Joan Miró

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Joan Miró, Barcelona, ​​1935. Photo portrait by Carl Van Vechten
Miró, Joan 1893-1983 02 signature.jpg

Joan Miró i Ferrà [ ʒuˈan miˈɾo i fəˈra ] (born April 20, 1893 in Barcelona , Catalonia , † December 25, 1983 in Palma ) was a Spanish - Catalan painter , graphic artist , sculptor and ceramicist .

Building on Catalan folk art, his early works show influences from Cubism and Fauvism . From the beginning to the middle of the 1920s , influenced by the prevailing art movements of Dadaism and Surrealism , the artist made the fundamental change in style in Paris , which led him away from objectivity. As a representative of classical modernism, with his imaginative motifs, Miró is one of the most popular artists of the 20th century. His magical symbols for the moon, stars, birds, eyes and women are among the most famous elements of his art. The disturbing late work, such as the Toiles brûlées ( Burned Canvases ) series, was a staged destruction, a protest against the commercialization of art and an expression of his demand to “murder painting”. In public spaces, for example, its ceramic walls adorn the UNESCO building in Paris and the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen am Rhein; Monumental sculptures are set up in squares in Barcelona and Chicago, among others.

Life

childhood and education

Joan Miró (right) with her parents and sister Dolors, who is four years younger, photo around 1903

Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893, the son of the goldsmith and watchmaker Miquel Miró i Adzerias from Cornudella de Montsant and his wife Dolors Ferrà di Oromí, daughter of a cabinet maker from Palma . His birthplace was at Passatge del Credit 4 in the old town of Barcelona, ​​where his father ran a goldsmith and watch shop.

Plaque on Miró's birthplace in Barcelona, ​​Passatge del Crèdit 4

As a child he began to draw - the earliest surviving drawings date from 1901 - and met with rejection from the petty-bourgeois-minded father, who did not understand this occupation. After he had to leave high school in 1907 because of bad grades, Miró began commercial training at his father's request, but took art lessons at the art academy “ La Llotja ” in Barcelona, ​​where Pablo Picasso's father José Ruiz Blasco Picasso had taught and until 1910 Pablo Picasso himself had been a student nine years earlier. His teachers there were Modest Urgell and Josep Pascó.

From 1910 to 1911 Miró initially worked as an accountant in the drugstore Dalmau Oliveras SA After a nervous breakdown and typhoid fever, he gave up the commercial profession and moved to his family's newly acquired farm in Mont-roig del Camp near Tarragona to recover . Resistance to artistic training waned and Miro was allowed to enroll at Francesc Galí's private art school "Escola d'Art" , which he attended from 1912 to 1915. Galí thought his pupil was gifted, as he explained to his father during one of his weekly visits. Galí introduced his students to modern French art and the architecture of Antoni Gaudí , Barcelona's famous modernist artist .

In 1912 he visited an exhibition of cubist painting in the Dalmau gallery in his hometown, where he got to know the works of Marcel Duchamp , Albert Gleizes , Juan Gris , Marie Laurencin , Fernand Léger and Jean Metzinger . From 1913 to 1918 Miró attended the free drawing academy of the " Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc ". This called for the abandonment of modernism and a return to classicism, taking into account the Mediterranean heritage; Avant-garde artists were only accepted to a limited extent.

First World War - Miró's first solo exhibition in 1918

Catalog for Miró's first solo exhibition, 1918

After the outbreak of World War I , Miró had to do military service from 1915. Those who could afford it used to buy themselves out of military service; However, the father only paid a relatively small amount, which was enough to shorten the son's military service to a total of ten months, spread over several years. Occasionally Miró despaired of his work: “I did not have the pictorial means to express myself and therefore felt miserable. Sometimes, desperate as I was, I hit my head against the wall, ” Michel Leiris later quoted him . In the same year, Miró set up his first studio together with EC Ricart in Calle Baja de San Pedro 51 in Barcelona. In 1916 he met the art dealer Josep Dalmau, who was now his patron, and a year later Maurice Raynal and Francis Picabia , whose magazine 391 founded in 1917, introduced Miró to Dadaism . In the same year he began to be interested in modern poetry. In the literary magazine Nord-Sud , published by Pierre Reverdy , he first saw the pictorial poems by Guillaume Apollinaire , who first coined the term Surrealism in 1917. In the following years, Miró's work was also strongly influenced by the Fauves and the French Cubists . In February 1918, Miró's first solo exhibition took place in the Galerías Dalmau in Barcelona, ​​which included 60 landscape paintings and still lifes . In the same year he founded the group Courbet (Agrupació Courbet), named after Gustave Courbet , whose radicalism they admired , together with Ricart, JF Ràfols, Francesc Domingo, Rafael Sala - later joined by Josep Llorens i Artigas . The name stood for the desire to be regarded as a progressive artist within Barcelona and to overcome the Catalan classical art movement of the Noucentisme . However, their joint exhibitions of lively, colorful works were not very successful.

Stays in Paris and Mont-roig del Camp

Mas Miró, the house of the Miró family in Mont-roig del Camp. The photo shows the building from the perspective of the painting The Farm , created in 1921/22.

In March 1919 Miró traveled to Paris for the first time for a few months, where he visited Pablo Picasso in his studio. The latter acquired a self-portrait painted that year from his younger compatriot. His first poster was created for L'Instant magazine , and many more were to follow. At the end of 1920 he moved into a studio at 45 rue Blomet in Paris; he soon became friends with his neighbor, André Masson . They lived in meager circumstances, but in contrast to Masson, Miró dressed bourgeois, chose white gaiters for going out and wore a monocle as if he had taken over his father's company. The art metropolis attracted him, but he always remained connected to his Catalan homeland. Therefore Miró lived alternately in summer in Mont-roig del Camp , Spain, and in winter in Paris, where he joined the poets Max Jacob , Pierre Reverdy and Tristan Tzara and took part in Dada activities.

The hermitage of Sant Ramon on the Mare de Déu de la Roca mountain near Mont-roig del Camp, a place that Miró often went to to paint.
The entrance side of the Mas Miró

In 1921 Josep Dalmau organized Mirós first solo exhibition in Paris, which was shown in the "Galerie la Licorne". Since it was unsuccessful, his material difficulties could not be averted. Two years later he made the acquaintance of Henry Miller , whose book The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder he was later to illustrate, and with Ernest Hemingway , who, like Miller, was in Paris at the time; Hemingway borrowed money to purchase Miró's painting The Farm (1921/22) in 1925 . In 1923 he took part in the exhibition at the Salon d'Automne with some of his works . Through André Masson, Miró met the surrealists Louis Aragon , André Breton and Michel Leiris in 1924 and joined the surrealist group as a member, but remained a silent outsider among them. He wrote to Michel Leiris in a correspondence on August 10, 1924 that he was now breaking away from old pictorial conventions. In three steps he proclaimed pure line, pure color, with nuances in between, which he characterized as the charm and music of color. In 1925 his second solo exhibition took place in Paris, which was organized by the " Galerie Pierre ". In the same year Miró was also involved in the first surrealist exhibition in this gallery. In 1926 Miró and Max Ernst worked on the sets and costumes for Djagilev's ballet Romeo and Juliet , music by Constant Lambert , performed by the Ballets Russes . This collaboration provoked the protest of the surrealist group. In the same year his father died in Mont-roig.

Les Fusains studio house on Montmartre, 22, rue Tourlaque, Paris. Photo from 2009

In 1927 Miró moved into a studio in Les Fusains at rue Tourlaque 22 on Montmartre and had Hans Arp , Paul Éluard , Max Ernst and René Magritte as neighbors , among others . In 1928 he met the sculptors Constantin Brâncuși , Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder ; he had a lifelong friendship with the latter two, which is reflected in Miró's and Calder's works - both artists created series titled Constellations in the 1940s , with Calder using wood and metal and Miró using gouache . Miró visited the Netherlands that year and, inspired by the Dutch masters , began with a series of paintings, the Intérieurs hollandais . In 1929, at the suggestion of Joan Miró , Salvador Dalí joined the group of surrealists in Paris. In October 1929 Miró married Pilar Juncosa Iglesias (1904–1995) from Palma de Mallorca in Palma. The couple took an apartment on rue François Mouton in Paris. In 1930 his daughter Maria Dolors was born in Barcelona. Due to the global economic crisis , Miró's art dealer Pierre Loeb was no longer able to buy his paintings, so that from 1932 the art dealer Pierre Matisse in New York signed him up.

