Miró, Joan

Miró, Joan (zhōän` mērō`), 1893–1983, Spanish surrealist painter. After studying in Barcelona, Miró went to Paris in 1919. In the 1920s he came into contact with cubism and surrealism. His work has been characterized as psychic automatism, an expression of the subconscious in free form. By 1930, Miró had developed a lyrical style that remained fairly consistent. It is distinguished by the use of brilliant pure color and the playful juxtaposition of delicate lines with abstract, often amebic shapes (e.g., Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926; Philadelphia Mus. of Art). In some of his works there is a distinct undertone of nightmare and horror. After 1941, Miró lived mainly in Majorca. He painted murals for hotels in New York City and Cincinnati and for the Graduate Center at Harvard. In 1958 he completed ceramic decorations for the UNESCO buildings in Paris. Many of his canvases are in the Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum.

Bibliography

See studies by J. T. Soby (1959), U. Apolonio (tr. 1969), and R. Penrose (1971).

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Miró, Joan

Joan Miró, photograph by Yousuf Karsh, 1966.

(credit: Karsh/Woodfin Camp and Associates)

(born April 20, 1893, Barcelona, Spain—died Dec. 25, 1983, Palma de Mallorca) Spanish (Catalan) artist. He attended a commercial school and worked as an office clerk until a mental breakdown persuaded his artisan father to permit him to study art. From the beginning he sought to express concepts of nature metaphorically. From 1919 on he lived alternately in Spain and Paris, where he came under the influence of Dadaism and Surrealism. The influence of Paul Klee is apparent in his “dream pictures” and “imaginary landscapes” of the late 1920s, in which linear configurations and patches of colour look almost as though they had been set down randomly. His mature style evolved from the tension between this fanciful, poetic impulse and his vision of the harshness of modern life. He worked extensively in lithography and produced numerous murals, tapestries, and sculptures for public spaces.

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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.