Joan Miro

Joan Miró i Ferrà (Barcelona, April 20, 1893-Palma de Mallorca, December 25, 1983) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, engraver and ceramicist. In his works he reflected his interest in the subconscious, in the "childish" and in the culture and traditions of Catalonia. Although he is associated with abstract art due to his mature style of stylized and imaginary shapes, in his youth he began in figuration, with strong Fauvist, Cubist and Expressionist influences, moving on to a flat painting with a certain naive air, as is his well-known painting La Masía from the year 1920. After his stay in Paris, his work became more fanciful and dreamlike, coinciding with points of surrealism and joining this movement. In numerous interviews and writings that dating from the 1930s, Miró expressed his desire to abandon conventional methods of painting, in his own words of "killing, murdering or raping them", in order to favor a more of expression that was contemporary, and not wanting to bow to their demands and their aesthetics, not even with their commitments to the surrealists.

One of his major projects was the creation in 1975 of the Joan Miró Foundation, located in Barcelona, a cultural and artistic center to disseminate new trends in contemporary art, which was established with a large collection of works donated by the author. Other places with significant collections of his works are: the Pilar i Joan Miró Foundation, in Palma de Mallorca; the Reina Sofía Museum and the Espacio Miró in Madrid; the Center Pompidou, in Paris; the MoMA, in New York and the Mas Miró Foundation, in Montroig, where he spent most of his summers.

Biography

Family

The Credit Passage in Barcelona, birthplace of Joan Miró.

His father was Miquel Miró i Adzeries, son of a blacksmith from Cornudella. He moved to Barcelona where he set up a goldsmith and watchmaking workshop in a passage near the Plaza Real in Barcelona. There he met Dolors Ferrà and Oromí, daughter of a Mallorcan cabinetmaker; they married and established their residence in the same passage of Crédito where their children Dolors and the future artist Joan Miró were born.

Miró married Pilar Juncosa in Palma de Mallorca on October 12, 1929, and they settled in Paris, in an apartment with enough space for the artist's home and workshop; On July 17, 1931, the couple had his only daughter, Dolors.When he was released from the contract with his dealer Pierre Loeb, Miró decided to return with the family to Barcelona, making intermittent stays in Mallorca and Montroig. He was in the latter population when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. In November he had an exhibition scheduled in Paris, and once there and in view of the adverse circumstances caused by the war, he decided to stay when he managed to get his wife Pilar to arrive. and of his daughter. On the eve of the Second World War, the atmosphere in Paris was increasingly tense. They spent some time in a house offered by his friend the architect George Nelson in Varengeville-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast; He felt good in the area, as it brought him closer to nature as he was used to in Mallorca or Montroig, and he ended up renting a house. In the spring of 1940, friends had been disappearing from Varengeville, and he and Pilar decided to return to Catalonia. After a short time, the family moved to Majorca, where, according to Miró, there was nothing more than "Pilar's husband." In 1942 he returned to Barcelona.

Studies

Woman bottle located in the Viera and Clavijo Cultural Park of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. On January 28, 2002 it is declared a Cultural Interest Good with the category of Good Furniture.

He studied Commerce, according to his father's wish, to have a preparation and be “someone in life”. Given Joan's desire to enroll in the Lonja school to draw and having the possibility of night classes, his father accepted the request as a hobby for the boy. At the Lonja, he was influenced by two teachers, Modest Urgell and Josep Pasco. The drawings dated from the year 1907 that are kept in the Miró Foundation are good proof of this clear influence of Modest Urgell; other drawings, from shortly before Miró's death, made with a simple but firm horizontal line and the inscription: "in memory of Modest Urgell" They summarize the great affection that he always kept for his teacher. Of the classes received by Josep Pascó, professor of decorative arts, there are also some drawings with a modernist air from the year 1909 as a design for some brooches representing a peacock and a snake. From this teacher he learned the simplicity of expression and the artistic tendencies of the moment.