Spanish Civil War - World War II

Joan Miró, portrayed by Carl Van Vechten in 1935

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 , Miró left Mont-roig by 1940 and lived exclusively in Paris. In May 1936 Miró was represented, alongside Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti , Salvador Dalí , Meret Oppenheim , Yves Tanguy , Hans Arp and Max Ernst , at the exhibition "Exposition surréaliste d'objets" designed by André Breton and set up by the Parisian art dealer Charles Ratton . Surrealist objects created especially for this show were shown, which Ratton integrated “within his showcases according to the surrealist idea of ​​a collective, unconscious creativity together with ethnological material, works by the insane, bizarre minerals, curious found objects and similar things”. A month later Miró was involved with 15 works in the exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at the Museum of Modern Art , New York, and in the “ International Surrealist Exhibition ” organized by Roland Penrose from June 11th to July 4th 1936 in the New Burlington Galleries in London.

Paris at the time of the World's Fair in 1937

For the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, Miró exhibited his monumental painting Le faucheur ( The Reaper or Catalan Farmer ), now considered lost , alongside Picasso's Guernica and Calder's mercury fountain, and designed a poster for the exhibition entitled Aidez l'Espagne . In 1938 he was involved in the " Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme " at the Beaux-Arts gallery in Paris.

After the occupation of France by German troops during the Second World War in 1940, Joan Miró returned to his home country Spain from his refuge in Varengeville-sur-Mer , where he had spent the summer months since 1938, and initially lived in Palma de Mallorca 1942 in Barcelona in the house where he was born. In his mother's 1944 death, he started with his friend, the Catalan ceramist Josep Llorens i Artigas, whom he knew from Barcelona, with ceramics . Artigas, who also worked with Raoul Dufy and Albert Marquet , introduced Miró to ceramics. In addition, he created the first modeled figures of smaller format, which were cast in bronze in 1950 .

In 1947 Miró first traveled to the United States to design a mural for the Terrace Plaza Hotel (Terrace Hilton Hotel from 1965) in Cincinnati . He worked on it for nine months in a studio in New York , during which time he met Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock . In the same year he took part in the exhibition “Le Surréalisme en 1947: Exposition internationale du surréalisme” at the Galerie Maeght , Paris, organized by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp . In 1948 Miró returned to Paris, where an exhibition of his ceramic sculptures was opened in the Maeght Gallery. The catalog for the exhibition contained texts by Tristan Tzara , his friend, the hatter and patron Joan Prats i Vallès , and by Paul Éluard. In 1950 he engraved his first xylographs in Barcelona .

Residency in Mallorca from 1956

Miró's workshop in Cala Major, built by Josep Lluís Sert

In 1956 Miró moved his permanent residence to Cala Major , an administrative district of Palma . The Son Abrines house was designed and built by Miró's brother-in-law, the architect Enrique Juncosa Iglesias (1902–1975). Together with Artigas, he had previously produced two large-scale wall reliefs ( moon and sun wall ) for the UNESCO building in Paris, for which both artists were awarded the International Guggenheim Award in 1958. With a donation of US $ 10,000, Miró acquired the adjoining Son Boter country house , which was originally planned as a sculpture workshop, but over time became his second studio house.

Miró had a new workshop built on the site in 1956 by the architect Josep Lluís Sert , a friend of the artist. The director of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design was considered a spokesman for the European avant-garde of architecture. Sert created a poetic and functional space in which Miró could bring his artistic process to a climax. Miró had already expressed the idea of ​​a large workshop in 1938 in the autobiographical text "I dream of a large studio" in the magazine Le XXe Siècle :

"[...] my dream, when I can really settle down somewhere, is to have a large workshop, not so much because of the lighting, [...] but to have space for many canvases, because the more I work, the more I want to work. "

In the following years he mainly worked on sculptures. In 1959 he made his second visit to the United States on the occasion of a major Miró retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1960 he worked with Artigas on a mural for Harvard University and in 1961 traveled a third time to the United States. There he was involved in the exhibitions Alexander Calder - Miró and The Art of Assemblage , both in New York. In the same year, an extensive biography of Jacques Dupin appeared in Paris, on which Dupin and Miró had worked since 1957.

In 1964, the Maeght Foundation was opened in Saint-Paul-de-Vence . The building was again a design by Sert; numerous ceramic sculptures, which were created in collaboration with Artigas and his son Joan Gardy Artigas, and a Mirós labyrinth , completed in 1968, are part of the exhibition. In 1968 his 75th birthday was celebrated with a whole series of honors, in particular with an exhibition by the Maeght Foundation.

Miró otro

In 1969, a group of young Spanish architects organized an exhibition called Miró otro in their association house in Barcelona . They protested against Franco's authorities who wanted to use the painter, but also against designers and poster painters who began to plunder and vulgarize Miró's repertoire. The night before the opening, Miró painted aggressive pictures on the window panes to make it clear that it was not for sale, and washed them off three days later. Louis Aragon dedicated an issue of the literary magazine Les Lettres françaises to the exhibition of the “other Miró” .

In 1970 he created two murals for public spaces, the first for the world exhibition in Osaka , the second, made of ceramic, for the airport in Barcelona. A year later, Miró initiated the establishment of a foundation, the building of which in Barcelona was also planned by Sert. It was opened in 1975 under the name Fundació Joan Miró .

Last years

Entrance area of ​​the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Cala Major

Worried that his creative environment might be forgotten or that the building activity that began in 1956 would result in the influx of tourists coming to Mallorca completely disappearing, Miró gave part of his property as a gift from the city administration of Palma. As a result of this donation, the second foundation, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca , was established in 1981 . Its headquarters are in Cala Major , where Miró lived and worked. Miró's motivation for the second foundation can be seen in the following quote:

"[...] I do not wish that one day one of these terrible skyscrapers will be built here that surround me on all sides [...] The idea that one day a sledgehammer will tear down the walls of Son Boter and the pictures there for could always get lost, haunts me day and night [...] "

The Miró family grave on the Cementiri de Montjuïc

The artist's 90th birthday on April 20, 1983 was celebrated worldwide with a series of exhibitions, publications and honors. The city council of Barcelona dedicated a week of honor to Miró, the Semana de homenaje à Joan Miró , during which the monumental sculpture Woman and Bird was officially inaugurated on the Plaça de l'Escorxador. The city administration placed the order for the plant in 1981.

On December 25th of the same year Joan Miró died in Palma de Mallorca and was buried on December 29th in the family grave in the cemetery of Montjuïc in Barcelona. His only daughter, Maria Dolors Miró Juncosa , honorary chairwoman of the Miró Foundations in Barcelona and Palma, died at the end of December 2004 at the age of 74.

plant

Miró created a large number of works. In his long life as an artist he created around 2000 oil paintings, 500 sculptures, 400 ceramics and 5000 collages and drawings. The graphic work comprises around 3500 works, including lithographs and etchings , which were mostly printed in small editions.

Paintings, graphics, collages

“How did I come up with all the ideas for my pictures? Well, I came back to my studio on rue Blomet late at night and went to bed, sometimes without having had dinner. I saw things, I wrote them down in my notebook. I saw apparitions on the ceiling [...] "

- Joan Miró

Early work

Between 1912 and 1915, when Miró was enrolled in Francesc Galí's private art school “Escola d'Art” , he painted most of the time in Mont-roig del Camp . Landscapes were created in the style of Fauvism , but "in very dark, earthy colors, which he removed from the heaviness of the material and refreshed in the sense of a poetic realism ." He used folk and Catalan art as sources for his painting, he also continued deal with contemporary art. For example, his still life wall clock and lantern showed the influence of Paul Cézanne , Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse . The picture content of the still life from 1917, Nord-Sud , points to folk art, literature and the French avant-garde , as it shows a ceramics, a bird cage and a flower, a volume by Goethe and a folded edition of Nord-Sud , a magazine for Dada and surrealism . The painting from 1920, Der Tisch (Still Life with Rabbits) , shows animals such as the rabbit, a rooster and a fish, as well as peppers, onions and grape leaves , on a table painted in a cubist way. The painting La Masía (1921/22), which Ernest Hemingway acquired in Paris in 1925 for 5,000 francs, is considered to be one of Miró's key works. It shows his parents' farm in Mont-roig del Camp, which was a source of energy for the artist. In this picture a realistic representation mixes with abstract motifs. The painting is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC

Transition to surrealism

The transition to surrealism took place relatively abruptly around 1924, although Miró developed his own unmistakable visual language. Just as he perceived Cubism as a level of learning, he felt the same with Surrealism, especially since he categorically rejected both art movements as too ideological and “both dogmas as too restrictive in artistic terms”. In the painting Plowed Earth (1923/24) Miró found a new visual language that translates the observation of nature into a system of colors and symbols, but it is not yet fully integrated into an independent world of symbols. In Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) from the same period, the content of the picture is reduced to signs and lines, the hunter can only be recognized by a realistically painted pipe. Miró would later complain that during the lean times in Paris he had lost his visual language through hallucinations caused by hunger - instead he spent his money on painting utensils and trips to his home country - and staring at the cracks in the concrete. Like Masson and the early Tanguy , Miró created a painting developed from writing and drawing from the Écriture automatique, which emerged from the surrealist group around Breton, and never gave up control of the creative process.

