Miró, Joan

b. 1893, Barcelona; d. 1983, Palma de Mallorca

   Artist

   Miró claimed that he never intended to create symbols, yet his childlike images remind us of prehistoric shapes that reflect basic life forces such as growth, movement, attraction and repulsion. Early inspiration came from a farm near the hill town of Montroig. Miró was influenced by the use of colour in Fauve painting, and developed an interest in detail and the rhythmic patterns of traditional Catalan art. The Farm is like an inventory of typical rural objects, and the very enlarged feet of The Farmer's Wife emphasize his belief that energy rises from the earth before transfiguring reality.

   After 1920 Miró worked in Paris, where he met leading surrealists and responded to their appeal to the imagination. He began to combine phantas-magoria with his depiction of external reality. In The Ploughed Field we find giant ears and eyes growing on trees. Thereafter Miró developed an entire pictorial language, a kind of visual shorthand. In Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) we recognize remnants of a moustache, the partial flame of an exploded gun, but never the entire object. This dismemberment is repeated in Portrait of Madame K where he selects images to convey the presence of a woman: head, breasts, heart, pubic hair.

   The surrealists favoured exploring the subconscious and also chance. Spontaneity was successfully harnessed in Miro's "dream paintings", but as oil and tempera proved limiting for the ideas of surrealism, Miró declared that he wished to "assassinate painting". He turned to collage, using string, random objects and a variety of textured surfaces. His images were often based on the abstraction of items advertised in illustrated catalogues, yet in the finished artwork such as Painting, 1933, they achieve the status of symbols. But what are they symbols of? Once more we find our reference in the stars and circles of archetypal iconography.

   Miró's work darkened with the advent of the Spanish Civil War. He used pastels to accentuate violent distortions in his "peintures sauvages", wherein the sky is often red or black. The now famous poster Aidez l'Espagne, descibes an immense clenched fist symbolizing the heroism and strength needed to defeat fascism. During the difficult years of WWII, Miró returned to Spain from occupied France, and retreated into detail. Swarms of tiny emblems fill the gently coloured spaces of his "constellation paintings", and are given long poetic titles like, Woman Beside a Lake Whose Surface Has Been Made Iridescent by a Passing Swan. Miró achieved worldwide recognition by the late 1950s. He continued to experiment with ceramics and lithography from his studio in Calamayor, Mallorca. Much of his painting and sculpture can be seen at the Fondation Maeght in St Paul de Vence, France, and at the Fundació Miró on Monjuich in Barcelona.

   Further reading

   - Dupin, J. (1962) Miró, London: Collins (a sensitive account of Miro's development).

   - Lassaigne, J. (1963) Miró, Lausanne: Skira (a competent study).

   - Penrose, R. (1995) Miró, London: Thames & Hudson (a clear and insightful study of Miro's life and work).

   HELEN OPPENHEIMER