At the age of seventeen he finished his business studies and went to work for two years as an employee in a drugstore, until an illness forced him to retire to a family home in the town of Montroig. When he returned to Barcelona, he already had the firm resolution to be a painter, and although with reluctance, he also had his father's permission; He entered the Academy of Art directed by Francesc d'Assís Galí, where he learned about the latest European artistic trends, which he attended until its closure in 1915. While he also attended drawing classes from life, at the Círculo Artístico de Sant Lluc, where he made friends with Josep Francesc Ràfols, Sebastià Gasch, Enric Cristòfor Ricart and Josep Llorens i Artigas, forming with all of them the artistic group Agrupación Courbet whose foundation was made public on February 28, 1918 in La Publicitat.

Awards and recognitions

• 1954 Grand Engraving Award of the Venice Biennale
• 1959 Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Alfonso X el Sabio
• 1959 Guggenheim Foundation Award.
• 1962 Named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in France.
• 1966 Carnegie Painting Award.
• 1968 Named doctor honoris causa Harvard University.
• 1977 Receives the Medal "Al Mérito en el Trabajo", in its Golden category
• 1978 He is granted the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic.
• 1978 received the Gold Medal of the Generality of Catalonia, being the first Catalan to receive such a distinction.
• 1979 Named doctor honoris causa by the University of Barcelona.
• 1980 received, by King Juan Carlos I of Spain, the Gold Medal of Fine Arts.
• 1983 Named doctor honoris causa by the University of Murcia.

First exhibitions

Great maternity, bronze sculpture located in San Francisco.

Joan Miró's first individual exhibition was held at the Dalmau Galleries in Barcelona between February 16 and March 3, 1918. Miró presented sixty-four works including landscapes, still lifes and portraits. These early paintings are clearly influenced by French trends, especially post-impressionism, fauvism and cubism. In the paintings Ciurana, the town (1917) and Ciurana, the church (1917) he approaches the most typical tones of Van Gogh and the landscapes of Cézanne, reinforced with a dark brushstroke One of the paintings that he calls the most attention is the one entitled Nord-Sud , like the French magazine that in its first issue (1917), Pierre Reverdy wrote about cubism. In this painting, Miró mixes Cézanne techniques with the use of labels within the painting, as in the cubist works of Juan Gris or Pablo Picasso. In the portraits (for example the Portrait of V. Nubiola ), he shows the fusion of cubism with the aggressive fauve color.This same spring he exhibited at the Artistic Circle of Sant Lluc together with the members of the Coubert Group.

As was his custom and would continue to do for years, Miró spent that summer in Montroig, where he abandoned the colors used until then and the hard forms for the most meticulous ones, as he explained in a letter to his friend Ricart dated 16 July 1918:

No simplifications or abstractions. For now what interests me most is the calligraphy of a tree or of a roof, leaf by leaf, rim by rim, grass by herb, tile by tile. This does not mean that these landscapes eventually end up being cubist or rabbiically synthetic. Anyway, we'll see. What if I propose is to work a long time on the fabrics and leave them as finished as possible, so at the end of the season and after having worked a lot if I appear with few fabrics; nothing happens. During the next winter the critical lords will continue to say that I persist in my disorientation.

In this way, an archetype can be observed in the landscapes painted during this time through a new vocabulary of iconographies and meticulously selected and organized signs, drawing being the structuring agent. In Viñas y olivos de Montroig you can see the roots drawn underground completely individualized to achieve the physical connection with the earth.

The first trip to Paris was made in March 1920 and after spending the summer again in Montroig, he returned to settle in Paris where he met the sculptor Pablo Gargallo who had a workshop on Blomet street, which he only used during the months summer, and reached an agreement with him to use it only in the winter season. The efforts made by the gallery owner Dalmau provided him with a solo exhibition at the Galerie La Licorne which opened on April 29, 1921; despite not garnering any sales, reviews were favorable. In the artistic community that gathered in Montparnasse, he met André Masson, a resident of Rue Blomet and with whom he met at Max Jacob's meetings. Another regular in this group was Pablo Picasso who bought her the Self-portrait of 1919 and later the Spanish Dancer of 1921.

The farmhouse

View of the Mas Miró from where the work was painted.

