Joan Miró

Who was Joan Miró?

Joan Miró was a Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramicist whose flat grounds, primary colours and floating signs became one of the most recognizable visual languages of the twentieth century. He is closely associated with Surrealism, showed in the movement's first group exhibition, and never fully belonged to it.

The shape of his career is a shuttle. He arrived in Paris in 1920 carrying a subject with him: his family's farm at Mont-roig, a village in rural Tarragona whose animals, tools, crops and night sky he had been painting in obsessive detail. In Paris he lived among poets rather than painters, and over four years the farm's inventory compressed into signs. For the rest of his life he moved between France and Catalonia, building that language, attacking it, and rebuilding it in paint, clay, bronze and finally architecture.

He was also a connector. Ernest Hemingway bought his 1921–22 painting The Farm. André Breton came to his studio in 1925, the year of the first Surrealist group exhibition. And it was Miró who brought his own dealer to Figueres to look at a younger Catalan's work and mentioned him to Pablo Picasso, which is why Salvador Dalí reached Paris introduced rather than unknown.

Barcelona, an office job, and a fever

Joan Miró i Ferrà was born on 20 April 1893 at 4 Passatge del Crèdit in Barcelona. His father was a silversmith and watchmaker; his mother came from a family of cabinetmakers in Palma de Mallorca. Craft was the family trade on both sides, and Miró never much respected the line between fine and applied art.

From 1907 he studied at La Llotja, the Barcelona art school, under Modest Urgell and Josep Pascó, while also enrolled at commercial school. In 1910 he took the path his parents preferred and became an accounts clerk. It went badly. In 1911 he caught typhoid fever and was sent to convalesce at the farmhouse his parents had recently bought at Mont-roig, in the countryside south of Tarragona.

The fever ended the office career and started everything else. In 1912 he committed to painting and entered Francesc Galí's art school, where his classmates included Josep Llorens Artigas, a potter who would matter enormously to him thirty years later. Mont-roig became the fixed point of his life: the place he returned to every year, and the landscape that supplied nearly every image he ever painted. From 1916 the dealer Josep Dalmau, the man who connected Barcelona's small avant-garde to Paris, began supporting his work.

45 rue Blomet

Miró made his first trip to Paris in 1920, to visit Pablo Picasso. From 1921 he kept a studio at 45 rue Blomet, in the fifteenth arrondissement, working there during the academic terms and returning to Mont-roig for the rest of each year. The rhythm held for the whole decade: Paris for the world, Catalonia for the work.

His neighbour at rue Blomet was the painter André Masson, and Masson's studio was a gathering place for young writers. Through him Miró met Michel Leiris, and probably Antonin Artaud, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Georges Limbour and Raymond Queneau. The company mattered. Miró's transformation happened among poets, not painters, and it happened before Surrealism existed as a movement: André Breton did not publish the first Surrealist manifesto until 1924.

Breton met Miró on a visit to the rue Blomet studio in 1925, the same year Miró had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Pierre and showed in the first Surrealist group exhibition there. He took part in the movement's exhibitions without accepting its discipline, a distance he kept for the rest of his life.

The Farm, and the writer who rolled dice for it

Between 1921 and 1922 Miró painted The Farm, an exhaustive inventory of the Mont-roig property: the animals in the shed, the donkey at the millstone, the crops, the tools, a watering can standing on a newspaper. The National Gallery of Art, which now owns it, describes a scene where everything looks ordinary at first glance and then will not stay that way.

Ernest Hemingway wanted it. By his own account, published in Cahiers d'Art in 1934, the poet Evan Shipman had persuaded Galerie Pierre to put a price on the painting, thought better of it the same day, and decided Hemingway should have it instead; the two rolled dice for the right to buy it. Hemingway won and paid the gallery in monthly installments. The Gallery's provenance records the Hemingways owning The Farm by 9 November 1925.

The painting's afterlife followed the marriage. When Hemingway and his first wife Hadley Richardson divided their possessions before their divorce in 1926, The Farm went to Hadley. Hemingway borrowed it back for a Miró exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in January 1935, and the painting later passed to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, who bequeathed it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1987. It hangs there today.