In the years 1924 and 1925 he wrote a series of "picture poems", as Miró called them, including stars in the family of snails from 1925. In the same period, as a result of the surrealist influence of the unconscious, his painting Carnival of the Harlequin (1924/25) was created. From spring 1925 to summer 1927 Miró worked on his so-called “dream pictures”. This group of paintings is characterized by a subdued, almost monochrome color scheme and an undefined floating spatial situation such as in the painting Dancer II from 1925. Despite his romantic imagination, Miró was a careful planner. His images existed in a preliminary form in his imagination and in studies on paper long before they were realized on canvas. Bathers from 1925 is another example of a monochrome painting from this period. White and yellow lines have become movement that guide the viewer through the picture against the background designed as a seascape. The painting Photo - ceci est la couleur de mes rêves depicts lines of text and a bruise united on an ocher-colored background. The Dutch Interiors I to III followed after a trip to the Netherlands in 1928. They were created based on suggestions from the old Dutch masters . For example, Jan Steen's cat dance lesson (1626–1629) inspired Miró to Dutch Interior II , when the artist removed signs and signatures from Steen's picture and included them in his work "translated". The painting Queen Luise of Prussia from 1929 also characterizes the surrealist influence. After a Spanish advertisement for the diesel engine of the German company Junkers, which he kept and described as “Pour la Reine”, he designed the picture by reducing the drawing of the engine until it took the form of a constricted female figure. From 1929 Miró began to experiment with lithography, the first cuts appeared from 1933.

Influence from Hans Arp and Paul Klee

Like Paul Klee , Joan Miró was fascinated by the number as a formal language and symbol. From the mid-1920s the number appears in his works, especially in painting 48 from 1927. Miró was obsessed with this number; for every time he stepped out of his apartment in Paris at 45 rue Blomet, he had seen it as a house number on a building across the street. In the painting L'Addition ( The Bill ) from 1925, according to Hubertus Gaßner , the numbers represent “the systematic ciphering of a literary source”. The sequence of numbers appearing in front of the blurred color space at the top right refers to the 1902 novel Le Surmâle ( The Übermann ) by Alfred Jarry . Miró's calculation refers to the "counting of the love acts of the 'overman' who set out to break the record of more than seventy orgasms in an experiment." Klee and Miró never met personally, but Miró had one in 1925 Seen and appreciated paintings in an exhibition at the Pierre Galerie in Paris. Both Klee and Miró have often been criticized as "infantile". From 1927 onwards, a neighbor was Hans Arp , whose work with curved organic forms also influenced Miró. An example is Landschaft (The Hare) from the same year. These forms, as outlines or full color fields, accompanied Miró during his further artistic career.

Collages

In the years 1924 and from 1928 to 1929, in a brief phase in which Miró wanted to give up painting completely, the artist created a number of collaged works , one of which is the paper collée from 1929. Of this collage, made of tar cardboard, oil paper and scraps of wallpaper, there are only two other similar works in Miró's oeuvre that were created with the same materials and have roughly the same format: a portrait of Georges Auric , which is exhibited today at the Kunsthaus Zürich , and another Work long in the possession of the surrealist poet Georges Hugnet (1906–1974). From 1931 Miró continued to modify the collages and, along with Willi Baumeister , established the so-called material image “by using sand, plaster and mortar to give their paintings a relief-like, roughened, plastic effect”.

Wild pictures

This is the name Miró used to summarize the pictures he himself called from 1934. The cause was the uncertain political situation in Spain and the rise of fascism . In a series of 15 pastels on velor paper, he showed pained, perplexed, beastly individuals, mainly women. In 1935 he created the material picture Strick und Personen I , which continues both the collages and the wild pictures . The real twisted rope applied to the painting is a symbol of violence. Man Ray wrote in his autobiography that the use of the rope had something to do with a threatened hanging of Miró in Max Ernst 's studio , when Miró remained silent in a discussion despite being asked to participate. The painting Schwalbe / Liebe , completed at the beginning of 1934 , in which figures seemingly in free fall and the word elements “Hirondelle” and “Amour” are connected with intertwined lines, creates a feeling of openness and letting go. In October 1935 he and his husband and wife painted a painting in a gloomy atmosphere in front of a pile of dung ; In front of a statue-like pile of poop stands an alienated couple with extremely prominent genitals.

Works at the time of the Civil War - Barcelona series

Immediately before and at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), which continued to influence the artist in his work, between July and October 1936 Joan Miró created the series Pintures damunt masonita ( pictures on masonite ). A return to realism followed in 1937 with Still Life with an Old Shoe ; Everyday motifs such as a shoe, bread, an apple pierced by a fork that looks like a weapon seem like an apocalyptic vision. The monumental painting Le faucheur ( The Reaper ), now lost, and the poster Aidez l'Espagne ( Help Spain ), both with revolutionary motifs against the fascist putschists General Francisco Franco , were created for the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937 . The screen print was sold for one franc, with the proceeds going to the Republican government in Madrid. This was followed by work on the Barcelona series, 50 lithographs in black, created in an aggressive manner from the years 1939–1945, they were published by Joan Prats , a long-time friend of Miró and art patron in the Barcelona area.

Constellations

Between 1940 and 1942 Joan Miró created the 23-sheet series Constellations , gouaches in which larger figures, often depicting women and birds, are embedded in a dense web of circular disks and linear signs. With its novel all-over structure with its repetitive elements and the use of automatic drawing, the series had a great influence on the development of American art in the New York School . The results later served as a source of inspiration for Miró. Regarding the constellations , however, there were also allegations that Miró had created “harmlessness” and a “stereotype of innocence” with this series in difficult times. Similar accusations like those of the “decorator” and “organizer of colored surfaces” also had to endure Henri Matisse - the painters knew and valued each other. Like Matisse, Miró released the color on the surface in the constellations and used black as the color, but in contrast to Matisse wanted to set the surface in motion with the swarm of figures and signs. Matisse's work was easier to identify.

Monochrome images

From 1955 to 1959, Miró devoted himself entirely to ceramics, only in 1960 did he take up painting again. The result was series on a white background as well as the triptych Bleu I, II, III from 1961, which is almost completely monochrome blue and is somewhat reminiscent of the pictures by Yves Klein . After he had applied the blue paint, he interrupted the color space in a controlled manner with minimalist characters, lines, dots and brushstrokes by applying the colors with the "prudence of the gesture of a Japanese archer" (Miró). These paintings are reminiscent of Miró's works from around 1925, when he created monochrome paintings, such as Danseuse II ( Dancer II ), with few empathic accents. “For me it is important to achieve a maximum of intensity with a minimum of effort. That is why the emptiness in my pictures is becoming more and more important, ”was his statement about these works.

Lettres et Chiffres - late work

At the end of the 1960s, Miró painted a whole series of large-format panels entitled Lettres et Chiffres attirés par une étincelle ( letters and numbers attracted by a spark ). In a painterly marbled color space, similar to L'Addition , he used isolated, minimalist, repetitive lettristic and numerical symbols - which testify to Miró's interest in concrete poetry and serial music -, in contrast to earlier, very few ciphers like that T or 9 which "engrave like in the cosmos around the differently colored spot, the spark of the title."

A five-part series, the Toiles brûlées ( Burned Canvases ) from 1973, expressed Miró's anger against the commercialization of art. He partially destroyed the canvas covered with colored powder by working it with a gas burner, and during the fire he turned the picture to the right and left before extinguishing it. In the same year, May 1968 , with the traces of burst paint bags, the imprints of Miró's hands and the intense colors, it looks like an obituary for the Paris student riots of 1968. Miró also created the painting Woman with three hairs and birds , his Resumed painting style from the 1925s to the 1930s. The late work is characterized by its use of a few pure colors with a strong use of black. In 1979 a series of 18 color lithographs was printed with the title Hommage a Gaudí . In the last years of his life he also devoted himself to the old Catalan art of artistic processing of tapestries and designed stage sets.