During 1921 and 1922 he made La masía, which is the culminating work of this “detail-oriented” era. He worked on it for nine months of hard work; Miró's mythical relationship with the land is summarized in this painting, which represents his family's farm in Montroig; the naive and realistic graphics of all the objects, the animals are the domestic ones, the vegetables the ones that the man works and the objects all of daily use and necessary for the man. He studies all the details of him to the minimum, it is what is called Miró's calligraphy, starting point for the following years of his contact with surrealism.

After finishing this painting in Paris, due to economic necessity, he began a tour among dealers to be able to sell it. Rosenberg, who was in charge of Picasso's paintings, agreed to keep it in storage and after a while and at Miró's insistence, he seriously suggested dividing the canvas into small pieces for easier sale. He looked angrily, picked up the cloth and took it to his workshop. The painting was then taken over by Jacques Viot of the Pierre Gallery, who, after some dealings, sold it to the writer Ernest Hemingway for five thousand francs. It is currently kept at the National Gallery in Washington.

Surrealism

Lunar Bird in Madrid (1966).

Installed in Pablo Gargallo's studio in Paris, he had contact with artists from the Dada movement, which they founded in 1924, led by the poet André Breton, the Surrealism group.

It served Miró mainly to abandon his period of detail and synthesize the reasons already mentioned at that stage. It is, in the potential that surrealism offered him, in the unconscious and the dreamlike, where he found the perfect material for his future works. This is how it can be seen in Tierra labrada, with a clear allusion to La masía, but with surreal elements such as the eye and an ear next to the tree in the painting. In Smoker's Head, the influence is seen in the synthesis used for character description.

Had an exhibition at the Pierre Gallery from June 12 to 27, 1925, presenting 16 paintings and 15 drawings. All the representatives of the surrealist group signed the invitation to the exhibition. The inauguration took place at midnight, something unusual at that time, while outside, hired by her friend Picasso, an orchestra of musicians played the bars of a sardana; visitors had to enter the room, in turns, completely full. Sales were as good as the critics.

In 1926, Joan Miró collaborated with Max Ernst on designs for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, in the work Romeo and Juliet. On May 4, 1926, it was performed for the first time in Monte Carlo and on May 18 at the Sarah Bernhardt Theater in Paris. It was known that he was in the mood of the surrealists and communists, to alter the premiere of the "bourgeois" Diaghilev and the "traitors" Ernst and Miró, and so it was, at the beginning of the performance, between whistles, a rain of red brochures was launched with a text of protest, signed by Louis Aragon and André Breton. However, after a short time, the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste, edited by Breton, continued to reproduce works by the two artists.

Dutch interiors

In 1927 he made an illustration for the first time for the book Gertrudis by J.V. Foix. He moved to live in another larger studio on rue Tourlaque, where he met old friends Max Ernst, Paul Éluard and met Pierre Bonnard, René Magritte and Jean Arp. He experimented with them the exquisite corpse game. In 1928 he traveled to Belgium and the Netherlands, visiting the most important museums in both countries, including a visit to the Rijksmuseum. Dutch painters such as Vermeer and the masters of the 17th century had a great impact on the artist, who bought colored postcards of these paintings reproduced from the Rijksmuseum collection, and on his return to Paris he dedicated himself to the creation of a series known as Dutch Interiors made up of a total of three paintings. He made numerous drawings for the achievement of the first painting Dutch Interior I , inspired by The Lute Player by Hendrick Martensz Sorgh; in Dutch Interior II, it is from the work Children Teaching a Cat to Dance by the painter Jan Havicksz Steen. Dutch Interior III, inspired by another work by the same author, Young Woman in the Bath. In this series, Miró transformed the painting of his surrealist dreams, with the empty space in which graphics prevailed, to the recovery of the composition in perspective and the analyzed forms.

Dutch Interior I

The painting is inspired by the 17th century The Lute Player by Hendrick Martensz Sorgh depicting a lute player in a domestic interior. Sorgh's work, brightly colored and flat, moved away from the naturalistic model and perspective of Dutch 17th century">17th century painting.

Dutch Interior I includes the elements present in the work of Martensz Sorgh: the lute, the player, the tablecloth, the wall frames, the elements behind the window, a dog, a cat, the young woman, a basket of fruit, and so on. The basic position of the objects in the painting is also maintained.

