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Joan Miro
was born in 1893 in the province of Catalonia, Spain. He began to
study art when he was fourteen, at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts,
but after a short time he enrolled at the Gali Academy in the same
city. When he was eighteen, he decided that academic instruction was
not giving him anything very useful, and began to work alone. |
Upon his first
visit to Paris in 1919, he came under the influence of Braque and
Pablo Picasso, and for a time he painted
in the Cubist manner. By 1925,
however, he had become a member of the Surrealist group. He exhibited
with them in their first show, and his work began to take on the style
and character now associated with his name. At about this time he
worked with Max Ernst on the sets and costumes of Roméo et Juliette,
a Diaghilev Ballet russe production. His famous Harlequin's Carnival,
now in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, was also painted
at this time. In 1928 Miro traveled to Holland and was exhibited for
the first time in New York. He then began producing a group of collages
that was shown in Paris in 1930, and in 1937 he painted a large mural
for the Paris Exhibition.
Miro left France in 1940 and went to the
island of Majorca, where he continued to paint, began to make lithographs,
and did ceramic work with Artigas. He returned to Paris in 1944, and
divided his time between that city and Barcelona, continued to paint,
but also designed tapestries and rugs, made ceramics, and created
sculptures in stone and wood. Miro's work, sometimes called "hiomorphic
abstraction," is brilliant in color. It is carefully composed of curvilinear
shapes that are as mobile and fluid as the changing shapes of the
amoeba. He was the leader of the school of Surrealists whose work
was disciplined yet not intellectual. His melting forms transport
us to a timeless universe furnished with magical symbols and characters
which approach human individuality. The fascination of Miro lies in
the fact that we can never quite transform the ideas he offered into
specific words or thoughts.
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