Joan Miró (1893-1983)

"What I'm looking for is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what we call the eloquence of silence, or what Jean-de-la-Croix called, I think, silent music.

Catalan artist Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893. He studied at the École supérieure des arts industriels et des beaux-arts de la Lonja, then at the École d'art de Francesc Galí, a private school open to all the arts and sensitive to the ideas of the European avant-garde. It was here that he discovered modern painting. Van Gogh, the Fauves and the Cubists made a strong impression on him. He also made lasting friendships with Joan Prats, Josep Francesc Ràfols, Enric Cristòfol Ricart and Josep Llorens Artigas. In the autumn of the following year, he joins the Cercle artistique de Sant Lluc, where he takes drawing classes. In the summer of 1915, at Mon-troig, his family's farm in the province of Tarragona, he painted his first landscapes, close to Cubism in their schematization of forms and to Fauvism in their use of color. The following year, he made the acquaintance of the art dealer Josep Dalmau, owner of the Dalmau gallery in Barcelona, a hub of avant-garde activity in the city, where foreign artists who had fled war-torn France gathered: Albert Gleizes, the couple Sonia and Robert Delaunay, and Francis Picabia, who published the journal 391 in Barcelona. During the summer of 1918 in Mont-roig (July-December), a new, highly detailed and meticulous style began to emerge in his landscape paintings, notably La Maison du palmier (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid) and Le Potager à l'âne (Moderna Museet, Stockholm) executed during this period. TheSelf-portrait from the Picasso collection (Musée national-Picasso, Paris) also dates from this period.

Read the full biography.