However, the forms are clearly Miró's, with an accentuated disproportion with respect to the original work, reflecting the relative importance of the elements in the composition, rather than physical proportions. The lute and the player occupy most of the space, while the young woman is reduced to a detail cast in the water: she is part of the landscape, like inanimate objects.

Focusing attention on the figure of the performer, it can be seen that Miró reduces his facial features to a distended face and red in the center, with a mustache shifted to the right, his body gradually dissolving until the lute really replaces it, and all that remains of the figure of the youth is a small foot sticking out of the bottom of the instrument. A disproportionate character that expresses a kind of physical excitement with a force capable of breaking the strings of the instrument. At this moment, Miró intends to attack the human anatomy from the perspective of classical terms, from the ideal vision of a harmonic form, in order to tackle his personal project of disarming it. Miró uses a tragic, sacrilegious and heretical graphic humor that with a quixotic genius transforms Sorgh's work with his brush.

The colors are also shades inspired by the original fabric, although the intensity of the color is Mironian. Thus, the gray-green gradient of the wall in Sorgh's work becomes an apple green in Miró's, the light brown and ocher tones of the lute transform into a dark orange. Apply the paint directly with the tube; she doesn't mix them on the palette, and she doesn't mix them on the canvas either. Greens, whites, oranges, reds, and yellows are very pure colors. The work is an example of Miró's ease of drawing. The profiles of all the figures are very precise, painted with a very fine brush, his hand is constant and strong in the perimeter lines of the characters.

Dutch Interior II

The painting is inspired by the work Children Teaching a Cat to Dance by Jan Havicksz Steen. In this work, the artist returns to use the technique and philosophy of the original work. Miró retains elements such as the guitar, the dog and the man looking through the window. The real subject of Steen's painting was not the cat, but the sound, movement, and hilarity that dance class provokes. Miró takes advantage of this anomaly in his version: despite the fact that the cat serves as the axis of the centrifugal composition, he emphasizes the cacophony and animation of the lesson through the rotating movement of the great diversity of details and the rhythm of the points and counterpoints of the dance. The scene is animated, the smiling faces of the children are seen, reinforcing the grotesque smile of the character on the left in Steen's work. The central figure of the girl stands out with a profile that emulates her pose, filling the entire surface of the Miró version with the blue color of her skirt. Dogs and cats take up most of the space, while inanimate objects are reduced to their details. Steen's disturbing character who watches the scene worriedly from the window transforms into a pair of red eyes in Miró's version, continuing a long tail that wraps around the scene and where its end is a sting. As was the case with Dutch Interior I, the strength of the colors is intense and transforms Steen's work with various variations of brown, which serve to highlight the blue clothes the girl wears. Steen's orange spots (socks, caps) are found in dark red in Miró's work. The painting is on display at the Guggenheim Museum in Venice.

Dutch Interior III

If the first two works in the series were painted from museum postcards and are easily identifiable, this is not the case for the third painting in the series, which cannot be clearly linked to a single painting. One of the identification proposals has been achieved taking into account the elements of this work that coincide with Young man in the bathroom, by Jan Steen. The movement of the bowed face covered with a blanket, the orange socks, the movement of the arm that ends in a bare foot, a black and white dog on the right wall, the two brown shoes pointing downwards, the importance of the The brown chair with the purple clothing, and the cloak elements in the yellow, white, and pale cloak reveal the influence of the original work, though the parallels are more difficult to detect. Another interpretation of this highly complex painting is that it is inspired by several of Steen's works, most notably The Birdyard (1660), plus compositional aspects and elements of Young Woman in the Bath i> (1659), Lovesick Woman (1660), Sick Woman and a Doctor (c. 1660) and Woman at the Dressing Table (c. 1661-1665). The painting is held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Very similar to these Dutch interiors was the following series of Imaginary Portraits, also with the starting point of some portraits already made: Portrait of Mrs. Mills in 1750 from a painting with the same title by Georges Engleheart, Portrait of a Lady in 1820 by John Constable, La fornarina by Raphael Sanzio and the fourth The origin was an advertisement in a newspaper for a super diesel engine, which managed to metamorphose into a female figure that he titled Queen Luisa de Prusia. Miró used the image not to make an interpretation of a work already done, but as a starting point to analyze the pure form until he achieved the Miró figure of him. The process can be followed for each painting, through the preparatory drawings that are kept, some at the Miró Foundation in Barcelona and others at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Break with surrealism and "murder" of painting

