Joan miro artist biography

Museum Stories. His work has been interpreted mainly as Surrealist but he experimented with many other styles to eventually create his own unique way of expression. He was a loud supporter of the Catalan independence movement and shared its deep-rooted sense of the possibilities of liberty. He held on to his identity as a Catalan, as a freedom fighter.

Surrealist automatism is a method of art-making in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind to have greater sway. When I first knew Miro, he had very little money and very little to eat, and he worked all day every day for nine months painting a very large and wonderful picture called The Farm ….

The Farm was bought by Hemingway who was also an art collector but not without difficulty. On the final day he trawled around every bar he knew in Paris, with his friend John Dos Passos, borrowing cash and eventually raising the funds. I would not trade it for any picture in the world, it has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there.

No one else has been able to paint those two opposing things. I had this unconscious feeling of impending disaster, like before it rains; a heavy feeling in the head, aching bones, an asphyxiating dampness…. The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I'm overwhelmed when I joan miro artist biography, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun.

There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains — everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me. They form a preconceived opinion, then they look at the work of art. Painting merely serves as a cloak in which to wrap their emaciated philosophical systems. He also made temporary window paintings on glass for an exhibit.

The exhibit features foot canvasses as well as smaller 8-foot paintings, and the influences range from cubism to abstraction. Privete's compositions for an ensemble of up to ten musicians was described by critics as "unconventionally light, ethereal, and dreamlike". In he was given the Venice Biennale print making prize, in the Guggenheim International Award.

In Octoberthe Grand Palais in Paris opened the largest retrospective devoted to the artist until this date. The exhibition included nearly works and was curated by Jean Louis Prat. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item.

Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist — Portrait by Carl Van Vechten BarcelonaSpain. PalmaBalearic Islands, Spain. Biography [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Late life and death [ edit ]. Mental health [ edit ]. Works [ edit ]. Early fauvist [ edit ]. Magical realism [ edit ]. Early surrealism [ edit ]. Surrealist pictorial language [ edit ].

Livres d'Artiste [ edit ]. Styles and development [ edit ]. Experimental style [ edit ]. Exhibitions [ edit ]. Legacy and influence [ edit ]. Recognition [ edit ]. Art market [ edit ]. He traveled to Paris and met Picasso in He held his own solo exhibit in Paris in at the La Licorne Gallery. Ernest Hemmingway bought one of his paintings, The Farmwhich was a fauvist like piece.

One of his most recognized works was painted a few years following this. This piece represents what his mature work would resemble. It was performed in Paris by the Ballets Russes. Soon after, Joan started becoming interested in other types of art, like collages, lithographs, etchings, and engraving. His collage Spanish Dancer is the most well-known.

Soon after, the Spanish Civil War broke out, so they moved to Paris. In this work he created his own pictorial idiom. His pictorial language was singular, instantly recognizable and - quite rightly - no longer perceived as some Catalan dialect of Surrealism. In a spare landscape that is both Surrealistic and humorously cartoonish, divided between rich chocolate earth and a black night sky, a whimsically distorted dog, depicted in bright colors, barks up at the moon above him.

On the left, a ladder, depicted in white and yellow with red rungs, extends into the sky. The distortions of the moon and the dog, along with the improbability of the ladder, create a sense of play where everything both is and is not what it seems, while the white, red, and yellow, used for the four forms, creates some mysterious sense of connection between them.

As art critic Laura Cummings wrote, "On the ground, a multicoloured critter with something like paws and jaws barks at the moon with all the energy implicit in its tightly sprung joan miro artist biography. The moon is not quite immune to this absurd display: it has a painted heart. But it also wears a satirical red nose.

As Cummings noted, the work famous "as a work of surrealism Here is the young artist as a pup, trying to find his voice in the international avant-garde. The beautiful ladder must therefore be his art, by which he will ascend. Oil on canvas - A. This painting is based on Hendrick Martensz Sorgh's Lute Playera Dutch Golden Age genre painting showing a domestic interior where a young man with a small dog at his feet serenades a young woman who seems unimpressed, as a cat looks out from under the table.

Here, the young woman is left out and the lute player becomes a biomorphic shape with a red circular face surrounded by a large white circular collar, a curlicue swirl of lines for hair, as he plays the lute that diagonally intersects the center of the canvas. The white of the collar extends to the right in angles and curves, and resembles a kind of oversized leg painted with small ambiguous symbols, a dark pyramid for genitalia next to a sperm like shape, a black crescent shoe at the "foot.

As art critic Karen Rosenberg wrote, "presences become floating, Surrealist apparitions - unmoored and ambiguous but still mischievous," becoming "a giddy fantasia in green and orange, with the lute player as a kind of Pied Piper to various birds and beasts. The same year, following a very successful exhibition of his work in Paris, the artist said, "I understood the dangers of success and felt that, rather than dully exploiting it, I must launch into new ventures.

But nothing more than a starting point to go in a diametrically opposite direction. This painting uses a reduced palette to present many small blue, green, yellow, red, and predominantly black forms that resemble signs, globes, stars, and eyes that populate the opalescent, tawny background. While searching for the lovers and the bird, viewers are drawn further in by the plethora of lines that connect them, woven into a complex constellation against a night sky.

As art historian Laurie Edison noted, "Unlike stars, which exist physically in the sky, constellations exist only conceptually The small village was often in a state of blackout. He wrote, "I had always enjoyed looking out of the windows at night and seeing the sky and the stars and the moon, but now we weren't allowed to do this any more, so I painted the windows blue and I took my brushes and paint, and that was the beginning of the Constellations.

He said, "When I was painting the ConstellationsI had the genuine feeling that I was working in secret, but it was a liberation for me in that I ceased thinking about the tragedy all around me. His ability to bring forth illustrative form to his emotions laid a great foundation for the ensuing Abstract Expressionist movement. And is there any influence other than his that has been common to both de Kooning and Rothko?

Joan miro artist biography

This monumental canvas, nearly 12 feet by 9 feet, part of a series of three, uses simple abstract shapes against a blue background, painted with uniform brushstrokes. A slightly diagonal red stroke adds dramatic contrast, emphasizing the infinite and vacant expanse, while a series of black, irregularly round shapes, evokes a private language of signs, energetically extending across the horizon.

The intense blue dominates, capturing the artist's feeling as he wrote, "The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I'm overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge, empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.

But at the same time, the work also draws upon his lifelong preoccupations and ancient sources, as he said, "Little by little, I've reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colors. It's not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colors. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this.

For me, they are magnificent things. This sculpture depicts a hybrid creature, its face and horns lunar shaped, while its two arms resemble the arc of wings, but are devoid of plumage. Its squat horizontal torso with two limbs firmly planted has a primal power, as if drawing strength from the earth. The many hornlike shapes not only evoke crescent moons and birds, but the tradition of Spanish bullfighting.

As a result, the work seems to have sprung out of the natural world, resembling an organic form that has taken shape in dark shining metal. In the s, he enlarged the original model to make casts of the work, which can be found in museums and sculptural parks throughout the world.