Miró

Joan Miró (1893- 1983) was born in Barcelona and studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and the Academia Gali. His work, drawn from the realm of memory and imaginative fantasy is surreal in nature and among the most original of the 20th century.

Before 1920, Miró’s work showed his wide-ranging influences, including the bright colours of the Fauves (which is to say it used pure, brilliant colour, applied straight from the paint tubes in an aggressive, direct manner to create a sense of an explosion on the canvas), the broken forms of cubism, and the powerful, flat two-dimensionality of Catalan folk art as well as the Romanesque church frescoes of his native Spain.

In 1920, Miro moved to Paris in 1920, where he fell under the influence of surrealist poets and writers and his style evolved. Miró drew on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues of surrealist poetry. These dreamlike visions, such as Harlequin's Carnival or Dutch Interior, often have a whimsical or humorous quality, containing images of playfully distorted animal forms, twisted organic shapes, and odd geometric constructions. The forms of his paintings are organized against flat neutral backgrounds and are painted in a limited range of bright colors, especially blue, red, yellow, green, and black.

Amorphous amoebic shapes alternate with sharply drawn lines, spots, and curlicues, all positioned on the canvas with seeming nonchalance. Miró later produced highly generalized, ethereal works in which his organic forms and figures are reduced to abstract spots, lines, and bursts of colors.

Miró also experimented in a wide array of other media, devoting himself to etchings and lithographs for several years in the 1950s and also working in watercolor, pastel, collage, and paint on copper and masonite.

Text courtesy of California State University Hayward.

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