Between the years 1928 and 1930, the differences within the group of surrealists became more and more evident, not only in the plastic sphere, but also in the political sphere. Miró, increasingly individualistic, distanced himself further, despite accepting the principles of surrealist aesthetics; he did not feel obligated to go frequently to participate in all the demonstrations. On March 11, 1929, at a meeting at the Bar du Château, Breton already adhered to the communist party, the topic of discussion was the fate of Lev Trotsky; this topic was left aside and the discussions came to clarify the positions. Among those who spoke out against a completely common action based on a Breton program, were Miró, Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille and André Masson among others. Miró just wanted to defend himself and fight with the paint. Between Marx who advocated "transforming the world" through politics or Rimbaud's "changing life" through poetry, Miró chose the latter. It was then that Georges Hugnet explained that Miró can only defend himself with arms his own, painting:

Yes, Miró has wanted to kill the painting, he has murdered it with plastic media, using a plastic that is one of the most expressive of our time. He has murdered her, perhaps, because she did not want to bend to her demands, to her aesthetics, to a program too narrow to free her aspirations and her thirst.

From then on, Miró drew and devoted himself intensely to another alternative, collage, which he did not do as the Cubists had done, carefully cutting the paper and fitting it into the support, but rather his forms they are without precision and after being hooked on the support, it leaves the edges exposed and links them with a graphic; the search for him is not useless, he opens the doors to the sculptures that he will make from 1930.

In 1930, he exhibited sculptures-objects at the Pierre gallery, followed by his first individual exhibition in New York with paintings from the years 1926-1929. She made her first lithographs for the book L’ Arbre des voyageurs by Tristan Tzara. In the summer of 1930 he began his series called Construcciones, a consequence of collages, the composition was made from elementary shapes, circles and squares cut out of wood and glued on a support generally also made of wood, with the application of nails reinforcing the lines of the painting. All these pieces were exhibited in Paris, where they were seen by the dancer and choreographer Leonide Massine, who immediately realized that he was the artist he was looking for. make the decoration, costumes and various objects for the ballet Jeux d'enfants. Miró accepted and traveled to Monte Carlo at the beginning of 1932. The sets were made based on volumes and various objects endowed with movement. The play opened on April 14, 1932 to great success. Later it was performed in Paris, New York, London and in Barcelona at the Gran Teatre del Liceo on May 18, 1933.

From January 1932 he began to reside in Barcelona, with frequent transfers to Paris; He was part of the association of Friends of Art Nou (ADLAN) together with Joan Prats, Joaquim Gomis and the architect Josep Lluís Sert, whose objective was to publicize the international artistic avant-garde and promote the Catalan one. He had numerous exhibitions in Barcelona, Paris, London, New York, Berlin. He continued his search for it and created the 18 paintings as a collage from images of newspaper advertisements, as the artist later commented:

I used to cut newspapers in non-regular forms and paste them on paper sheets, day after day I accumulated these forms, Once made, the collages served me as a starting point for the paintings. I didn't copy the collages. I just let them suggest shapes.

He created some new characters with an expression of great drama with a perfect symbiosis between the signs and the figures, whose backgrounds are generally dark, painted on masonite (tablex) as Man and woman in front of a pile of excrement< /i> (1935), or Woman and Dog in Front of the Moon (1936), probably due to the artist's state of mind before the events of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent World War II.

Still life of the old shoe

His return to Paris due to an exhibition that he had scheduled for November 1936, with the drama that represented the Spanish war, made him feel the need to repaint reality, which the artist turns into a nature still life: Still life of the old shoe, where he achieves a relationship between the shoe and the rest of the elements placed on the table, the bottle, an apple with a fork stuck in it, and the piece of bread; the colors achieve the maximum aggressiveness since they are acidic and violent; The paint in this painting is not flat as in previous works, but outlines and gives dimension to the shapes of the objects. According to Miró himself, all this representation was made thinking of the painting Labriego's Shoes by Van Gogh, an artist he greatly admired. It is considered a key piece of this pictorial moment of reality. He also felt good about what he did since people who admired him liked him and he liked that.

