Joan Miró

Miró, Joan 

Born Apr. 20, 1893, in Montroig, near Tarragona, Catalonia. Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist.

Miro attended the San Jorge School of Fine Arts in Barcelona from 1907 to 1910. He has lived mostly in Paris since 1919. Miro exhibited with the surrealists in their first group exhibition in 1925. In his ornamental works the artist imitates a child’s naive, incoherent drawing, arranging on a flat plane various figures that sometimes vaguely resemble real objects but more frequently are fantastic, mollusk-shaped forms that seem to flow into each other (Catalan Landscape, 1924, Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Still Life With an Old Shoe, 1937, private collection, New Canaan, Conn.; A Woman and a Bird in the Moonlight, 1949, Tate Gallery, London). In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Miro took up abstract art. The artist also did book illustrations and designed ceramics and carpets. He subsequently turned to monumental decorative art, for example, the tile mural in the UNESCO building in Paris (1958).

REFERENCE

Soby, J. T. Joan Miro. New York, 1959.