Joan Miró

(1893-1983)

"What I'm looking for is an immobile movement, something equivalent to what we call the eloquence of silence or what Jean-de-la-Croix referred to with the words, I believe, of mute music."[1].

Catalan artist Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893. In 1907, in accordance with his father's wishes, he attended the Barcelona School of Commerce alongside the Lonja School of Industrial and Fine Arts until 1910. Stricken with typhoid fever, he convalesced in 1911 on the family farm at Mont-roig in the province of Tarragona. The following year, he enrolled at the Francesc Galí Art School, a private establishment 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 Mon-troig in the summer of 1915, he painted his first landscapes, close to both Cubism in the schematization of forms and Fauvism in the 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.

Miró made his first visit to Paris in 1920 (February-June), where Josep Dalmau tried to organize an exhibition for him. He visited Picasso. At the beginning of the following year, he returned to Paris, settling in the rue Blomet studio lent (or rented) by the sculptor Pablo Gargallo, next door to André Masson's studio. From then on, he divided his time between Paris in winter and Mon-troig in summer. In the summer of 1921, he undertook La Ferme, the masterpiece of his détailliste period, with great attention to the material and texture of objects. The work was acquired in November 1925 by Ernest Hemingway (National Gallery of Art, Washington). Miró met many writers and poets through André Masson, whose studio was a place of almost daily impromptu meetings.

"Rue Blomet was, above all, about friendship, exchange and exalted discovery through a wonderful group of friends. Michel Leiris, who remained my dearest friend, and Roland Tual, Georges Limbour and Armand Salacrou were familiar faces at these meetings in Masson's studio.[2],

To whom we must add Pierre Reverdy, Tristan Tzara, creator of Dada, Max Jacob, then Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, then a numismatist, introduced by Michel Leiris. "We talked and drank a lot. [...] We listened to music [...] and read a lot on rue Blomet".[3] Lord Byron, Saint-Pol-Roux, Alfred Jarry, Arthur Rimbaud, Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as their own texts. "As dissimilar as we were," Michel Leiris recalls, "there was a common tone that was given (it seems to me) by a furious appetite for the marvelous, a desire to break with ordinary reality or, at any rate, to transfigure it."[4]It was also a desire to break the straitjacket of pictorial conventions. Poetry in all its forms had a sacred value for them. The abundant creativity of these years unfolded in an atmosphere of immense freedom, decisive for Miró. A few years later, he painted Musique Seine Leiris, Bataille et moi, 1927 (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam), which testifies to his complicity with Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille. These poetic experiences were of vital importance to Miró's work. "Rue Blomet is a place, a decisive moment for me. I discovered there everything I am, everything I would become."[5]. Terre labourée, 1923-1924 (Solomon-R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) and Paysage catalan (Le Chasseur), 1924 (MoMA, New York) were turning points. Starting out from reality, Miró strove to lose contact with it. He discarded "all pictorial influences [...], cut[e] all contact with realism and [...] painted with absolute contempt for painting."[6]. The process of substituting the imaginary for realism, which had begun the previous year, gained momentum. His painting was liberated by poetry and onirism.

Also in 1924, Miró's first paintings on "moving" monochrome backgrounds appeared, such as the series of yellow backgrounds, including Tête de paysan catalan (National Gallery of Art, Washington) and the blue backgrounds inaugurated by Baigneuse (Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'Art moderne, Paris). Of Mont-roig, Miró wrote: "I free myself from all pictorial convention (this poison) [...]. My latest canvases, I conceive them as if by a thunderbolt, absolutely free from the outside world (from the world of men who have eyes in the hollow under their foreheads"[7]. In autumn, on October 15, André Breton published the Manifesto of Surrealism. The cercle de la rue Blomet draws closer to members of the movement. André Masson produces his first automatic drawings four years after the publication of Champs magnétiques, a collection of prose texts written by André Breton and Philippe Soupault using the principle of automatic writing. In June 1925, Galerie Pierre (Pierre Loeb) presents Miró's first solo exhibition. For Roland Tual, "Miró's painting is the shortest path from one mystery to another."[8].