1937 Pavilion in Paris

At the request of Christian Zervos, founder of the magazine Cahiers d'art, Miró designed the color image Aidez l'Espagne ( Help Spain!) for a postage stamp, intended to help the Spanish Republican government; but finally the stamp was not issued and the design was stamped in pochoir (stencil) for an issue of said magazine. The motif represented is a peasant with a barretina and a raised fist in a fighting attitude, characterized in red and yellow colors alluding to the Catalan and Spanish flags.

Then Miró was commissioned to paint a large work for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the 1937 Paris International Exposition that was to be inaugurated in July of that same year. In this pavilion the artists Picasso also exhibited with Guernica, Alexander Calder with the Mercury Fountain, Julio González with the sculpture Montserrat, Alberto Sánchez also with a sculptural work The Spanish people have a path that leads to a star and Miró who made The reaper, representing the Catalan farmer with a sickle in one fist in a revolutionary attitude, symbolizing the collectivity of an entire people in struggle; this work disappeared at the end of the exhibition, when the pavilion was dismantled. Only a few black and white photographs remain.

Constellations

Painted between 1940 and 1941, in Varengeville-sur-Mer, a small town on the Normandy coast, he felt attracted to the sky and began a series of 23 small works with the generic title of "Constellations" made in 38x46 cm format, with a paper support that the artist moistened with gasoline and scrubbed until he achieved a surface with a rough texture. From here he would add color while maintaining a transparency to create the desired final look. On this background color, Miró drew with pure colors to achieve contrast.

In the constellations, the iconography wants to represent the entire order of the cosmos, the stars refer to the celestial world, the characters symbolize the earth and the birds are the union of both. These paintings perfectly integrate figures with the background.

Later in 1958, a book was published with the title Constelaciones of very few copies, with the reproduction of twenty-two gouaches by Miró and with twenty-two prose parallels written by André Breton.

Starting in the year 1960, Miró entered a new stage, where ease is reflected in the way of drawing graphics with great simplicity, typical of childish spontaneity; the thick strokes are made with the color black, on his canvases drips of paint and splashes can be seen, repeatedly alluding to the earth, the sky, the birds and the woman in his themes and with primary colors.

Other materials

Sculpture

Woman and Bird (1983) in Barcelona.

In 1946 he worked on bronze casting sculptures that were sometimes covered with brightly colored paint. In sculpture, she was interested in looking for volumes and spaces and incorporating everyday or simply found objects, stones, roots, cutlery, tricorn hats, faucets, which she melts with lost wax. They lose the sense of identifiable objects, when joining by casting with other objects. Thus, in 1967 he formed The Clock of the Wind which he made with a cardboard box and a spoon, cast in bronze and assembled, constituting a sculptural object that only measures the intensity of the wind. He built together with Josep Llorens i Artigas a large ceramic sculpture The Goddess of the Sea that was submerged in Juan-les-Pins. In 1972 he held sculpture exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Clevelan Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Starting in 1965, he made a large number of sculptures for the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, among them are the Moonbird, Solar Bird, Lizard , Goddess, Hairpin and Woman with wild hair.

In April 1981, a monumental 40-foot-tall sculpture, known as Miss Chicago, was unveiled in Chicago; on November 6, two other sculptures were placed on public roads in Palma de Mallorca; The sculpture Character and Bird was inaugurated in Houston in 1982 and in collaboration with Joan Gardy Artigas made his last sculpture for Barcelona, Woman and Bird , in concrete and covered ceramic. It was inaugurated in 1983 without the presence of Miró due to his delicate state of health. Located in the Joan Miró park in Barcelona, at the foot of a large artificial lake, the 22-meter-high sculpture represents a female form with a hat and on it the image of a bird. The woman's silhouette is solved with an elongated and hollowed-out leaf shape. Its entire exterior is covered with ceramics in red, yellow, green and blue colors (the artist's most common) treated as trencadís.

