Catalan painter and sculptor. He came to Paris in 1920, took a studio at 45 rue Blomet beside André Masson's, and spent the next sixty years turning the family farm at Mont-roig into a language of floating signs.
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.
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.[1]
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.[1]
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.[1]
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.[1]
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.[1]
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.[2]
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.[3]
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.[3]
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.[4]
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.[5]
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.[1]
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.[1]
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.[1]
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.[1]
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.[1]
After the war the work widened out of painting altogether, into clay, bronze and the printing press.
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.[1]
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.[1]
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.[1]
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.[1]
Born Joan Miró i Ferrà on 20 April at 4 Passatge del Crèdit, Barcelona, to a silversmith father and a mother from a Palma cabinet-making family.
Working as an accounts clerk, he catches typhoid fever and convalesces at the family's newly bought farmhouse at Mont-roig. The next year he commits to painting and enters Francesc Galí's school.
First trip to Paris, to visit Pablo Picasso.
Takes the studio at 45 rue Blomet, next to André Masson, working there in term time and at Mont-roig the rest of the year. Paints The Farm through 1922.
Paints The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) at Mont-roig: the farm compressed into signs, with the written fragment "sard" for the sardana.
First solo exhibition at Galerie Pierre; André Breton visits the rue Blomet studio; Ernest Hemingway buys The Farm, paying Galerie Pierre in monthly installments after winning a dice roll against Evan Shipman.
Moves to 22 rue Tourlaque in the Cité des Fusains, near Max Ernst and Hans Arp, and designs the Ballets Russes production of Romeo and Juliet with Ernst for Sergei Diaghilev.
Marries Pilar Juncosa in Palma de Mallorca. Their daughter Maria Dolors is born in Barcelona the following year.
Pierre Matisse becomes his dealer in the United States by contract.
Living at 98 boulevard Auguste-Blanqui in Paris after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he paints The Reaper (Catalan Peasant in Revolt) for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the Paris International Exposition.
Begins the Constellations gouaches at Varengeville-sur-Mer in January 1940, flees the German advance to Spain in May, and completes the twenty-three sheets at Mont-roig in September 1941 — the year of his first MoMA retrospective, organized by James Johnson Sweeney.
First ceramics with Josep Llorens Artigas; the Barcelona Series of fifty lithographs is published.
Moves permanently to Palma de Mallorca, into a studio designed by Josep Lluís Sert.
The ceramic walls made with Artigas for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris are unveiled and win the Guggenheim International Award.
The Fundació Joan Miró, legally constituted in 1972 and housed in a building by Sert, opens to the public in Barcelona.
Dies in Palma de Mallorca on 25 December, aged ninety, and is buried on 29 December in Montjuïc cemetery, Barcelona.
Painting
A room crowded with dancing creatures, musical instruments, a guitar, a die, a cat, a fish and a window on a blue sky. A masked head split down the middle, blue on one side and red on the other, hangs at the centre-left above a white body with a hole cut through its stomach. Joan Miró painted it at 45 rue Blomet in 1924–25. André Breton owned it in 1926, and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum bought it in 1940.
Painting
A canvas two and a half metres tall whose ground was poured rather than painted, soaking into the unevenly primed cloth in some places and sitting on top of it in others. Over that mottled grey-brown field Joan Miró set a black triangle on a bent string, a red disc, a white head on a stem, a black figure and a yellow thread. The Museum of Modern Art acquired it in 1972, partly by purchase and partly as a gift from the artist.
Painting
An inventory of a Catalan farm, painted object by object: a whitewashed farmhouse, a eucalyptus, a goat, four rabbits, a lizard, a snail, a watering can standing on a French newspaper. Joan Miró worked on it between Mont-roig, Barcelona and Paris from the summer of 1921 to early 1922. Ernest Hemingway owned it for the rest of his life, and the National Gallery of Art has held it since 1987.
Painting
A chartreuse sky over a salmon-pink ground, with a stick-figure hunter at the left, a one-eyed sardine at the centre, a cream disc, a ruled sea at the upper right and the letters sard written large across the lower right. Joan Miró began it at Mont-roig in July 1923 and finished it in the winter of 1924. André Breton owned it before the Museum of Modern Art bought it in 1936.
Painting
The same Catalan farm Joan Miró had inventoried in The Farm, repainted as emblems. A pine holds a human eye in its foliage and a human ear on its trunk. Six wavy furrows, a horse, a hare, a hen and a snail fill the field, and three flags stand on a black border post. He began it at Mont-roig in the summer of 1923 and finished it in 1924. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York owns it.
Met · 1925
Hemingway bought Miró's The Farm from Galerie Pierre in 1925 — by his own 1934 account after rolling dice with the poet Evan Shipman for the right to buy it — and the National Gallery of Art's provenance records the Hemingways owning it by 9 November 1925.