In Mont-roig during the summer, Miró undertook his first "dream paintings", or "oniric paintings" (1925-1927), including Photo: Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, 1925 (Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'Art moderne, Paris), which associates the color blue with onirism, and La Sieste (Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'Art moderne, Paris) - to which the poem-paintings also belong. At the same time, Miró also painted a series of canvases on brown backgrounds, such as L'Addition, Aug.-Sept. 1925 (Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'Art moderne, Paris), which seem "less painted than dirtied."[9]. The artist joined the Surrealist group but remained independent. He takes part in the first La Peinture surréaliste exhibition at Galerie Pierre (November), alongside Georgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Man Ray, André Masson and Pablo Picasso.

In early 1926, Miró moved from rue Blomet to the Cité des Fusains on rue Tourlaque in the Montmartre district. Jean Arp, Max Ernst and Belgian art dealer Camille Goemans were his new neighbors. With Ernst, and following in the footsteps of his predecessors, notably Picasso and Matisse, who were diversifying their practice beyond the canvas, he collaborated with Serge de Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, designing the sets and costumes for Romeo and Juliet, premiered on May 4 in Monte Carlo and performed on May 18 in Paris. During the summer at Mont-roig, Miró paints his first "imaginary landscapes". The tumultuous backgrounds of the "dream paintings" were succeeded by backgrounds composed of flat areas of saturated color divided by a horizon line, such as Dog barking at the moon, 1926 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Miró's first experience of illustration was with a drawing for Gertrudis by the Catalan poet Josep Vicenç Foix, published by L'Amic de les Arts in 1927.

On February 11, 1928, André Breton's Le Surréalisme et la peinture was published by the N.R.F., with the aim of demonstrating the existence of surrealist painting. Miró has a place in it. The artist creates the "Spanish Dancers" series from discarded elements. A radical break with traditional painting conventions, these works embody Miró's desire to "assassinate painting". In spring (May 4-16), he travels to Belgium and Holland (Brussels, The Hague, Amsterdam). On his return to Paris, he creates the "Dutch Interiors" series, based on postcards purchased in museums during his travels. During the summer in Mont-roig, he continued his offensive against painting by creating large monochrome collages with cut-out paper, into which he introduced found materials such as wire, rags and tar plates. These works (twenty-two are listed) are part of a process of critical investigation by the artist of his own creation. He produces his first black lithographs for Tristan Tzara's L'Arbre des voyageurs (Éditions de la montagne). In Paris in early January 1930, experiencing a new period of self-doubt, Miró executed a series of six large abstract paintings described as "anti-paintings" by Jacques Dupin, writer, poet and eminent specialist in his work. They constitute his farewell to painting. These works are reproduced in Documents n°7 with a text by Georges Bataille.

"[...] as Miró himself professed that he wanted to "kill painting", the decomposition was pushed to such a point that only a few shapeless stains remained on the lid (or tombstone, if you like) of the box of tricks. Then, the angry, alienated little elements erupted again, only to disappear again today in these paintings, leaving only the traces of who knows what disaster" (p. 399).

In the spring, Miró takes part, along with Jean Arp, Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Juan Gris, René Magritte, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso and Yves Tanguy, in the Collages exhibition organized at the Camille Goemans gallery (49 rue de Seine), whose catalog contains Aragon's famous text "La Peinture au défi" ("Painting as a challenge"). "I have a profound contempt for painting; only the pure spirit interests me", Miró confided to Francisco Melgar in January 1931.[10]. In L'Intransigeant, Tériade referred to an artist (without naming him) who declared that he wanted to "assassinate" painting[11]. In March of the following year, with Homme et Femme (Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris), he began the series of object paintings, composed of salvaged materials (metal parts, pieces of wood). This was followed, during the summer in Mont-roig, by a series of assemblages using objects gleaned from his walks (nails, wire, shells, branches, etc.), which triggered Miró's creative impulse, "le choc". "It's difficult for me to talk about my painting, because it is always born in a state of hallucinations, provoked by some shock, objective or subjective, and for which I am totally irresponsible."[12].

