Joan Miró
Joan Miró
1893-1983
Joan Miró, author of paintings, lithographs, drawings and sculptures, is known for his intricate graphic compositions and use of vibrant colours. Born in 1893 in Barcelona, he moved to Paris where he worked alongside Cubist and Surrealist artists. In the post-war period his works became abstract, populated by geometric and biomorphic forms. Believing art belongs to the public sphere, in the final years of his career Miró increasingly enlarged the size of his works, highlighting the liberating, redemptive powers of his practice. Miró died in 1983 but continues to be celebrated by critics and viewers for his unique artistic style.
The works of celebrated twentieth-century artist Joan Miró are known for their intricate graphic experimentations, their warm, vibrant colours and their combinations of symbols and biomorphic forms. Constantly referencing the subconscious and the oneiric through his signature geometric and abstract shapes, Miró’s art has been associated with diverse movements such as Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.
Born in 1893 in Barcelona, Miró attended La Lonja’s Escuela Superior de Artes Industriales y Bellas Artes from the age of 14. Initially close to Fauvist aesthetics, his early paintings were also inspired by Post-Impressionist artists such as van Gogh and Cézanne. After his first trip to Paris in 1919, in which he met Picasso, his works steered more clearly towards Cubism, incorporating frontal, geometric patterns into his colourful, expressive style.
During the 1920s, Miró’s practice veered closer to that of Surrealist and avant-garde artists, notably Dalí, Magritte, Klee, Kandinsky and Arp. In this decade he produced influential paintings such as ‘The Tilled Field’ (1923-24), in which memories of his childhood home in rural Catalonia merge with dreams and symbols, becoming a warm and intimate projection of the artist’s mind.
One of Miró’s continued concerns was the exploration of the mind through unorthodox approaches to artistic expression, which materialised in his use of different techniques and aesthetics. He produced several automated drawings, as well as papiers collés, lithographs, etchings and sculptures from Surrealist inspiration which incorporated stones and found objects. The enigmatic figurations, colourful and energetic, of paintings such as ‘Still Life with Old Shoe’ (1937) exemplify his distinct take on Surrealism.
Reaching international fame in the late 1930s, also due to his open political condemnation of Franco’s authoritarian regime, Miró’s first major exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1954 and documenta 1 in Kassel in 1955. An important commission in this decade was a mural for the UNESCO building in Paris in 1958.
For Miró, art belongs to the public sphere and is meant to be shared by the population at large. Perhaps for this reason, from the 1960s onward he increasingly enlarged the size of his sculptures and paintings. He produced monumental pieces, such as his series ‘The Ladder of Escape’ (1940-71) meant for public display, specifically designed for distinct locations.
In the final years of his career, Miró’s artworks attempted to highlight the liberating, redemptive powers of art in large triptychs such as ‘The Hope of a Condemned Man’ (1973). These paintings, consisting of three thick lines reminiscent of scribbles on a white background, allude to the execution of the Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich. The religious connotations of triptychs, traditionally used in church altarpieces, underscore Miró’s faith in the social relevance of his practice.
A testament to Miró’s concern for the democratisation of art production and appreciation is the establishment of the Joan Miró Foundation Centre of Contemporary Arts, opened in Barcelona in 1976. Miró died in 1983, but the celebration of his unique artistic style is unrelenting and his artworks have been the subject of major retrospectives well into the 21st century. His personal interpretations of forms, thoughts and creative techniques, as well as and political events, come to life through his unique take on Surrealism.
CONSTELLATIONS
Joan Miró
Political events and the natural world were both meaningful sites of inspiration for Joan Miró. Upon fleeing Paris due to the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the artist settled in a small, isolated village in Normandy which prompted ‘Constellations’, a series of 24 works on paper. In a letter from the period he wrote ‘I had always enjoyed looking out of the windows at night and seeing the sky and the stars and the moon, but now we weren’t allowed to do this anymore, so I painted the windows blue and I took my brushes and paint, and that was the beginning of the Constellations’.
Shocked by the war, Miró poured into these paintings his deepest emotions of fear and hope, which materialised into dynamic visions of signs and geometric forms dancing on the painted surface. Employing bold colours on light brown backgrounds, Miró constructed childlike graphic lines and shapes, such as simplified eyes. He conceived of these figurations as an intimate language that could convey his conflicted feelings of loss and uncertainty.
These paintings, condensing emotions into illustrative figurations, became immediately influential. Critics consider ‘Constellations’ to be the historical foundation of the later Abstract Expressionist movement, his explorations explicitly linked to the works of Pollock, Gorky and Gottlieb. Fascinated by the spontaneous appearance of these works, the Surrealist poet André Breton produced his ‘Constellations’ (1958) poems.