Engravings

He had always been interested in engravings for the realization of lithographs, and in recent years he had delved much deeper into it; on his trip to New York in 1947, he worked for a time at the Atelier 17 directed by Hayter, through which he increased all his knowledge of chalcography; During these months in New York, he produced the plates for Le Desperanto , one of the three volumes of the work L’ antitête by Tristan Tzara.

A year later he collaborated again with this author on a new book Parler seul, making 72 color lithographs. From then on, he worked on various bibliophile books in collaboration with poet friends, such as Breton in Anthologie de l'humour noir in 1950 and La clé des champs in 1953.; with René Cher, Fête des arbres et du chasseur in 1948 and A la santé du serpent in 1954; with Michel Leiris in 1956, Bagatelles végétales; and with Paul Éluard, A toute épreuve with eighty xylographies made in boxwood. The execution of this work was carried out between the years 1947 and 1958.

Between June 9 and September 27, 1969, he held an individual exhibition «Oeuvre gravé et lithographié» at the Gérald Cramer Gallery in Geneva and in the same year a great retrospective of graphic work at the Pasadena Art Museum in Pasadena (California).

Outstanding works

Femme (1981), sculpture by Joan Miró at the Casa de la Ciudad de Barcelona.

Paintings

• The Palm House (1918) - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
• The Masia (1921) - National Gallery of Art.
• Spanish Dancer (1921) - Centro Georges Pompidou
• Labrada Earth (1923) - Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
• The Hunter - Catalan Landscape (1923) New York Museum of Modern Art
• Carnival of Arlequin (1924) - Albright Museum - Knox
• Composition (1934) - Soumaya Museum
• Naked woman climbing the staircase (1937) - Fundación Joan Miró
• A star caresses the breast of a black (1938) - Tate Modern
• The Constellations (1940-1941)
• Barcelona Series (1944) - Fundación Joan Miró
• La Lección de Esquí (1966) - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas
• The hope of the sailor (1968-1973)
• Character in front of the sun (1968) - Fundación Joan Miró
• The hope of the sentenced to death (1974) - Fundación Joan Miró
• Hands flying towards the constellations (1974) - Fundación Joan Miró
• Head of Catalan peasant
• Beso en la pradera (1976) - Fundación Joan Miró

Ceramic murals

• Ceramic Walls of the Sun and Moon, 1958, Unesco Headquarters in Paris.
• Ceramic wall for Harvard University, 1950.
• Ceramic wall of the Handekshochschule, 1964 of Sankt Gallen in Switzerland.
• Ceramic wall of the Maeght Foundation, 1964 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
• Ceramic wall of Terminal B, 1970 of Barcelona Airport.
• Ceramic Walls for the Gas Pavilion, 1970 for the Osaka International Exhibition
• Ceramic wall in Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, 1971 by Ludwigshafen.
• Ceramic wall of the Cinematheque, 1972 of Paris, currently at the Basque Center-Museum of Contemporary Art of Vitoria (ARTIUM).
• Pavimento Miró, Barcelona, 1976.
• Ceramic wall of the new Palacio de Congresos de Madrid, 1980.

Sculptures

• Character with umbrellas1933 wood carving, umbrellas and dry leaves at the Fundación Miró in Barcelona.
• Lunar Bird, 1946-1949 in bronze various copies
• Solar landscape, 1946-1949 in bronze various copies
• Wind watch1967 bronze sculpture.
• The caress of a bird, 1967 bronze painted at the Fundación Miró de Barcelona
• Woman bottle1973 bronze sculpture for the Viera and Clavijo Cultural Park of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
• Dog, 1974 bronze at the Miró Foundation of Barcelona.
• Mère Ubu1975, bronze. Museo de Escultura al Aire Libre de la Castellana (Madrid).
• Monumental complex for La Défense, 1978 in Paris.
• Miss Chicago1981 Public sculpture of 12 meters in Chicago.
• Femme, 1981 bronze sculpture, exhibited at the Barcelona City House.
• Woman and Bird, 1983 cement sculpture coated with ceramic in the Joan Miró Park of Barcelona

Tapestries

• Tapiz de la Fundació

Foundations

Joan Miró Foundation

Fundación Joan Miró in Barcelona

The Joan Miró Foundation is located in the city of Barcelona and guards some of his most representative works. It contains more than 10,000 pieces including paintings, sculptures and tapestries. As for the drawings, it should be noted that the Foundation preserves practically all of Joan Miró's preparatory drawings, with more than 8,000 references, basic material for understanding Miró's work.