Book illustrations

Among the numerous artist books that Miró has created since the 1930s, one example is the illustrated poem Paul Éluard , published in 1958 . It is entitled A toute épreuve , published by Gérald Cramer, Geneva, and contains 80 mostly colored woodcuts by Miró. It is considered to be his finest illustrated book. The sales circulation was 80 copies. Paul Éluard's poem was first published in 1930 in the Édition Surréalistes in Paris.

Objets trouvés, sculptures, ceramics, tapestries

“One thing goes into the other. Everything forms a unit. There is no domain that is different from others. Everything is linked together. "

- Joan Miró

Objets trouvés - sculptures

Dona i Ocell ( Woman and Bird ), 1982, ceramic tiles, Barcelona

From 1928 onwards, the first larger and smaller surrealist sculptures and objects, so-called “peinture objets” and the “sculpture objet” from 1931, consisted of a block of wood and partly painted objects attached to it, such as a lump of cork , a scallop and a Iron ring. From 1931 Miró, like the surrealist artists Max Ernst , Salvador Dalí , René Magritte and Yves Tanguy , concentrated on the found object, the objet trouvé . The 180 cm high object-like assemblage with the title Personnage from 1931 (destroyed), a large black umbrella crowning a piece of furniture with a large stick penis, attracted considerable attention at the exhibition in the Salon des Indépendants , with the public at that time, as well as the later three-dimensional ones Works by the artist, which praised "blatantly erotic allusion".

Since 1966 Miró has been creating larger sculptures in bronze, keeping the shape of the forms invented 20 years earlier. The artist's first sculpture is Oiseau solaire ( Sun Bird ) and dates from this year. A year later, sculptures were created that were cast from found objects in bronze and painted. Some works, such as Insect Woman (1969), with their rough surface are reminiscent of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti . For the Esplanade de la Défense in Paris, Miró created concrete sculptures in 1978 and from 1979 to 1980 he worked on a figurative model for a fifteen-meter-high colored sculpture in Central Park , New York . Further sculptures in public space followed. The monumental sculpture Miró's Chicago , originally called The Sun, the Moon and a Star , is about twelve meters high and consists of the materials steel, wire, bronze, concrete and ceramic tiles. The work, which stands not far from the sculpture Chicago Picasso in Chicago , was unveiled on April 21, 1981. Other monumental sculptures followed in 1982, Dona i Ocell ( woman and bird ) in Barcelona and Personnage et oiseaux ( figure and birds ) in Boston.

  • Grande Maternité ( Great Motherhood ), 1967, bronze, San Francisco

  • L'Oiseau lunaire ( moon bird ), 1967, bronze, Museo Reina Sofía , Madrid

  • La carícia d'un ocell , 1967, painted bronze, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

  • Femme ( woman ), 1970, bronze, in front of the Frieder Burda Museum , Baden-Baden

  • Femme ( woman ), 1970, bronze, in the Parc de la Mar in Palma

  • Personnage ( figure ), 1970, bronze, Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens, Purchase, New York

  • Personnage et oiseau , bronze, 1971, Duisburg

  • Personnage ( figure ), 1972, painted bronze, Hakone Open Air Museum, Japan

  • Personnage gothique ( Gothic figure ), 1976, bronze, in the Miró Foundation, Palma

  • Femme ( woman ), bronze, 1981, Barcelona City Hall

Ceramics

Signature of Miró and Artigas in Ludwigshafen am Rhein , 1979
Wall of the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Pla de l'Os , Barcelona 1971
Mosaic wall of the Congress Center in Madrid
The Mirós ceramic wall in Palma de Mallorca

Together with Josep Llorens i Artigas , Miró worked on ceramics and ceramic vases from 1944, Artigas selecting the clay and producing the colors that Miró applied to the glaze . Ten vases were made, five of which were exhibited in the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1947. He also began to specialize in the production of prints. From 1954 to 1958, working with these media was his main field of work. With Artigas and his son Joan Gardy-Artigas , Miró created a monumental ceramic wall for the UNESCO building in Paris. It took them three years after the contract awarded in 1955 to complete the work. It consists of two parts: the wall of the sun is 3 meters high and 15 meters long, the smaller wall of the moon is half as long at 7.5 meters at the same height. Miró wrote about his planning, which was inspired by the Altamira cave paintings , which he had visited in 1957, and Gaudí's Park Güell :

“So the idea occurred to me to place a mighty, intensely red disk on the big wall as a contrast to the enormous concrete walls. The equivalent on the smaller wall was supposed to be a blue crescent, determined by the more restricted and intimate area. [...] I was looking for a powerful expression for the large wall and a more poetic one for the small wall. "

The UNESCO ceramic wall, which was awarded the Guggenheim Award, is no longer in the open air, but is surrounded by a building shell to protect it from weather damage. Other large-format ceramic walls can be found, for example, in the Maeght Foundation (1968), at the airport in Barcelona (1970); Another Miró wall adorns the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen, which was completed in 1979, followed in 1980 by a wall for the congress center in Madrid . In 1983, the year he died, a ceramic wall was built in his home town of Palma, located in the “Parc de la Mar” in front of the La Seu cathedral .

Tapestries

In 1974 Miró created a tapestry for the World Trade Center in New York. Originally he had turned down the order, but then dealt with weaving technology and produced other works of this type. The tapestry was a victim of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 . It was one of the most expensive works of art destroyed in the attack on the Twin Towers. For the completion and opening of the Fundació Joan Miró in 1975, the artist donated several of his drawings, pictures, ceramics and graphics and “created a large, elaborate tapestry especially for the Fundació […].” The Sobreteixims , textile pictures, were created in an experimental way the painting and objects are incorporated. They are therefore more like a collage or a sculpture. In 1977 a large carpet for the National Gallery of Art in Washington followed in collaboration with Josep Royo.

Stage sets and costumes, glass windows

Stained glass window in Senlis

As early as 1926, Miró, together with Max Ernst, made the decorations for the ballet Romeo et Juliette performed by the Ballets Russes , and in 1932 he created the decorations and costumes for Jeux d'enfants , with music by Georges Bizet and the choreography by Léonide Massine . In 1978 Miro returned to theater work when he realized puppets and masks by Mori el Merma for the Claca Teatre, based on Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry . The first performance took place in the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. In 1981 he created sets and costumes for the mime ballet Miro, l'uccello luce with the text by Jacques Dupin .

In the mid-1970s, Miró devoted himself to a new medium. Together with the glass artist Charles Marcq , three glass windows were created in 1976 for the Saint Frambourg chapel in Senlis , which dates from the 12th century. Six more windows followed for the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul de Vence in 1979.

Miró's icons

In Miró's work, symbols such as snail, woman, flower and star describe the essential areas of fauna, people, flora and cosmos, which Joan Miró had dealt with throughout her life.

In 1925 he created the picture Étoiles en des sexes d'escargot ( Stars in the sex of snails ), one of the picture poems . The blurred-looking ocher-colored background "creates the impression of a dreamlike indefinite spatiality." A black star floating in the upper right corner of the picture with a downward-pointing tail is enclosed by a red circular line into which a black trapezoidal shape penetrates from below. The upper left side of the picture shows in blue in a "circular writing movement" a "hint of light clouds" and the inscription Étoiles en des sexes d'escargot . The ocher-colored background runs through “irregular shapes such as dark shadows or creeping tracks.” In Miró's work, the sparks of the comet's tail are usually to be interpreted symbolically as male seeds, “which unfold their ambiguity in the reference field of a sexual cosmos or a sexuality expanded into the cosmic” as “signs . "

Since the 1930s, Miró's symbols used in different materials such as stars, comets, suns and moons as symbols of the universe have remained almost unchanged. In addition to these symbols, there are insects, ladders as a sign of escape, flaming hearts, male and female genitals . The latter are often represented by spider, eye, egg, among other things. The sexual parts of the body depict desire as the driving energy of artistic creativity. The most common motif in Miró is femme et oiseau ( woman and bird ), where the bird expresses desire. It is often depicted as a crescent moon and is reminiscent of the attribute of the Greek goddess of hunting and fertility Artemis (Roman: Diana ).

