In
1928, Mirò visited Holland, where he became excited about the paintings
of great Dutch artists and painted a few very calculated paintings in the
same manner. Soon afterwards, though, Mirò switched gears and stopped
giving his works large amounts of preparatory thought. He began to create
a number of infantile collages and quickly executed paintings that frequently
featured ferocious and swirling forms inspired by dreams and hallucinations.
In addition to painting works on canvas, Mirò also started to paint
ballet sets with Max Ernst for a short time.
Amidst this extremely productive period of
Mirò’s career, in 1929 the artist married his cousin, Pilar Juncosa,
and the couple became parents in 1931 to a daughter named Marie Dolores.
Two years later, Mirò reached his artistic apex and painted several
large, abstract compositions, such as Painting, in which Mirò
based the horned shapes on machinery parts. It was also at this time that
Mirò began to paint in the childlike and dreamy style for which he
is most recognized. He worked in an almost automatic fashion during this
period, creating strangely precise works using a casual artistic intuition.
Mirò adeptly played with bright color tones, and he used rich blacks
in a particularly penetrating manner. Besides numerous paintings, Mirò
also did much collage work. In a series of works entitled Collage,
Mirò combined paint with postcards, engravings, photographs and odd
objects like string, felt and metal. During this period, Mirò also
began to develop an interest in texture, and he began painting on sandpaper
and various rough surfaces in a very playful way.
In the late 1930s, when the Spanish Civil
War broke out, Mirò was living in Paris. He remained there during
this conflict, virtually cut off from contact with his homeland. Though
Mirò claimed a lack of interest in political matters, he was nonetheless
worried for his country’s poverty and suffering. Consequently, his paintings
expressed this melancholy with dark, lurid colors and frightening images.
In 1937, Mirò painted Still Life with Old Shoe in direct
response to the war. He also painted an anti-Franco poster entitled Help
Spain.
In 1938, Mirò returned to the art of
the portrait, and he created an important series of abstract portraits before
World War II. Many of these abstract portraits have a celestial aura, most
notably Mirò’s self-portrait, in which he depicts himself ascending
toward the heavens. In these works, Mirò frequently portrays eyes
as starry pinwheels and often uses shapes of the sunburst and starfish.
At the same time as he created this series of abstract portraits, Mirò
also perfected his poetry paintings. Possessing a deep love for poetry,
which began in Mirò’s student days, the artist once commented that
paintings "make no distinction between painting and poetry." In his poetry
paintings, Mirò would write poetic phrases on his canvasses. One
of the most famous examples of Mirò’s poetry-paintings is his Painting-Poem
of 1938, which features the French expression "une étoile caresse le sein
d’une négresse" ("a star caresses the breast of a black woman") atop a vast
black background.
In 1942, Mirò explored his fascination
with texture and started to work with ceramics. At first, the pottery shapes
were unconventional and non-utilitarian, though the pieces eventually evolved
into traditional sculptures of heads and plaques. Mirò’s ceramics
were huge, some up to 12 feet in height. For some time, Mirò concentrated
upon sculpture and did relatively little painting. In 1947, however, Mirò
received a commission to paint a mural for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati
and spent eight months there completing the work.
From the 1950s onward, Mirò spent most
of his efforts on further exploring new media. In the late fifties, he began
working on illustrations and woodcuts for Paul Eluard’s book of poems, A
Toute Épreuve. Besides this project, Mirò also turned
out over 200 sculptures in a few years. This period of experimentation was
briefly interrupted in 1960, when Mirò returned to the United States
to paint a mural for Harvard University. During the later stage of his career,
Mirò’s earlier works were showcased around the world in huge exhibitions
at the most respected museums. Also around this time, Mirò received
multiple awards, including the Guggenheim International Award. In 1975,
the Joàn Mirò Foundation/Center for the Study of Contemporary
Art opened in Barcelona in dedication to the artist. Joàn Mirò
died in Palma de Mallorca.
With an intense use of color, fanciful shapes,
and a wide array of media, Joàn Mirò created a body of provocative
work overflowing with imagination, intense beauty, and elegance. Following
an early fascination with portraiture (which reemerged later in his career),
Mirò soon focused on works that tended more toward abstraction and
Surrealism. After developing this signature style, Mirò began to
incorporate his love of poetry into his works, featuring words as prominent
parts of his paintings. After becoming a master of the canvas, Mirò
turned his attention to other media, such as ceramics, sculpture, and woodcutting.
With a voluminous body of work spanning such diverse periods of artistic
evolution, Mirò left an artistic legacy that will take decades to
digest but only seconds to savor.