The Joan Miró Foundation was the first artistic institution in Barcelona that was devised from the joint work between an artist and an architect, Joan Miró and Josep Lluís Sert. The resulting equipment was, for many years, a paradigm of modernity and artistic independence. It opened its doors to the public on June 10, 1975. In 2009 the foundation was directed by Rosa María Malet, and its board of trustees was Jaume Freixa.

Its origins date back to 1968, on the occasion of the first major retrospective exhibition of Joan Miró in Barcelona, presented at the old Hospital de la Santa Cruz. Various personalities from the world of art and culture then realized the historic opportunity of having a reference space for Miró's work in Barcelona.

In accordance with the will of the artist, the new institution was to promote knowledge and dissemination of the most current art, in all its aspects. At a time when the artistic and cultural panorama was rather meager, the Joan Miró Foundation provided vitality with a new concept that it should be a more dynamic museum, in which Miró's creations coexisted with the most diverse artistic manifestations. This fact was reflected in the epigraph CEAC (Centro de Estudios de Arte Contemporáneo) that is on the door of the center. In 1988 the building was enlarged in order to expand the exhibition space.

Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation

Workshop Sert, Miró workshop in Mallorca.

The Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation was established in 1981 in Mallorca. It has three locations: Son Boter, a Majorcan house from the end of the XVIII century and which the artist used as a second painting studio and sculpture; the Sert Workshop, a studio designed by the friend and architect Josep Lluís Sert and built in 1956, and the Moneo building, the Foundation's headquarters, designed by Rafael Moneo and inaugurated in 1992. The first two buildings have been declared Assets of Cultural Interest (B.I.C.). In total, there are 2,500 works by the artist on display. Its main objective is to stimulate new generations of artists and support research on Miró's work. It continuously offers training programs and courses in the field of graphic arts (engraving, lithography, serigraphy, photography...) Miró's old house, Son Abrines, is currently privately owned and is not open to the public. public.

Miró Center

Since 2004, the Miró Center, located in the old church of Montroig, has shown copies of some of the artist's most representative works. The building appears represented in a work by Miró from 1919, the painting Pueblo e iglesia de Montroig. It has information sheets with the places in the environment where Miró was inspired for his first pictorial themes. It also preserves reproductions of the "Miró dolls", reproductions made from the designs made by Miró, together with Joan Baixas, for the play Mori el Merma premiered at the Teatro del Liceo in 1979. There are six dolls: the rooster, the owl, the titolot, the mosquito, the ant and the pumpkin.

Consulted bibliography

• Squire, Carmen / Montaner, Teresa (1993). Joan Miró 1893-1993: Catàleg. Fundació Joan Miró - Leonardo Arte.
• Green, Christopher (1993). Joan Miró, 1923-1933: the first painter. Fundació Joan Miró - Leonardo Arte.
• Lubar, Robert S. (1993). The Mediterrània of Miró: conception of cultural identity. Fundació Joan Miró - Leonardo Arte.
• Malet, Rosa María (1992). Joan Miró. Barcelona, Edicions 62. ISBN 84-297-3568-2 (in Catalan).
• Raillard, Georges (1992). Miró. Madrid, Editorial Debate. ISBN 84-7444-605-8.
• Rebull Trudell, Melania (1994). Joan Miró. Barcelona, Globus and Polygraph Editions. ISBN 84-88424-96-5 (in Catalan).
• Cabins, Pilar. Joan Miró. The way of art. I find. ISBN 978-84-9055-004-5.
• Barberá Pastor, Carlos. "Between Son Abrines and Son Boter. rita_ Indexed Journal of Academic Texts 7, pp. 54-59. DOI: 10.24192/2386-7027(2017)(v7)(02)