In early 1932, Miró renewed his collaboration with the Ballets Russes. He designed the curtain, sets and costumes for Jeux d'enfants, commissioned by Léonide Massine for Boris Kochno's ballet to music by Georges Bizet. He transposes his plastic vocabulary to the stage. "I treat everything in the spirit of my last works; the curtain, the first hook that catches the spectator, like the paintings this summer, with the same aggressiveness, the same violence."[13]. The ballet premiered at the Grand Théâtre de Monte-Carlo on April 14 (the Paris premiere took place on June 11 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées).

In the winter of 1933-1934, Miró made another breakthrough outside the realm of painting stricto sensu. He produced four tapestry cartoons at the request of Marie Cuttoli, whose commissions of modern artists since the mid-1920s had renewed the aesthetics first of carpets and then of tapestries. These are : Personnage avec étoile; Hirondelle-Amour; Personnage rythmique; Escargot-femme-fleur-étoile. Miró's work is celebrated in Christian Zervos' magazine Cahiers d'Art, which devotes an entire issue to him (vol. 9 no. 3-4 June 1934). In Mont-roig during the summer and autumn of 1935, he began a series of twelve small paintings (six on copper and six on masonite), which he worked on until June 1936: aggressive colors, nightmarish distortions of motifs. From the same period comes the famous Objet du couchant (Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'Art moderne, Paris), an assemblage of a carob tree trunk and other objects found by Miró during his walks (acquired by Breton around 1937).

Civil war breaks out in Spain on July 18th. Miró leaves Barcelona at the end of October. He decides to stay in Paris. On April 26, 1937, the Germans and Italians bomb the Spanish Basque town of Guernica. Christian Zervos asks Miró to design a Help Spain stamp - enlarged to poster size. The Spanish Republican government commissions him to paint a large mural for the anti-Franco Spanish pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques in Modern Life. The pavilion was designed by his friend Josep Lluís Sert. Miró wrote to Pierre Matisse, his dealer in the United States since 1934: "The Spanish government has just commissioned me to decorate the pavilion at the 1937 Exposition. It's only Picasso and I who are in charge; he has to decorate a 7-meter wall, mine is 6, so it's a lot of work! This painting, once the exhibition is over, will be able to come off the wall and belong to us."[14]. Miró created Le Faucheur (no longer in existence), displayed on the building's staircase, and Picasso the famous Guernica (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid). At the end of August 1939, shortly before war broke out, Miró rented a house in Varangeville-sur-Mer, where he had spent part of the summer the previous year at the invitation of the architect Paul Nelson. Here he met and befriended Georges Braque and Raymond Queneau, as well as Alexandre Calder, Georges Duthuit and Pierre Loeb, who lived nearby. Varengeville is the birthplace of Constellations, twenty-two gouaches on paper, all the same size (38 x 46 cm). The first is dated January 21, 1940; the last is dated September 12, 1941, executed in Palma. "I shut myself in on purpose. Night, music and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings. Music had always attracted me, and now, at this period, it was beginning to play the role that poetry had held in the early twenties."[15]. Signs and shapes seem endlessly reproduced on the surface of the paper. They are linked together by a network of supple, fluid lines. On iridescent backgrounds, they are either drawn with a single line or composed of flat colors (yellow, red, blue, green, black, brown, white). The vocabulary developed in Constellations was decisive for Miró's later work.

When the Germans bombed Normandy at the end of May, Miró and his family fled to Spain. They settled in Palma de Majorca at the end of July, where they remained until the end of 1941. He spent the rest of the war in Barcelona, apart from summers in Mont-roig. He blackens notebooks with working notes on new projects in all fields: sculpture, engraving, lithography, ceramics, painting[16]. In autumn, MoMA inaugurates the first retrospective devoted to his work, organized by James Johnson Sweeney. The exhibition had a strong impact on young American artists (Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, etc.).

