Joan Miró

• 1. Introduction

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  Joan Miró i Ferrà was born on the 20th of April 1893, in Barcelona, into a family rooted in craft: his father was a goldsmith and watchmaker. He died on the 25th of December 1983, in his home in Palma de Mallorca, at the age of 90. In the nine decades between those two dates, he became one of the most restless and hard-to-classify artists of the twentieth century.

  Miró began drawing classes at the age of seven at a private school in a medieval mansion on Carrer del Regomir 13. His father was dismayed when he enrolled at the fine art academy at La Llotja in 1907. At his very first solo exhibition in Barcelona in 1918, visitors ridiculed and defaced his work. None of that deterred him. Instead, he declared what he called an "assassination of painting" - a sustained attack on every convention that kept art in the service of wealth and power.

  What drove a man from a craftsman's household in Barcelona's Barri Gòtic neighborhood to conjure surrealist dream paintings in Paris, to flee two wars, and to weave a tapestry for the World Trade Center? And why, decades after his death, do his paintings still command prices exceeding twenty-six million dollars?

• 2. Roots and the Road to Paris

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  Miró's full name carried a trace of complicated history. The Miró surname has been linked by scholars to possible Jewish roots, pointing to converso or marrano Iberian Jews who converted to Christianity. He grew up in the Barri Gòtic, the Gothic quarter of Barcelona, and the textures of Catalan life would never fully leave his work.

  Before he was a painter, he was briefly a clerk. He enrolled in business school alongside art school, began a working life as a teenage office worker, and only abandoned commerce entirely after suffering a nervous breakdown. That crisis turned out to be decisive. At eighteen, in 1911, he experienced what he later described as a serious depression that kept him bedridden for three months, saying he was "demoralized" and truly ill. He turned to painting as a way of steadying himself, and would say for the rest of his life that without it he became "very depressed, gloomy" and got "black ideas."

  His earliest canvases showed the clear influence of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, and scholars later named this his Catalan Fauvist period. Fauve and Cubist exhibitions in Barcelona and abroad pulled him toward the arts community gathering in Montparnasse, and in 1920 he moved to Paris, though he continued to spend his summers in Catalonia. Those summers would matter enormously: the paintings he finished in Paris were often begun at his parents' farm in Mont-roig del Camp, and the land there fed a symbolism and nationalism that would stay with him for the rest of his career.

• 3. The Farm, Hemingway, and Surrealism

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  Ernest Hemingway purchased a Miró painting called The Farm, completed in 1921-22, and described it in terms that captured something essential about Miró's early ambition. He wrote that it contained "all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there," adding that "no one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things."

  The Farm was a turning point: it showed a shift toward a more individual style and what scholars describe as certain nationalistic qualities. Two of Miró's first works classified as Surrealist, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) and The Tilled Field, grew directly from that same symbolic language. In Catalan Landscape, Miró represented the hunter not as a figure but as a set of signs: a triangle for the head, curved lines for the moustache, angular lines for the body. The encoding was so dense that Miró later had to provide a written explanation of what the signs meant.

  He joined the Surrealist group formally in 1924, and his work fit naturally within the dream-like automatism the group practiced. Yet sketches from this period show that his paintings were often the product of a methodical process, not pure spontaneity. In a 1924 letter to his poet friend Michel Leiris, Miró referred to his own work ambiguously as simply "x." The paintings from this stretch were eventually called his dream paintings, and André Breton would later describe Miró as "the most Surrealist of us all." Miró explained how Harlequin's Carnival, one of his most recognized works, came to him: he would come home to his Paris studio on Rue Blomet at night, go to bed sometimes without supper, see shapes on the ceiling, and jot them down.

• 4. War, Exile, and the Constellations

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  Spain's Republican government commissioned Miró to paint The Reaper mural for the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition. It was the first time his work took on an explicitly political charge. Until then, despite the Catalan nationalism that ran quietly through his surrealist landscapes and the repeated Head of a Catalan Peasant series of 1924-1925, Miró had preferred to stay apart from direct political commentary.

  In 1939, with Germany's invasion of France approaching, Miró left for Varengeville in Normandy. On the 20th of May of the following year, as Germans moved into Paris, he fled to Spain, now under Francisco Franco. He stayed there through the duration of the Vichy Regime's rule. That period of displacement - in Varengeville, Palma, and Mont-roig - produced one of his most celebrated bodies of work. Between 1940 and 1941, Miró created twenty-three gouaches called Constellations, built around celestial symbolism. André Breton praised the series, and seventeen years later wrote a set of poems named after and inspired by it.