Murder of painting

When Miró's often quoted term “assassinat de la peinture” (“murder of painting”) was coined is not exactly certain. What is certain is that it was ascribed to him in Maurice Raynal's book on French painting, published in 1927, and can be seen in the context of the Dadaist art idea. At the First International Dada Fair in 1920 there was a poster with the inscription: Art is dead. Long live Tatlin's machine art . Miró increased the statement to include the term “murder”, a sign of his contempt for conventional painting methods that corresponded to the ideas of the bourgeoisie , which he had been expressing since the 1930s. Instead he wanted to "murder painting" in the sense of a renewal with his work and the pictorial elements he developed.

“As you know, the Surrealists decreed the death of painting. I want the murder. "

- Joan Miró : interview on 7 July 1930 by the art critic Tériade , published as a supplement to L'Intransigeant magazine.

The artist was at that time mainly to the recognition of constructions ( Constructions than increasing Collages ) as opposed to the traditional painting that had kept as a decorative status symbol moving into the upper middle-class living room. In the conversation Miró further stated: "Painting has been on the decline since the cave age", which Miró's biographer Jacques Dupin transferred to the artist, because for him Miró had got into a crisis between 1930 and 1932 and had reached a low point in his art . Dupin considered the collages and montages of that time to be symbolic self-mutilation, anti-painting. This referred not only to the objects, such as rope, wood or doll's shoe, which Miró brought into his paintings, but also to the different materials such as photos, sand or velor paper as a background.

Miró's rebellious stance towards commercialized art increased with age and peaked in 1973 in the five-part series Burned Canvases . In these large-format paintings he (similar to the Italian painter Lucio Fontana ) did not shy away from cutting out entire areas with a blowtorch . In an interview with Santiago Amon, printed in El País, Semanal in June 1978, Miró answered the question about his motivation for this brute technique:

“But as I've said elsewhere, the real reason was that I just wanted to indulge myself in the pleasure of the people who see art alone as having its commercial value - all those who believe and claim that their works are worth a fortune, once 'shit!' to call back. "

- Joan Miró

reception

Representations of contemporaries

"After me, it is you who opens new doors [...]"

- Pablo Picasso

Salvador Dalí , for whom Miró, nine years his senior, established important contacts for the Paris art scene with the art dealers Pierre Loeb and Camille Goemanns from 1927 , was introduced two years later by his compatriot to the inner circle of surrealists around André Breton. Dalí described Miró's painting as "too grandiose for the stupid world of our artists and intellectuals." He portrayed him as an innovator of art who can only be compared with Picasso; for him he embodies the "osmosis between surrealism and reality, boundlessly mysterious, capable of captivating us with the most lively intensity of distant and moving magical creations."

The surrealist André Breton , who in the early 1920s had still described Miró as childish, later saw him as a painter of pure automatism and wrote in his work Surrealism and Painting from 1967: “Maybe that's why he can be regarded as the 'most surrealistic' of us […] No one is as skilled as he is at uniting the incompatible, is so indifferent to destroying something that we do not even dare to see destroyed. "

The art critic Clement Greenberg , who had met Miró during his stay in New York in 1947, described his work as too decorative, but he still gave the world a lesson in “color”. This art belongs in the realm of the grotesque, as it was defined by the art theorist John Ruskin in the 19th century: "Composed of two elements, one laughable, the other terrifying." Miró's work can therefore be assigned to Ruskin's joking grotesque, since he in all more humorous than frightening. He described him as a short, compact, taciturn man with cropped hair, pale skin, quick eyes and movements. He is easily nervous, but at the same time impersonal in the company of strangers. The question is what could have brought this bourgeois to modern painting, the Rive Gauche and surrealism.

Antoni Tàpies , Catalans like Miró, but younger generation of artists, wrote in 1969 full of admiration that Miró had rediscovered the purity and innocence of the day of creation by freeing it from the ballast of youth: “Miró posed us against a universe created and ruled by gods everlasting waves, the changeful and endless flow of nature. He set rhythms against unchangeable laws [...]; against the oppressive, taboo-filled narrowness, the brightness of the open space. In the face of the monstrous arrogance of those in power, he showed that we are all equal because we are all made of the fire of the stars. [...] In order for things to grow and get better, love must penetrate everything, he told us. "

Influence on Abstract Expressionism

In the 1940s there was an artistic turnaround in the United States which, after years of socially critical American realism, led to a new beginning - "the desire to start from scratch" ( Barnett Newman ) - abstract expressionism . Artists such as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock , Mark Rothko , Clyfford Still and Franz Kline found their role models in Miró, Masson and Max Ernst , in their controlled psychological automatism , in controlled chance, not necessarily in their techniques. The free color gradients Mirós from the 1920s particularly influenced Pollock. In the 1960s Miró was again inspired by Pollock's Action Paintings and the abstract expressionism of Rothko and Robert Motherwell , for example in the triptych Blue I – III (1961); however, despite the greatest reduction in nature, Miró's forms are indebted to nature and not abstract structures. Miró also inspired artists such as the Irish-American painter Matt Lamb and Arshile Gorky , the New York School with its abstract expressionism and the German Otmar Alt .

Films about Miró

In the years 1971 to 1974 documentaries were made, which Edition Maeght 2005 compiled on a DVD. Lithographie d'une affiche is an eighteen-minute color film by Clovis Prévost with the collaboration of Carles Santos , which was shot in 1971 in a studio of the “Arte” printing company in Paris. The camera fixes the development process to improve a lithography . In 1973 Miró Sculpteur followed . This film, again by Clovis Prévost, shows the work on the sculpture L'oiseau au plumage rougeâtre annonce l'apparition de la femme éblouissante de beauté . The shooting took place in the atelier of the Clémenti foundry in Meudon . Duration of the film: 38 minutes. Miró parle is the name of the twenty-six minute film by Prévost and Santos, which was shot in the studio of Joan Miró, Son Boter, in Palma in 1974. The interview was conducted by Carles Santos and Pere Portabella. Miró speaks here about his life and work; in it he emphasizes the importance that Paris and the rue Blomet took on in his life when he met Masson and the surrealist poets who opened new doors for his work.

In 1978 the documentary Miró: Theater Of Dreams was made under the direction of Robin Lough. The almost one-hour film shows the 85-year-old artist at work and in his home town of Palma; In interviews with his biographer Roland Penrose , he describes his memories of fellow artists such as Picasso, Breton, Ernst, Masson and Tanguy and reports on his collaboration in the production of the Catalan theater group “La Claca”.

Miró on the art market

Joan Miró's works often reach high prices at auctions : Étoile Bleue achieved 29 million euros on June 19, 2012 at Sotheby’s in London . It is currently the highest price that has ever been paid for a work by Miró and was therefore listed among the 50 most expensive paintings in the world .

The popularity of his works encourage counterfeiters to offer “real Mirós”. Estimates assume that in the graphic categories between 40 and 50 percent forgeries are offered on the art market; with oil paintings it is about ten percent less. The artists of classical modernism are faked with preference. In addition to Salvador Dalí, works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Marc Chagall top the list of forgeries .

Miró in everyday life and in music

The ESPAÑA logo

Miró wanted to reach people interested in art with his work, so from the late 1950s onwards he had graphic series produced in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and Barcelona. Even today, the artist's works are so popular that many art prints are offered with images of his works as well as puzzles , for example the 1000-piece puzzle with the work The Dance of the Harlequin . Miró motifs decorate plates, mugs and cups made of porcelain. Lovers of fragrances can buy the “Miró” perfume, which is available in two scents. The bottle cap and the packaging are reminiscent of the artist's motifs.

“La Caixa” logo

In 1966 he designed the cover for the album Cançons de la roda del temps for Raimon , one of the most important system-critical songwriters of Nova Cançó .

The third largest credit institution in Spain, la Caixa , has been using a company logo since 1980 , a blue starfish with a yellow and a red dot, taken from a work by Joan Miró. The “ESPAÑA” logo, designed in 1983, is currently used by the Spanish tourist office “Turespaña” as a distinguishing feature. It shows a sun, a star and the words "ESPAÑA".

The "Miró Quartet" was founded in 1995. The professional string quartet is based in Austin , Texas . Its members are Daniel Ching, violin, Sandy Yamamoto, violin, John Largess, viola and Joshua Gindele, violoncello.