After a four-year hiatus, Miró resumed painting on canvas in early 1944. At the same time, he created his first terracotta sculptures. "To make the sculptures, use as a starting point the objects I collect, in the same way I use the stains on the paper and the accidents on the canvases."[17]. He felt that it was in sculpture that he would create a truly phantasmagorical mode of living monsters. He made his first ceramics with Josep Llorena Artigas, a childhood friend. "Between us began a close collaboration in which I saw an unlimited field of possibilities."[18]. Ten large vases and numerous decorated plates were produced between 1944 and 1946. In January 1945, Pierre Matisse presented a Miró exhibition at his New York gallery, featuring ceramics and lithographs made in 1944, and Constellations for the first time. The all-over, non-hierarchical space of Constellations made an impression on young American artists. The following year, Miró produced his first bronze sculptures:Oiseau lunaire andOiseau solaire.

He spent several months in New York in 1947, creating a mural for the circular dining room of the new Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnatti (9 m long by 3 m high). In New York, Miró frequented Stanley Hayter's Atelier 17, whom he had met in Paris in 1938. There, he produced the etchings for volume 3 of Tristan Tzara'sAntitête, as well as his first color etchings, published by Maeght in 1952-1953. He probably met Jackson Pollock at Hayter's. If young American artists such as Pollock and Motherwell were influenced by his work, their works in turn opened up new perspectives for Miró, especially from the 1960s onwards, when very large formats were inaugurated.

From the late 1940s, in parallel with his painting activity, Miró devoted himself increasingly to printmaking, bronze sculpture and ceramics. Decorative commissions multiplied.

He begins a collaboration with Fernand Mourlot, a famous lithographer who works with most of the great modern painters. He also began working with Jacques Frélaut at Roger Lacourière, an intaglio engraving studio. Aimé Maeght becomes his European dealer. By the end of the decade, Miró was simultaneously working on two types of painting. The "slow paintings", as Jacques Dupin calls them, are the product of a long elaboration that leaves no room for chance. All the elements are carefully considered; then, in parallel, there are those executed more rapidly, more impulsively and gesturally, which seem instead to be free improvisations on a variety of supports (cardboard, sandpaper, Masonite, etc.), leading Miró to object-paintings with the introduction of gleaned objects.

Early the following year, Walter Gropuis, founder of the Bauhaus in 1919 and living in the United States since 1937, commissioned him to paint a mural (190 x 590 cm) for the refectory of Harvard University's Harkness Graduate Center. The installation was shown in the spring 1951 exhibition Sur 4 murs at Galerie Maeght, alongside works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger.

Very attached to Palma de Majorca, Miró bought a property there in June 1954. He had a large studio built on the land by his friend, the Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert.

The two ceramic walls at Unesco, Mur du soleil and Mur de la lune (3 x 15 and 3 x 7.5 m), created in collaboration with Artigas and his son, were inaugurated in 1958. At the end of the 1950s, Miró embarked on a new line of painting research. His language became simpler. The Altamira cave paintings in Santillana del Mar, reviewed by Miró in 1957, may well have contributed to this orientation in his work. "I feel the need to achieve maximum intensity with minimum means. This is what led me to give my painting an increasingly stripped-down character. [...] My figures have undergone the same simplification as my colors. Simplified as they are, they are more human and more alive than if they were depicted with every detail; they would lack that imaginary life that enlarges everything."[19]. These works fall into two categories: the importance of gesture, and improvisation based on the interplay of lines, materials and colors. Heinz Berggruen's gallery on rue de l'Université presents facsimiles of Constellations edited by Pierre Matisse, accompanied by prose texts by André Breton (January 20 to March 1959). The set was then exhibited in New York at Pierre Matisse's gallery (March 17-April 11).

From the 1960s onwards, Miró produced paintings on cardboard or canvas covered with various materials, scratched and incised. The great freedom of his work reveals affinities with informal art, European tachism and American painting, particularly that of Pollock, which opened up new perspectives. Miró continued to reflect on space and emptiness. He worked on ever-larger formats, creating his first monochrome triptychs: Bleu I, II, III (Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris). "It took me a long time to make them. Not to paint them, but to meditate on them. It took me an enormous effort, a great deal of inner tension, to achieve a deliberate stripping down."[20]. These were the first works of this scale created in the large studio designed by his friend Josep Lluís Sert on the grounds of his Palma de Mallorca estate. For Miró, they were "the culmination of everything I had tried to do.[21]. The following year, he painted a second large green, red and orange triptych, Peinture murale pour un temple I, II, III (private collection).