The subjective, intimate qualities of this series indicate the painter’s tumultuous feelings towards a country torn by war and social disruptions. For Miró, these paintings became a safe emotional space. ‘When I was painting the Constellations’, he stated, ‘I had the genuine feeling that I was working in secret, but it was a liberation for me in that I ceased thinking about the tragedy all around me’.
LITHOGRAPHS
Joan Miró
Joan Miró created throughout his prolific career more than a thousand lithographs. Through this printmaking method he was able to draw directly on a stone or metal plate, making his designs more spontaneous and immediate. While a few of Miró’s lithographs are copies of his own paintings, many are autonomous explorations of this medium’s figurative potential.
One of his most important series of lithographs is known as the ‘Barcelona’ series, which consists of 50 black and white prints published in 1944. A reaction to the Spanish Civil War, these prints depict grotesque images of animals and humans with distorted faces and bodies, which represent the absurdity and violence of the conflict. Due to a sudden scarcity of paper, only seven editions of this series were made.
After the war, Miró’s style grew increasingly abstract, relying more and more on graphic lines, simple geometric shapes and bright colours. The output of this period, playful and improvisational, was described as a ‘kaleidoscopic game of infinite possibilities’. Compositions were discovered through chance and accidents, combining these experimentations with a controlled and systematic artistic method.
Miró’s prints became immediately popular for their bright colours and abstract simplicity, as well as for their accessibility which complemented the artist’s political and social engagement. His distinctive forms, dynamic and expressive, constitute a personal visual journey, documenting the artist coping with the traumatic events of the 20th century. Miró’s visually approachable lithographs convey his firm belief in the redemptive and emancipatory power of art.
AUTOMATIC PAINTINGS
Joan Miró
In the early years of his career, influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud, Joan Miró embraced the automatic painting process of the Surrealist movement. Between 1923 and 1927, abandoning the figurative style of his previous paintings, he produced a large series of works that are referred to as ‘automatic paintings’, ‘dream paintings’ or ‘peinture-poesie’ (poetry-painting). Through this practice, drawings and paintings are made by avoiding conscious thoughts and attempting to retrieve memories or ideas from a forgotten psychic world of dreams. Miró appropriated this creative process and developed a personal language in which simple geometric or biomorphic forms could generate fantastical, dynamic figurations.
Paintings produced through this technique include the influential ‘The Tilled Field’ (1923) and ‘The Hunter (Catalan Landscape)’ (1923–24), in which he reinterpreted the ideals of Surrealism in his own distinctive style. In these works, Miró combined uncanny visions from dreams with his lyrical memories of childhood, juxtaposing floating geometrical shapes and symbols to body parts and animals. Miró’s canvases overflow with contrasting elements, covering the surface in dense clusters of interacting signs and objects.
Miró’s process remained unique among other Surrealist painters. His works were, he stated, ‘conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness’. Miró’s expressive compositions influenced artists such as Ernst, Tanguy and Dalí, while also recalling Calder’s mobiles. Having spent time in New York in the 1940s, critics also associate his automated paintings to the post-war experiments of the American Abstract Expressionists.
Abstract yet suggestive of arcane processes of reproductions and procreations, Miró’s mysterious paintings cannot be fully interpreted but remain open to infinite interpretations, revelling in their inventive fantasy.
BLUE
Joan Miró
Joan Miró’s celebrated ‘Blue’ series consists of three monumental paintings produced in the early 1960s in the artist’s studio in Mallorca. These works, unadorned and straightforward, reflect the artistic process of formal simplification that the painter undertook since the end of World War II. The ‘Blue’ paintings represent the final stage of Miró’s research into a personal compositional and colouring style.
Vivid, intense and immersive, these paintings are composed of isolated dots and thin lines over a bright blue background with sudden explosions of contrasting reds. While explicitly abstract, these works convey a sense of movement and direction expressed by the dynamic potential of shapes. If Miró used dots as devices to contain and restrain energy, lines communicated simple, immediate trajectories.
Compared to Miró’s earlier paintings, in which a multiplicity of forms and lines populated crowded canvases full of abrupt movements and primordial symbols, the ‘Blue’ paintings seem pervaded by stillness and emptiness. It is in this absence of movement, however, that Miró found expressive freedom, a newfound spontaneity in the use of colour and material. For the painter, ‘mastering freedom means mastering simplicity. Then, at most, a line, a colour, is enough to make the picture’.
The highly simplified canvases nevertheless pulsate with energy and potential. The mesmerising quality of the blue shades captivates viewers, activating forms and absorbing space. It is perhaps due to the unparalleled profundity of these figurations that the ‘Blue’ paintings have been reproduced in innumerable printed series. Combining sparse, meaningful symbols in an impulsive yet expressive way, these paintings capture the power of Miró’s pictorial aesthetic.