Museums and foundations related to Miró

The Fundació Joan Miró
Entrance to the Center Miró in the old church of Mont-roig

In 1975, the Foundation Joan Miró - Center d'Estudis d'Art Contemporani, whose building in Barcelona was designed by Josep Lluís Sert , opened its doors to the public. A large number of paintings, sculptures, tapestries and lithographs are exhibited there. Changing presentations of modern art complement Miró's work. The idea for this foundation goes back to the artist's childhood friend, Joan Prats i Vallès , who laid the foundation for today's collection with an extensive donation.

In 1981 the second foundation, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca , was established. The Atelier Son Boter , the workshop built by Sert and a museum built in 1992 by the architect Rafael Moneo as the foundation seat in Cala Major , a suburb of Palma, which shows 2500 works by the artist, can be seen in the context of the exhibition. The former house Mirós, Son Abrines , is currently privately owned and cannot be visited.

Since 2004, the Center Joan Miró in Mont-roig del Camp has offered the opportunity to get to know Miró's complete works on Mont-roig - albeit exclusively on the basis of true-to-life copies. His works can be found in museums all over the world. The center is located in the old church of Mont-roig del Camp, the Esglesia Vella. The artist painted it in 1919 in his picture Poble i església de Mont-roig ( Village and Church of Mont-roig ). In the Centro Miró there is a leaflet that lists the pictorial themes of Miró's early works that have Montroig as their theme. The locations from which he drew are marked with large signs in the vicinity of the place.

Joan Miró Prize

Since 2007, the Fundació Joan Miró and the Fundació Caixa Girona have been awarding the Joan Miró Prize, endowed with 70,000 euros , every two years  . The first prize awarded was given in 2007 to Ólafur Elíasson , followed in 2009 by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist , in 2011 by Mona Hatoum , in 2013 by Roni Horn , 2015 by Ignasi Aballí , 2017 by Kader Attia and 2019 by Nalini Malani .

From 1961 to 1986, an annual competition for the undoped Premio Internacional de Dibujo Joan Miró (Joan Miró Prize for Drawing) was held in Barcelona along with an exhibition of works by the winner and the finalists.

Awards (selection)

Coin worth 10 pesetas with a portrait of Miró, 1993

Exhibitions (selection)

Works (selection)

The French and German titles follow Janis Mink's biography of Miró. In museums, the titles are often presented in the national language, for example in English or Catalan.

Objets trouvés - sculptures
Sun, moon and a star in the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Some of the smaller sculptures presented here later served as models for monumental sculptures.

  • 1931: Objet ( object ), oil on wood, nails, string, bones, chickpea, 40 cm × 29.7 cm × 22 cm, Museum of Modern Art , New York
  • 1946–1949: L'Oiseau lunaire ( moon bird ) , bronze, 19 cm × 17 cm × 12.5 cm, Fundació Joan Miró
  • 1946–1949: L'Oiseau solaire ( Sun Bird ), bronze, 13.5 cm × 11 cm × 18.5 cm, Fundació Joan Miró
  • 1967: Femme ( woman ), bronze, 57 cm × 21.5 cm × 21.5 cm, Fundació Joan Miró
  • 1967: La carícia d'un ocell ( Caressing a bird ), bronze, 311 cm × 111 cm × 38 cm, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
  • 1967: The Sun, the Moon and One Star ( sun, moon and a star ), bronze, Milwaukee Art Museum ; was erected in 1981 as a sculpture under the title Miró's Chicago , concrete, bronze, ceramic, 12 m, at the Cook County Administration Building, 69 W. Washington St. in Chicago.
  • 1969: Torso , bronze, 120 cm × 175 cm × 125 cm, Galerie Beyeler, Basel (1980)
  • 1970: Personnage ( figure ), bronze, 200 cm × 100 cm × 120 cm, Fundació Joan Miró
  • 1976: Personnage gotique ( Gothic figure ), bronze, 450 cm × 200 cm × 160 cm, Adrien Maeght Collection, Paris (1984)
painting
  • 1917: Nord-Sud , oil on canvas, 62 cm × 70 cm, private property
  • 1917: Portrait Nubiola , oil on canvas, 104 cm × 113 cm, Museum Folkwang , Essen
  • 1919: Autoportrait ( self-portrait ), oil on canvas, 75 cm × 60 cm, Musée Picasso , Paris
  • 1920: La table - Nature mort au lapin ( The table (still life with rabbits) ), oil on canvas, 130 cm × 96 cm, private property
  • 1921/22: La ferme ( The Farm ), oil on canvas, 124.8 cm × 41.3 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, a donation from Mary Hemingway
  • 1922/23: The carbide lamp , oil on canvas, 38.1 cm × 45.7 cm, Museum of Modern Art , New York
  • 1923/24: La terre laborée ( plowed earth ), oil on canvas, 66 cm × 92.7 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
  • 1923/24: Paysage catalan (Le chasseur) ( Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) ), oil on canvas, 64.8 cm × 100.3 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York Fig.
  • 1924/25: Le carnaval d'Arlequin ( Carnival of the Harlequin ) , oil on canvas, 66 cm × 93 cm, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo Fig.
  • 1925: Étoiles en des sexes d'escargot ( Stars in the sex of snails ), oil on canvas, 129.5 cm × 97 cm, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf Fig.
  • 1925: L'Addition ( The Bill ), oil on canvas, 195 cm × 129.2 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Center Georges Pompidou, Paris Fig.
  • 1925: Danseuse II ( Dancer II ), oil on canvas, 115.5 cm × 88.5 cm, Rosengart Collection, Lucerne Fig.
  • 1925: Baigneuse ( bathers ), oil on canvas, 73 cm × 92 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris Fig.
  • 1925: Photo - ceci est la couleur de mes rêves ( Photo - this is the color of my dreams ), oil on canvas, 96.5 cm × 129.5 cm, private property Fig.
  • 1926: Personnage lancant un pierre à un oiseau ( figure throwing a stone at a bird ), Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • 1927: 48 , oil on canvas primed with glue, 146.1 cm × 114.2 cm, private collection
  • 1927: Paysage (Le lièvre) ( Landscape (Hare) ), oil on canvas, 130 cm × 195 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York Fig.
  • 1928: Intérieurs hollandais , ( Dutch interiors I to III )
  • 1929: La Reine Louise de Prusse ( Queen Luise of Prussia ), oil on canvas, 82.4 cm × 101 cm, Meadows Museum, Dallas Fig.
  • 1933: Composition ( composition) , oil on canvas, Kunstmuseum Bern , Bern Fig.
  • 1933/34: Hirondelle / Amour ( Schwalbe / Liebe ), oil on canvas, 199.3 cm × 247.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York Fig.
  • 1934: Trois personnages sur fond noir ( three figures on a black background ), glued paper and gouache on paper, 49.8 cm × 64.8 cm, LaM , Villeneuve d'Ascq Fig.
  • 1935: Corde et personnage I ( Strick und Personen I ), oil and cord on cardboard, glued to a wooden panel, 104.7 cm × 74.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York Fig.
  • 1936: Homme et femme devant un tas d'excréments ( man and woman in front of a pile of dung ), oil on copper, 23.2 cm × 32 cm, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
  • 1937: Nature morte au vieux soulier ( still life with an old shoe ), oil on canvas, 81.3 cm × 116.8 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • 1939: A bird's flight over the plain , Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
  • 1941: Chiffres et constellations amoureux d'une femme ( Constellation No. 19: Numbers and constellations, in love with a woman ), gouache and turpentine paints on paper, 46 cm × 38 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago Fig.
  • 1945: La course de taureaux ( The bullfight ), oil on canvas, 114 cm × 145 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris
  • 1949: Personnes et chien devant le soleil ( People and Dog in Front of the Sun ), 81 cm × 55 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel , Basel
  • 1950: Peinture ( painting ), oil, strings and case art on canvas, 99 cm × 76 cm, Van Abbemuseum , Eindhoven
  • 1953: Les échelles en roue de feu traversent l'azur ( The ladders run through the sky blue as a wheel of fire ), oil on canvas, 116 × 89 cm, private property Fig.
  • 1961: Bleu I , oil on canvas, 2.7 m × 3.6 m; Bleu II , oil on canvas, 2.7 m × 3.6 m; Bleu III , oil on canvas, 2.7 m × 3.5 m, I, II, III: Musée d'Art Moderne, Center Georges Pompidou, Paris Fig. Bleu II
  • 1968: Paysan catalan au clair de la lune ( Catalan farmer in the moonlight ), acrylic on canvas, 162 cm × 130 cm, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
  • 1973: May 1968 , acrylic on canvas, 200 cm × 200 cm, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
  • 1978: Figures, birds, star , acrylic on canvas, 88.7 cm × 115 cm, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
Collages

A selection of collages can be found on the website of the American Institute for Conservation.

