Joan Miro Biography
The painter, Joan Miró, was born in Barcelona in 1893 and died in Mallorca in
1983. He produced works in a variety of different styles, and using a wide range
of materials, but the majority of them had a surrealist flavour. This is how he
is best remembered, although he preferred to think of his works as
individualistic, and not necessarily falling into any particular category.
He showed an early passion for art, and attended drawing classes while he was at
primary school. In 1907 he enrolled at the School of Industrial and Fine Arts
(the Llotja) in Barcelona, and studied there until 1910. In 1912, Miró was
recovering from a bout of Typhoid, and decided that he wanted to follow his love
of painting, and not a career in accounting that he had been attempting to
pursue. He spent 3 years at a school of art run by Francesc Galí, and studied
life art at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, His first one man exhibition was
in 1918, and his works showed a number of influences. These included the vibrant
colours of Fauvism, Cubist shapes, Catalan art and Roman frescos.
In 1920, he visited Paris for the first time, and met Picasso. This is probably
one of the main reasons why his style changed after this point, and Miró began
to focus on more surreal paintings. He decided to move to Paris, and held his
first solo exhibition there in 1921. He divided his time between Spain and
France and met, and worked alongside, many of the surrealist artists and poets
of the time. Ernest Hemingway was among Miró’s customers during this time. He
bought a painting that mixed cubism with surrealism, ‘The Farm’. In 1926, Miró
and his friend, Max Ernst, were commissioned to design the sets and costumes for
the ballet ‘Romeo and Juliet’, performed in Paris by the Ballets Russes. Around this time, Miró also started to become interested in object collages. The
first he produced was the ‘Spanish Dancer’. He moved away from painting for a
while, and concentrated on sculptures. However, he also experimented with a wide
variety of other artistic forms, including lithography, engraving, and painting
over copper. He married in 1929, and his daughter was born the following year.
Miró then decided to spend more time in Spain, until the outbreak of the Spanish
Civil war forced him to move his family back to Paris in 1936. They remained
there until 1940, when they moved back to Spain. Miró continued to learn about,
and experiment with, various materials and types of art, but it was his ceramic
work that he concentrated on.
In the late 1950s, Miró began to produce commissioned works, particularly murals
and large outdoor sculptures for locations around the world. In 1972, a building
to house the Fundació Joan Miró, Centre d'Estudis d'Art Contemporani (The Joan
Miró Foundation, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art) was commissioned. It
opened to the public in 1975, and it houses the largest collection of Miró’s
works. This is by far the biggest collection in the world, not surprisingly
because Miró himself donated the vast majority of pieces before he died. It
includes 240 paintings, 175 sculptures, 9 textiles, 4 ceramics, the almost
complete graphic works, and around 8,000 drawings. Other examples of Miró’s work
can be found at museums and locations around the world.
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