  Miró's surrealist origins, the source notes, evolved partly out of "repression," shaped by his Catalan identity, which was subject to particular persecution under the Franco regime. During his exile he also encountered Haitian Vodou art and Cuban Santería religion in the Caribbean, and both movements shaped his own style. Shuzo Takiguchi had published the first monograph on Miró in 1940, the same year the Constellations were being made.

• 5. Lithographs, Ceramics, and Public Monuments

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  Between 1948 and 1949, Miró lived in Barcelona and traveled frequently to Paris to work at the Mourlot Studios and the Atelier Lacourière on printing techniques. His collaboration with Fernand Mourlot produced over one thousand different lithographic editions. Across his career, Miró created more than 250 illustrated books, known as livres d'artiste.

  One of those books carried a particularly charged history. At the urging of the widow of the French poet Robert Desnos, Miró created a set of 25 lithographs in 1974 to illustrate a manuscript Desnos had written in Morocco in 1922 but never published. Miró and Desnos had become friends in 1925 and had planned the collaboration then; the Spanish Civil War and World War Two postponed it, and Desnos died at age 45 shortly after his release from imprisonment in concentration camps, including Auschwitz, in 1945. A critic writing about the lithographs described them as "an especially powerful set, not only for the rich imagery but also for the story behind the book's creation."

  In the final decades of his life, Miró created hundreds of ceramics, including the Wall of the Moon and the Wall of the Sun at the UNESCO building in Paris. In 1974, together with the Catalan artist Josep Royo, he created a tapestry for the World Trade Center in New York City. He had initially refused the commission, then learned the craft from Royo himself. The two artists produced several works together, including a tapestry for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, completed in 1977. Miró's World Trade Center Tapestry became one of the most expensive works of art lost during the September 11 attacks.

• 6. The Assassination of Painting

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  From the 1930s onward, Miró gave numerous interviews in which he expressed contempt for what he called conventional painting. His opposition was not aesthetic alone; it was political. He believed bourgeois art served as propaganda for the wealthy, and that Cubism, which had once seemed radical, had by his time been absorbed and domesticated by French cultural politics. He is quoted as saying, "I will break their guitar," targeting the way Picasso's work had been appropriated.

  He spoke of being overwhelmed by the sky: "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." He said this in 1958, and it was later quoted in a volume titled Twentieth-Century Artists on Art.

  Miró was among the first artists to develop automatic drawing as a way of undoing established painting techniques, and with André Masson he is credited as representing the beginning of Surrealism as a movement. Yet he refused official membership in the Surrealists precisely because he wanted freedom to experiment without being constrained by any group's position. He pursued automatic drawing, expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, and Color Field painting. In his final years, he explored the theoretical possibility of four-dimensional painting - a form he imagined would transcend the two-dimensionality of the canvas and even the three-dimensionality of sculpture. He also drew on Catalan folk art, including siurells, which he claimed to "observe constantly."

• 7. Legacy in the Market and in Art

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  Miró's influence spread wide and in unexpected directions. American abstract expressionists including Motherwell, Calder, Gorky, Pollock, Matta, and Rothko all counted him as a significant influence. His lyrical abstractions and color field paintings are understood as precursors to work by Helen Frankenthaler, Olitski, and Louis, among others. His reach extended into design: Paul Rand and Lucienne Day both show his influence, as does the painter Julian Hatton.

  In the art market, Miró's prices reflect the depth of that standing. His paintings sell today for between US$250,000 and US$26 million. In 2012, a 1925 painting-poem sold at Christie's London for $26.6 million. Later that same year, Peinture (Etoile Bleue) from 1927 brought nearly 23.6 million pounds with fees at Sotheby's in London, more than twice what it had sold for at a Paris auction in 2007, and a record price for the artist at that time. On the 21st of June 2017, Femme et Oiseaux from 1940, one of the Constellations series, sold at Sotheby's London for 24,571,250 GBP.

  In 2002, American percussionist and composer Bobby Previte released an album called The 23 Constellations of Joan Miró on Tzadik Records, composing short pieces, none longer than about three minutes, to parallel the small physical size of Miró's paintings. The ensemble numbered up to ten musicians. Critics described the compositions as "unconventionally light, ethereal, and dreamlike" - an echo, in sound, of a visual language Miró spent ninety years building. The Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Palma, Mallorca, established in 1981 in the four studios Miró had donated for the purpose, keeps that studio environment intact.