On July 28, 1964, the Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, also designed by architect Josep Lluís Sert, was inaugurated, housing many of Miró's works, including the Labyrinthe sculptures. Miró created his first monumental bronze sculptures in 1966: Oiseau solaire; Oiseau lunaire (fonderie Susse, Paris). In September of that year, he travels to Japan for a retrospective exhibition at Tokyo's National Museum of Modern Art. His discovery of Japanese calligraphy left a deep impression on him. "I was fascinated by the work of Japanese calligraphers and it certainly influenced my working technique. I'm working more and more in a trance; I'd even say I'm almost always in a trance today. And I consider my painting more and more gestural."[22]. Miró illustrated Alfred Jarry's Ubu roi, published by Tériade (1966), with lithographs. The artist featured Jarry's hero in two other adventures of his own invention, Ubu aux Baléares (1971) and L'Enfance d'Ubu (1975), also published by Tériade, one of the most important publishers of artists' books after the Second World War. From 1967 onwards, Miró painted the bronzes of his assemblage sculptures in bright colors. In 1941-1942, he had already noted "coloring fragments with very bright colors reminiscent of the xiulets of Majorca."[23]. Robert Dutrou of the Maeght printing house introduced him to carborundum engraving, invented by Henri Goetz. The following year, he painted large canvases with minimalist graphics, close to monochrome: Goutte d'eau sur la neige rose (private collection); Cheveu poursuivi par deux planètes (Collection Gallery K. AG.) or Peinture sur fond blanc pour la cellule d'un solitaire (Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona).

The Joan Miró Foundation was created in 1972. The design of the building, in Barcelona's Montjuïc Park, is entrusted to Josep Lluis Sert. The Foundation opened to the public in 1975. In the early 1970s, Miró produced a series of burnt and lacerated canvases. He also created the first series of Sobreteixims, composite works in the wake of Arte Povera, in collaboration with the weaver Josep Royo. On woven wool supports, he assembles recycled materials and objects: wool, rope, fabric, seals, etc., which he accompanies with paint. This was followed by another series, the Sobreteixim-Sack, based on the same principle and using canvas bags as supports. At the same time, he was producing very large-scale canvases, involving his entire body and dominated by black: Feux d'artifice, 292 x 585 cm, or Mains s'envolant vers les constellations, 260 x 681 cm (both Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona).

During this decade, Miró took on an increasing number of monumental commissions. He designed large ceramic murals and bronzes: a large ceramic wall on the façade of Barcelona airport (10 x 50 m); a pavement on the Ramblas in Barcelona; ceramic murals for the IBM company building and for the Wilhem-Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen, Germany; a large mosaic, Personnage et oiseaux (700 x 1300 cm), for the Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University (Kansas). Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University (Kansas); and a large wall tapestry, designed in collaboration with lissier Josep Royo, for the East Building, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

His meeting with Charles Marq, a master glassmaker and director of the Simon workshop in Reims, who designed many of Marc Chagall's stained-glass windows, led him to explore another creative field, that of stained glass, which underwent an aesthetic renewal after the Second World War with the collaboration of modern artists in religious art. Miró designed three stained-glass windows on the theme of "l'échelle de l'évasion", for the choir of the chapelle royale Saint-Frambourg, fondation Cziffra, in Senlis. The five others for the sides of the nave were executed after his death. In 1979, Miró again teamed up with Charles Marq to create a large double stained-glass window, which he donated to the Maeght Foundation.

In recent years, Miró's internationally acclaimed work has been the subject of numerous events: his first major retrospective in Madrid, an exhibition of drawings at the fledgling Centre Pompidou, and an exhibition of sculptures at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. Miró's ninetieth birthday in 1983 prompted numerous celebrations in New York, Tokyo, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca and Paris. Miró died that same year on December 25.

Two years earlier, concerned about the fate of his studios, he had planned to create a new foundation in Palma de Mallorca, as well as a center for living art. The project was carried through by his executor, brother-in-law and friend, Lluís Juncosa.