From inventory to sign

What happened next is visible in a single painting. The Hunter (Catalan Landscape), begun at Mont-roig in July 1923 and finished in the winter of 1924, shows the same countryside as The Farm with almost everything removed. The hunter is a stick figure with a triangular head, a pipe and a floating heart, holding a rabbit and a smoking gun; he stands for Miró. In the foreground Miró wrote the fragment "sard", short for the sardana, Catalonia's national dance, in the broken-word manner of the Dada and Surrealist poetry he had been reading at rue Blomet.

The Tilled Field, begun at Mont-roig across the same seasons, shows the change midway: still recognizably the farm, already sprouting emblems, a tree growing an ear and an eye. The Fundació Joan Miró counts these Mont-roig canvases as the turning point of his art.

The Museum of Modern Art, which bought The Hunter in 1936, treats it as the hinge of his career: the point where the real and the imaginary, image and text, began operating together in a way that would characterize his work for the next sixty years. The farm had become a vocabulary.

Cité des Fusains, a marriage, and America

In 1926 Miró moved across the river to 22 rue Tourlaque in the Cité des Fusains, a Montmartre colony of artists' studios where his neighbours included Max Ernst and Hans Arp. That year Sergei Diaghilev commissioned Miró and Ernst together to design the sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes production of Romeo and Juliet.

In 1929 he married Pilar Juncosa in Palma de Mallorca; their daughter Maria Dolors was born in Barcelona the following year. The domestic record corrects the myth of Miró as a childlike improviser. Through the thirties he ran a disciplined international career, and in 1934 the New York dealer Pierre Matisse, son of the painter Henri Matisse, signed a contract to represent him in the United States.

The war years

When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, Miró was working from the family home at 4 Passatge del Crèdit. He stayed in France rather than return, and by 1937 was living in an apartment at 98 boulevard Auguste-Blanqui in Paris. That year the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the Paris International Exposition carried his large mural The Reaper (Catalan Peasant in Revolt): the stick-figure peasant of the early landscapes, now raised as a wartime image for a government fighting for its life.

In 1939 the family rented a house at Varengeville-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast, and in January 1940, as the wider war closed in, Miró began a series of small gouaches of birds, women and stars. German bombing reached Normandy that May and the family fled south into Spain. He carried the series with him, continued it in Palma, and finished the twenty-third and last sheet at Mont-roig in September 1941. The series became known as the Constellations: two years of war on the ground, and none of it in the pictures.

Spain again, while New York made the case

The same year the Constellations ended at Mont-roig, the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged his first major retrospective, organized by James Johnson Sweeney. The timing defines the second half of his life: while Miró lived quietly in Franco's Spain, back at 4 Passatge del Crèdit from 1942, his international standing was being built an ocean away.

• 1944 — first ceramics with Josep Llorens Artigas, his classmate from Galí's school thirty years earlier, and the fifty lithographs of the Barcelona Series
• 1946 — first bronze sculptures
• 1947 — first trip to the United States, with a mural commission for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati and printmaking at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17
• 1948 — first solo exhibition at Galerie Maeght in Paris, with Aimé Maeght becoming his French dealer

After the war the work widened out of painting altogether, into clay, bronze and the printing press.

Earth and fire: Gallifa, Palma, UNESCO

Between 1954 and 1955, working with Artigas at Gallifa, Miró produced more than two hundred ceramic pieces, and then stopped painting entirely until 1959. In 1956 he moved permanently to Palma de Mallorca and commissioned the architect Josep Lluís Sert, a friend since 1932, to design him the large studio he had wanted all his life.

In 1958 the two ceramic walls he made with Artigas for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris were unveiled, and won him the Guggenheim International Award. The man who had arrived in 1920 as an unknown Catalan visiting Picasso was now part of the permanent fabric of Paris. A ceramic mural for Harvard followed in 1959, and in 1966 he visited Japan for the first time and met the poet Shūzō Takiguchi, who had written one of the earliest books on his work.

The foundation, and the end

In 1972 the Fundació Joan Miró was legally constituted in Barcelona, a centre for the study of contemporary art housed in a building designed, once again, by Sert. It opened to the public in 1975. The young painter had depended on dealers to reach the world. The old one built the institution himself.

In 1982 his monumental sculpture Woman and Bird was installed in Barcelona on the former site of the city slaughterhouse, in a park that now carries his name. Joan Miró died in Palma de Mallorca on 25 December 1983, at ninety, and was buried four days later in Montjuïc cemetery in Barcelona.