— LINKS
— Self~Portrait
(1919) — Self-Portrait
I (1938)
— Métamorphoses
— Carnaval d'Arlequins
— Intérieur
Hollandais
— La Table
Avec Lapin — Prades
— Libellule aux Ailerons Rouges
— Chiffres et Constellations
— étoiles en des
sexes d'escargot — Aidez l'Espagne
(1937)
— Untitled
(Frontispiece in the book, Le Surréalisme en 1947) (color lithograph
23x20cm; full size) [dog-headed human foot, with three misplaced eyes]
— Harlequins
Carnival (1925) — Montroig
— Nude
with a Mirror (1919)
— Rhythmic
Personages (1934) — Catalan
Landscape - The Hunter
— Untitled
[four stick figures] (1950, 38x28cm)
— L'Astro
Patapón (1960, 46x63cm) _ five smears — Composition
T (1978, 44x60cm)
— Femme
et Volcan (1938, 23x17cm) — L'Étrangère
(1958, 62x44cm)
— L'Oiseau
de Nuit (1962, 55x73cm) — Personage
dans le jardin (1951, 50x65cm)
— Figures
(1935, 31x24cm) — Little
Girl in the Wood, (1958, 56x41cm)
— Paysan
catalan au repos (47x64cm)
— Composition,
p.10, from the book Prints from the Mourlot Press (1964 color
lithograph)
— Composition,
p.11, from the book Prints from the Mourlot Press, (the picture
only) _ Composition,
p.11, from the book Prints from the Mourlot Press (whole page,
with text)
— Intérieur
hollandais II (été 1928, 92x73cm) _ Following a visit
to Holland in 1928 Miró painted a group of Dutch interiors based on 17th
century old masters. Intérieur hollandais II is a Surrealist
transformation of The
Cat's Dancing Lesson by Jan
Steen [1625-1679], in which three boys, a girl, and a dog around a table
have fun watching the oldest boy hold a cat up by the front paws and make
it dance to the tune of a pipe played by the girl, while a dimly seen old
man peers reprovingly at them through a window in the background. Miró's
thorough distortion of Steen's Realism
emphasizes the squalor and raucousness of the scene. The flat amoeba-like
shapes that float in an indistinct space like a world seen through a microscope,
are typical of Miró's personal brand of Surrealism
in which ambiguous free forms suggest the primitive organic life of half-formed
creatures. There is no detectable relationship to Dutch
Interior (1658, 74x64cm) by Pieter
de Hooch [1629-1684], or Dutch
Interior by Hubertus
van Hove [03 May 1814 – 14 Nov 1865].
— The
Tilled Field (1924, 66x93cm) _ During the summer of 1923 Joan Miró began
painting The Tilled Field, a view of his family’s farm in Montroig,
Catalonia. Although thematically related to his earlier quasi-realistic,
Fauvist-colored rural views, such as Prades, The Village, this painting
is the first example of Miró’s Surrealist vision. Its fanciful juxtaposition
of human, animal, and vegetal forms and its array of schematized creatures
constitute a realm visible only to the mind’s eye, and reveal the great
range of Miró’s imagination. While working on the painting he wrote, “I
have managed to escape into the absolute of nature.” The Tilled Field is
thus a poetic metaphor that expresses Miró’s idyllic conception of his homeland,
where, he said, he could not “conceive of the wrongdoings of mankind.”
The complex iconography of The Tilled
Field has myriad sources, and attests to Miró’s long-standing interest
in his artistic heritage. The muted, contrasting tones of the painting recall
the colors of Catalan Romanesque frescoes, while the overt flatness of the
painting—space is suggested by three horizontal bands indicating sky, sea,
and earth—and the decorative scattering of multicolored animals throughout
were most likely inspired by medieval Spanish tapestries. These lively creatures
are themselves derived from Catalan ceramics, which Miró collected and kept
in his studio. The stylized figure with a plow has its source in the prehistoric
cave paintings of Altamira, which Miró knew well. Even the enormous eye
peering through the foliage of the pine tree, and the eye-covered pine cone
beneath it, can be traced to examples of early Christian art, in which the
wings of angels were bedecked with many tiny eyes. Miró found something
alive and magical in all things: the gigantic ear affixed to the trunk of
the tree, for example, reflects his belief that every object contains a
living soul.
Miró’s spirited depiction of The Tilled
Field also has political content. The three flags — French, Catalan,
and Spanish — refer to Catalonia’s attempts to secede from the central Spanish
government. Primo de Rivera, who assumed Spain’s dictatorship in 1923, instituted
strict measures, such as banning the Catalan language and flag, to repress
Catalan separatism. By depicting the Catalan and French flags together,
across the border post from the Spanish flag, Miró announced his allegiance
to the Catalan cause.
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