Joan Miró was a prolific Spanish artist whose career spanned almost eight decades. Starting as a landscape painter, the evolution of Miró's vision and style reflects his association with the European avant-garde as well as a strong sense of individual identity. Although he did not attach himself to any one movement absolutely, his work is firmly rooted in its historic and cultural context, demonstrating the elements of abstraction and non-objectivity of his contemporaries. Producing a large amount of work across many media, he is best known for his contribution to painting. Influenced by his close relations with Cubists and Surrealists, Miró's experimentation paved the way for new modes of representation and abstraction in Modern Art.

• Miró was a pioneer, inventing a new kind of relational, pictorial space in which figures and their environments were strangely, even unrealistically depicted. This practice of nonobjective painting greatly influenced the Abstract Expressionists.
• Due to his desire for control, Miró balanced spontaneity with meticulous planning, resulting in dream-inspired compositions that were nevertheless carefully executed.
• Strongly influenced by the Fauves, Miró's use of broad washes of bold colors in turn affected the development of Color Field painting.
• Miró's obsessive work ethic and long career led him to experiment in many creative media, including painting, graphics, ceramics, public sculpture, tapestry, and even theatre.

Joan Miró was born in Spain in 1893 to a family of craftsmen. His father, Miguel, was a watchmaker and goldsmith, while his grandfathers were cabinetmakers and blacksmiths. His artisan family no doubt encouraged Miró's artistic growth, while also taking inspiration from the landscape of Barcelona and the Tarragona countryside. Exhibiting a strong love of drawing at an early age, Miró was not particularly inclined toward academics. In spite of this, he pursued art making and studied landscape and decorative art at the School of Industrial and Fine Arts (the Llotja) in Barcelona, while also attending the School of Commerce from 1907-10. This foray into the business world, characterized by constant study, instilled a strong sense of order and a robust work ethic. However, at this time he became ill and, after recovering, he devoted himself fully to making art.

In 1912, Miró enrolled in Francesco Gali's art academy in Barcelona. Gali taught Miró about Modern art across Europe and introduced him to contemporary Catalan poets. He also encouraged Miró to go out into the countryside, to touch the objects he wanted to paint and to study the practices of his contemporaries. Between 1912 and 1920, Miró painted still-lifes, nudes and landscapes, which revealed elements of what his peers called his "poetic realism." It was in his early career that he developed his confidence in realism and an interest in bold and bright Fauve-like color and the geometric compositions of the Cubists.

In 1919, Miró moved to Paris to continue his artistic development. Due to financial hardship, his time in Paris was difficult, though he took inspiration in Dada and Surrealist figures. He became friends with the Surrealist writer André Breton, forming a relationship that lasted long into Miró's career. The Surrealists were most active in Paris during the 1920s, formally associating in 1924 with the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto. Their members promoted "pure psychic automatism," which heavily influenced Miró's work. While the Surrealists experimented with the irrational in art and writing, Miró's art manifested these dream-like qualities, becoming increasingly biomorphic, enigmatic and innovative.

While his first solo show in Paris in 1921 was a complete disaster, selling no work at all, Miró went on to participate in the first Surrealist exhibition in 1925. He collaborated with the group's members in the creation of larger commissions, working with Max Ernst in 1926 on the creation of Sergei Diaghilev's ballet set designs. In his own work at the time, Miró painted fantastic and bizarre interpretations of his dreams.

He married Pilar Juncosa in 1929, and their only child, Dolores, was born in 1931. Miró's career flourished during this time. In 1934, his art began to be exhibited in both France and the United States. Miró was still residing in Paris when war broke out in Europe, and by 1941 he was forced to flee to Mallaorca with his family. It is not surprising that warfare and political tension were prominent themes in his art at this time, as his canvases became increasingly grotesque and brutal. Concurrently, Miró's first retrospective was held at the MoMA to great acclaim. His renown continued to grow both in America and Europe, culminating in a large-scale mural commission in Cincinnati in 1947. Though he denied being an Abstractionist, both the seeming simplicity and the tendency toward experimentation in his work influenced the American Abstract Expressionists, who began to shift from representational to non-objective art in the 1940s.

By 1950, having worked through his political period, Miró began dividing his time between Spain and France. The Gallerie Maeght in Paris and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York both showed a large exhibition of 60 works in 1953. After this time, he began working in larger scale canvases and in ceramics. In 1959, he represented Spain alongside Salvador Dalí in The Homage to Surrealism, an exhibition organized by André Breton, where Miró became recognized internationally for his contribution to Abstract art. The 1960s were a prolific and adventurous time for Miró as he continued to break away from his own patterns, even revisiting and reinterpreting some of his older works. While he did not alter the essence of his style, his brought his work into a more mature, distilled and refined form.

As Miró aged, he continued to receive many accolades and public commissions. In 1974, he was commissioned to create a tapestry for New York's World Trade Center, demonstrating his achievements as an artist as well as his place in popular culture. He received an honorary degree from the University of Barcelona in 1979.

Miró passed away at his home in 1983, a year after completing Woman and Bird, a grand public sculpture for Barcelona, which was the culmination of a prolific career integral to the development of Modern art.

Joan Miró's painting evolved from the strongly rooted realism of his youth to utterly surreal and dream-like abstraction at the end of his career. Miró was best known as a painter, but it was his total output as an experimental artist that highly influenced his peers and challenged those working in all media to explore the boundaries of representation. The biomorphic forms and imaginative scenes that Miró envisioned demonstrated a playful desire to create new mode of depiction. Additionally, his ability to respond to art and politics with an abstract brush made his work desirable to the growing Modern art market.


Below are Joan Miró's main influencers, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.



"The joy of achieving in a landscape a perfect comprehension of a blade of grass.. as beautiful as a tree or a mountain..What most of all interests me is the calligraphy of the tiles on a roof or that of a tree scanned leaf by leaf, branch by branch."

"Never, never do I set to work on a canvas in the state it comes in from the shop. I provoke accidents - a form, a splotch of color. Any accident is good enough. I let the matiere decide. Then I prepare a ground by, for example, wiping my brushes on the canvas. Letting fall some drops of turpentine on it would do just as well. If I want to make a drawing I crumple the sheet of paper or I wet it; the flowing water traces a line and this line may suggest what is to come next.

"How can it be said that, given the fact that all the signs I transcribe upon the canvas correspond to something concrete - how can it be said that they back a foundation in reality, do not form part of the real world?"