Met · 1920
Miró's first trip to Paris, in 1920, was made to visit Picasso. The older Catalan remained a fixed point of his Paris world; six years later Miró was the one talking to Picasso about a still-unknown Dalí.
Met · 1926
Miró was a decade ahead of him and already with the Surrealists. He brought his own Paris dealer to Figueres to look at Dalí's work and spoke about him to Picasso, which is why Dalí arrived in Paris introduced rather than unknown.
Met · 1925
Breton met Miró during a visit to the studio at 45 rue Blomet in 1925, the year of the first Surrealist group exhibition. Miró showed with the group from that exhibition on while declining to submit to its discipline.
Met · 1925
Hadley was drawn into the avant-garde art world through her husband. The Hemingways attended a Miró show, and Ernest later won The Farm on a roll of dice.
Collaborated with · 1925
Tanguy and Miró jointly made an exquisite-corpse drawing with Man Ray and Max Morise in Paris in 1926–1927.
Named with Arp by the Centre Pompidou as the Surrealist friends who most directed Kandinsky's painting during his Paris years, when his forms turned organic and curved after a decade of Bauhaus geometry.
Art & literary movement · 1924–1966
Miró showed with the Surrealists from their first group exhibition in 1925 and signed some of the manifestos, while declining to be governed by the group.
A visual language of flat grounds, strong primary colours and floating signs: birds, women, stars, ladders and eyes. The Farm (1921–22) is his great early inventory of the family farm at Mont-roig; The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) (1923–24) shows that inventory compressing into signs; the Constellations gouaches (1940–41) are the language at its most refined. He also made ceramics, bronzes, prints and monumental public works.
He showed in the first Surrealist group exhibition at Galerie Pierre in 1925 and André Breton met him at his rue Blomet studio that year, but he never submitted to the movement's discipline. His mature language formed among the poets of the rue Blomet circle before the 1924 manifesto existed, which is why he reads as a founder who declined membership rather than a follower.
Ernest Hemingway bought The Farm from Galerie Pierre in 1925. By his own account, published in Cahiers d'Art in 1934, the poet Evan Shipman had first arranged to buy it, changed his mind, and the two rolled dice for it; Hemingway won and paid in monthly installments. In the 1926 divorce settlement the painting went to his first wife Hadley Richardson; it later passed to his fourth wife Mary Welsh Hemingway, who bequeathed it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1987.
At 45 rue Blomet in the fifteenth arrondissement from 1921 to 1925, next door to André Masson, working there in term time and at Mont-roig the rest of the year. In 1926 he moved to 22 rue Tourlaque in the Cité des Fusains in Montmartre, near Max Ernst and Hans Arp, and in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, he lived at 98 boulevard Auguste-Blanqui.
A series of twenty-three small gouaches of birds, women and stars, begun at Varengeville-sur-Mer in Normandy in January 1940. When German bombing reached Normandy that May, Miró fled with his family to Spain, continued the series in Palma, and completed it at Mont-roig in September 1941.
The Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, which he founded in 1972 in a building by Josep Lluís Sert, holds the largest collection. The Farm is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington; The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) and The Birth of the World are at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the ceramic walls made with Josep Llorens Artigas are at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris; and Woman and Bird stands in the Parc de Joan Miró in Barcelona.
Associated with · 1924
Miró showed with the Surrealists from their first group exhibition in 1925 and signed some of the manifestos, while declining to be governed by the group.
Met · 1925
Hemingway bought Miró's The Farm from Galerie Pierre in 1925 — by his own 1934 account after rolling dice with the poet Evan Shipman for the right to buy it — and the National Gallery of Art's provenance records the Hemingways owning it by 9 November 1925.
Met · 1920
Miró's first trip to Paris, in 1920, was made to visit Picasso. The older Catalan remained a fixed point of his Paris world; six years later Miró was the one talking to Picasso about a still-unknown Dalí.
Influenced · 1934–1944
Named with Arp by the Centre Pompidou as the Surrealist friends who most directed Kandinsky's painting during his Paris years, when his forms turned organic and curved after a decade of Bauhaus geometry.
Met · 1926
Miró was a decade ahead of him and already with the Surrealists. He brought his own Paris dealer to Figueres to look at Dalí's work and spoke about him to Picasso, which is why Dalí arrived in Paris introduced rather than unknown.
Met · 1925
Breton met Miró during a visit to the studio at 45 rue Blomet in 1925, the year of the first Surrealist group exhibition. Miró showed with the group from that exhibition on while declining to submit to its discipline.
Met · 1925
Hadley was drawn into the avant-garde art world through her husband. The Hemingways attended a Miró show, and Ernest later won The Farm on a roll of dice.
Collaborated with · 1925
Tanguy and Miró jointly made an exquisite-corpse drawing with Man Ray and Max Morise in Paris in 1926–1927.
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