923 painting "The Farmer's Wife" Miro used a distortion of form that would become one of the trademarks of his work. In 1924 he executed "The Farm," a surreal reinterpretation of his 1921 canvas "The Farm." In this new painting, Miro reduced all the elements of his earlier work into a visual code where birds, fish and animals are represented by distorted forms that border on the abstract. Similarly, his 1924 works, "Harlequin's Carnival" and "Catalan Landscape," give his forms an almost primitive look, and at this time Miro came to be associated with the surrealists.

In the mid '20s Miro's work was gaining prominence, and in 1923 he had met Henry Miller, French poet Jacques Prevert and Ernest Hemingway, who ended up as the owner of "The Farm." In 1926 Miro was indeed featured in an exhibit by the Galerie Surrealiste that also featured works by Andre Masson, Yves Tanguy, Giorgio DeChirico, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst, among others. Miro began a series of "dream paintings" based on images on the unconscious in 1925, and soon after began experimenting with collage techniques.

When the Spanish Civil War broke in 1936, Miro made "Still Life With Old Shoe" a still life of blackened objects that is often thought of along with Picasso's "Guernica" as a definitive statement against the war. "The Reaper," which was commissioned by her Spanish government that same year, is another work that addresses the conflict, a figure rising up from the ground in defiance. These paintings seem to unlock an inner rage within him in works such as his four "Portraits" of 1938.

Miro's work became even more abstract during and after the second World War, and Miro became incredibly prolific. That his work after the '30s seems marred by too much repetition of ideas is due to this incredible output. By the 1960s Miro seemed to be turning out canvases by the minute. At the 1968 Barcelona exhibit, the works dated that year numbered over sixty paintings, twenty-eight graphic works and over thirty sculptures. Miro continued to work at a staggeringly prodigious pace until his death on December 25, 1983.

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