Tapestries
  • 1974: Tapestry of the World Trade Center , New York, destroyed on September 11, 2001 Fig.
  • 1977: Tapestry in collaboration with Josep Royo for the National Gallery of Art in Washington
  • 1979: Tapís de la Fundació , wool, 750 cm × 500 cm, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
Ceramic walls
Terminal B in Barcelona
Miró's mosaic on the Rambla in Barcelona
  • 1950: Harvard University
  • 1958: UNESCO, Paris
  • 1964: Commercial college, Sankt Gallen, Switzerland
  • 1964: Fundació Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence
  • 1970: Terminal B, Barcelona Airport
  • 1970: World's Fair, Osaka
  • 1971: Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen am Rhein
  • 1972: Cinémathèque, Paris
  • 1976: Street mosaic on La Rambla in Barcelona
  • 1980: Madrid Congress Center
  • 1983: Parc de la Mar, Palma de Mallorca
Book illustrations
  • 1930: Tristan Tzara : L'Arbre des Voyageurs , with four lithographs
  • 1933: Georges Hugnet : Enfances , with three etchings
  • 1948: Henry Miller : The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder , dt. The smile at the foot of the ladder . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1978, ISBN 978-3-499-14163-8
  • 1951: Tristan Tzara: Parler seul
  • 1954: Joan Miró: Une Hirondelle , text and drawings by Miró
  • 1957: René Crevel : La bague d'aurore , with five etchings
  • 1958: Paul Éluard : A toute épreuve , with 80 woodcuts
  • 1959: René Char : Nous avons , with five etchings
  • 1961: Raymond Queneau : Album 19 , with 19 lithographs
  • 1966: Alfred Jarry : Ubu Roi , with 13 lithographs
  • 1967: Ivan Goll : Bouquets de rêves pour Neila , with 19 lithographs
  • 1971: Joan Miró: Ubu aux baléares and Le lezard aux plumes d'or , texts and drawings
  • 1972: Joan Brossa : Oda a Joan Miró , with eight lithographs
  • 1975: Jacques Prévert : Adonis , with 63 etchings

literature

Writings by Miró
  • Joan Miró: Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves. Entretiens avec Georges Raillard . Paris 1977.
  • Margit Rowell (Ed.): Joan Miró. Selected Writings and Interviews . Thames & Hudson, London 1987.
  • Ernst Scheidegger (Ed.): Joan Miró. Collected writings, photos, drawings , Zurich 1957.
Biographies
Representations
Exhibition catalogs
  • Marion Ackermann (foreword): Miró. Painting as poetry . Bucerius Kunst Forum , Hamburg, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen , Düsseldorf (ed.), Hirmer, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-7774-2396-8 .
  • Kunsthaus Zürich, Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Ed.): Joan Miró , Kunsthaus Zürich and Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 1986.
  • Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (ed.): Insights. The 20th century in the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection, Düsseldorf . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2000, ISBN 3-7757-0853-7 .
  • Thomas Krens (preface): Rendezvous. Masterpieces from the Center Georges Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museums . Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York 1998, ISBN 0-89207-213-X .
  • Joan Miró. Works in the Würth Collection , Swiridoff, Künzelsau 2008, ISBN 3-89929-142-5 .
  • Miró. Poésie et lumière , 24 ORE cultura, Milano 2013, ISBN 978-88-6648-168-3 .
Investigations
  • Riewert Ehrich: Miró and Jarry. A contribution to the literary reception in the visual arts . Lang, Frankfurt / M. 2005, ISBN 3-631-54212-7 .
  • Riewert Ehrich: Mori el Merma - Miró's Ubu figures stepping out of the picture. The artist's triumph over the dictator . In: Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 21 (2008), pp. 97–120.
  • Evelyn Benesch / Ingried Brugger (eds.): Miró. Later rebel . Kunstforum Wien / Edition Minerva, Wolfratshausen 2001, ISBN 3-932353-49-8 .
Catalog raisonnés
  • Joan Miró. The lithographer, 1930–1972 . Four volumes, ed. by Patrick Cramer. Edition Weber, Geneva 1972–1982.
  • Joan Miró. Works on paper, 1901–1977 . Edited by Carl Haenlein, Kestner Society, Hanover 1977.
  • Obra de Jean Miró , inventory catalog of the Fundació Miro with 1679 works, Barcelona 1988.
  • Joan Miró. The Illustrated Books. Catalog Raisonné , ed. by Patrick Cramer. Patrick Cramer, Geneva 1989.
  • Miró etchings, 1928–1975 . Three volumes, ed. by Jacques Dupin. Edition Weber, Geneva 1984–1991.
  • Joan Miró. Paintings. Catalog raisonné . Edited by Jacques Dupin. Daniel Lelong, Paris 2002, ISBN 978-2-86882-049-5 .
  • Joan Miró. Sculptures. Catalog raisonné 1928–1982 . Edited by E. Fernando Miró, Daniel Lelong, Paris 2006, ISBN 978-2-86882-074-7 .
  • Joan Miró. Drawings. Catalog Raisonné 1901–1937 , Volume I. Ed. By Jacques Dupin and Ariane Lelong-Mainaud. Daniel Lelong, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-86882-084-6 .
  • Joan Miró, Josep Llorens Artigas. Ceramics. Catalog raisonné 1941–1981 , ed. by Cristina Calero Fernandez. Lelong and Successio Miró Gallery, Paris 2007, ISBN 978-2-86882-079-2 .

Web links

Commons : Joan Miró  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Joan Miró  - Quotes

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ Joan Miró. Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca, accessed November 27, 2015 .
  2. ^ A b Ortrud Westheider : Joan Miró. A life among poets. In: Marion Ackermann (Vorw.): Miró. Painting as poetry . Bucerius Kunst Forum , Hamburg, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen , Düsseldorf (ed.), Hirmer, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-7774-2396-8 , p. 216.
  3. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró . Taschen, Cologne 2006, p. 10.
  4. ↑ Hans Platschek: Joan Miró . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, pp. 12-15.
  5. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , p. 14 f.
  6. ↑ Michel Leiris: Joan Miró . In Documents , October 5, 1929; quoted from Hans Platschek: Joan Miró , p. 19.
  7. ↑ a b c d e Thomas Krens (preface): Rendezvous. Masterpieces from the Center Georges Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museums . Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York 1998, p. 671.
  8. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , pp. 18-20.
  9. ↑ Uwe M. Schneede: The art of surrealism: poetry, painting, sculpture, photography, film . CH Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-406-54683-9 . P. 87 and Platschek, p. 46 (several sources also give 1920 as the year of the first visit to Paris).
  10. ↑ Hans Platschek: Joan Miró , p. 46 ff.
  11. ↑ a b Quoted from the biography of the Miró Foundation, Barcelona.
  12. ^ Joan Miró: To Michel Leiris, Montroig, August 10, 1924 . In: Margit Rowell (Ed.): Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews . Thames and Hudson, London / Boston 1986, p. 86 .
  13. ↑ Evelyn Bennesch / Ingried Brugger (eds.): Miró. Later Rebel , p. 186.
  14. ^ Theodora Vischer (cat.): Sculpture in the 20th century . Merian-Park Basel, June 3 to September 30, 1984, Basel 1984, p. 92.
  15. ↑ Hans Platschek: Joan Miró . P. 141 f.
  16. ↑ Jacques Beauffet et al. a .: L'Art en Europe. Les années décisives. 1945–1953 , Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne, SKIRA, Genoa 1987, p. 57.
  17. ↑ a b Reinhold Hohl (Vorw.): Sculpture in the 20th century. Exhibition in Wenkenpark, Riehen / Basel. May 10 to September 14, 1980. Werner, Basel 1980, ISBN 3-85979-011-0 , p. 90.
  18. ↑ a b Janis Mink: Joan Miro , p. 93.
  19. ↑ Plaza & Hilton Hotels. cincinnativiews, accessed June 20, 2009 . The mural was removed and restored after the hotel was sold to the Hilton Group in 1965; it found its place in the Cincinnati Art Museum today .
  20. ^ Hans Platschek: Joan Miró , p. 143.
  21. ↑ a b c Biography of Joan Miró ( memento of October 15, 2005 in the Internet Archive ). Retrieved June 24, 2009.
  22. ↑ a b Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca , miro.palmademallorca.es, accessed on October 7, 2011.
  23. ↑ Hans Platschek: Joan Miró . P. 144.
  24. ↑ Hans Platschek: Joan Miró , p. 125 ff.
  25. ↑ a b Hans Platschek: Joan Miró , p. 146.
  26. ^ The grave of Joan Miró , knerger.de, accessed on November 22, 2011.
  27. ^ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , p. 91.
  28. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , p. 41
  29. ↑ a b Diether Rudloff: Unfinished Creation. Artist in the twentieth century . Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1982, p. 110.
  30. ↑ https://hemingwayswelt.de/ein-miro-fuer-mrs-hemingway/
  31. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , pp. 17 ff., 24, 30 f.
  32. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , p. 38 f.
  33. ^ Robert Hughes: The Shock of the New . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1981, ISBN 0-394-51378-9 , p. 235.
  34. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: The History of Art in the 20th Century , CH Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-48197-3 , p. 89.
  35. ^ A b Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (Ed.): Insights. The 20th century in the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection, Düsseldorf . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2000, p. 592.
  36. ↑ Evelyn Benesch / Ingried Brugger (eds.): Miró. Later rebel . Kunstforum Wien / Edition Minerva, Wolfratshausen 2001, p. 84.
  37. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , pp. 39–45.
  38. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró . Pp. 40-44, 50 f.
  39. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , p. 49 ff.
  40. ↑ a b c Karin von Maur (ed.): Magic of the number in the art of the 20th century . Verlag Gerd Hatje, Ostfildern bei Ruit 1997, ISBN 3-7757-0666-6 , p. 38.
  41. ^ Hans Platschek: Joan Miró , p. 85.
  42. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , p. 48 f.
  43. ↑ Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Ed.): Food for the Mind. The Udo and Anette Brandhorst Collection , State Gallery of Modern Art, Munich, June 9 to October 8, 2000, Hatje Cantz Verlag, ISBN 3-7757-9040-3 , p. 242.
  44. ^ A b Erika Mosier / Anne Umland: A Technical Investigation of Joan Miró's Collages of the 1920s , The Book and Paper Group Annual, Volume Fifteen 1996, The American Institute for Conservation. Retrieved June 18, 2008.
  45. ↑ Karin Thomas: DuMont's small non-fiction dictionary on the art of the 20th century. From anti-art to zero . DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 1977, ISBN 3-7701-0622-9 , p. 46.
  46. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró . Pp. 7, 58 ff.
  47. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , p. 62 ff.
  48. ^ Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (Ed.): Insights. The 20th Century in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf , p. 595.
  49. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , p. 70 f.
  50. ↑ Hans Platschek: Joan Miró . P. 109 f.
  51. ↑ Thomas Krens (preface): Rendezvous. Masterpieces from the Center Georges Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museums , p. 672.
  52. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miro , p. 87 f.
  53. ↑ Hans Platschek: Joan Miró , p. 122 f.
  54. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , pp. 77, 90.
  55. ↑ James Thrall Soby et al .: Joan Miró . Museum of Modern Art 1980, accessed June 17, 2009 .
  56. ↑ Hans Platschek: Joan Miró . P. 117, quoted from Miro Ceci est la couleur , p. 35
  57. ↑ Joan Miró's name for his abstract figures. From: Thomas Krens (preface): Rendezvous. Masterpieces from the Center Georges Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museums , p. 671.
  58. ^ Theodora Vischer (cat.): Skulptur im 20. Jahrhundert , Basel 1984, p. 92 f.
  59. ^ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , p. 87
  60. ↑ Jacques Beauffet et al. a .: L'Art en Europe. Les années décisives. 1945–1953 , p. 58.
  61. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miro , p. 80 ff.
  62. ^ Art Works Lost in WTC Attacks Valued at , Insurance Journal, October 8, 2001. Retrieved June 12, 2009.
  63. ^ Fundació Joan Miró. The museum with the works of Miró in Barcelona . Retrieved June 24, 2009.
  64. ↑ Joan Miró. kunstwissen.de, accessed on June 25, 2009 .
  65. ↑ Evelyn Benesch / Ingried Brugger (eds.): Miró. Later Rebel , p. 193.
  66. ↑ JK: Joan Miró in the museum kunst palast in Düsseldorf , art-in.de, accessed on October 7, 2011.
  67. ↑ Hubertus Gaßner: Joan Miró. The magical gardener . Cologne 1994, p. 83; quoted from: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (Hrsg.): Insights. The 20th century in the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection, Düsseldorf . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2000, p. 593.
  68. ↑ Evelyn Bennesch, Ingried Brugger (ed.): Miró. Later Rebel , pp. 69, 71-75.
  69. ↑ Felix Fanes: Salvador Dalí. The Construction of the Image 1925-1930 . Yale University Press 2007, ISBN 978-0-300-09179-3 , p. 101.
  70. ↑ Michael Töteberg: John Heartfield , p. 36 ff.
  71. ^ Margit Rowell: Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews . Thames & Hudson, London 1987, p. 114 f.
  72. ↑ quoted from Jacques Dupin: Miró , Poligrafa. Barcelona 1993, p. 448
  73. ^ Hans Platschek: Joan Miro , p. 86 f, and Dupin: Joan Miró , p. 189.
  74. ↑ quoted from Margit Rowell (ed.): Joan Miró. Ecrits et Entretiens . Daniel Lelong, Paris 1995, p. 319
  75. ↑ Hans Platschek: Joan Miró . P. 50, quoted from Memories of Rue Blomet , in the exhibition catalog of the Kestner Society, p. 39
  76. ↑ Torsten Otte: Salvador Dalí. A biography with self-testimonies from the artist . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, ISBN 3-8260-3306-X , p. 36 f.
  77. ↑ Fèlix Fanés: Salvador Dalí. The Construction of the Image 1925-1930 . Yale University Press, New Haven (Ct.) 2007, ISBN 0-300-09179-6 , pp. 98/99.
  78. ↑ Volker Zotz : André Breton . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1990, ISBN 978-3-499-50374-0 , p. 102 f.
  79. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , pp. 79, 7.
  80. ^ Antoni Tàpies: The practice of art . St. Gallen 1976, p. 98 f., Quoted from: Diether Rudloff: Unfinished Creation. Artist in the twentieth century . Stuttgart 1982, p. 112.
  81. ↑ Uwe M. Schneede: The history of art in the 20th century , p. 182 f.
  82. ↑ Janis Mink: Joan Miró , p. 90 f.
  83. ^ Felix Bentz: On the Matt Lambs exhibition in Berlin, Kleist House. Federal Government Commissioner for Disabled People, 2007, accessed on June 14, 2009 .
  84. ↑ Janis Mink: Miro , p. 71 f.
  85. ^ Otmar Alt: New Year's reception with exhibition opening. Otmar Alt Foundation, accessed April 20, 2018 .
  86. ↑ Miró - Film et interviews 1971–1974. Decitre, accessed June 20, 2009 .
  87. ↑ Miro: Theater of Dreams. Retrieved April 8, 2013 .
  88. ↑ Auction June 19, 2012. sothebys.com, accessed on July 5, 2012 .
  89. ^ Sabine Kaufmann: Art forger. planet-knowledge, May 6, 2009, accessed April 8, 2013 .
  90. ↑ Record cover by Joan Miró for Cançons de la roda del temps by Raimon
  91. ↑ España. Retrieved November 28, 2015 .
  92. ↑ Miró Quartet. miroquartet.com, accessed June 24, 2009 .
  93. ^ Homepage of the Center Miró in Mont-roig (In Catalan and Spanish) and exhibition information.
  94. ^ Premio Joan Miró , accessed February 8, 2020.
  95. ↑ fatrazie.com: Histoire de Collège - Le 23. clinamen 84 (French, accessed on July 29, 2014).
  96. ↑ Honorary Members: Joan Miró. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 16, 2019 .
  97. ↑ Jyoti: Brunswick Bldg. Plaza [Miro's Chicago - by Joan Miro]. In: chicago-outdoor-sculptures.blogspot.de. October 22, 2007, accessed April 20, 2018 .
  98. ^ Joan Miró - Self-Portrait. Illustration. In: abcgallery.com. Retrieved April 20, 2018 .
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personal data
SURNAME Miró, Joan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Miró i Ferrà, Joan (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish (Catalan) painter
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Barcelona , Catalonia, Spain
DATE OF DEATH December 25, 1983
Place of death Palma , Mallorca, Spain