Joan Miro

(1893-1983)

Catalan artist, one of the foremost exponents of abstract art and Surrealist fantasy.Miro was born April 20, 1893, in Barcelona and studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and the Academia Galí. Miro’s work before 1920 shows wide-ranging influences, including the bright colors of the fauves, the broken forms of cubism. Miro moved to Paris in 1920, where, under the influence of surrealist poets and writers, he evolved his mature style. Miro drew on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues of surrealist poetry. These dreamlike visions, such as Harlequin's Carnival or Dutch Interior, often have a whimsical or humorous quality, containing images of playfully distorted animal forms, twisted organic shapes, and odd geometric constructions. The forms of his oil paintings are organized against flat neutral backgrounds and are painted in a limited range of bright colors, especially blue, red, yellow, green, and black. Amorphous amoebic shapes alternate with sharply drawn lines, spots, and curlicues, all positioned on the canvas with seeming nonchalance. Miro later produced highly generalized, ethereal works in which his organic forms and figures are reduced to abstract spots, lines and bursts of colors.

Joan Miro’s famous oil paintings include:

• Le Vol D'Oiseau sur la Plaine I
• Prades, the Village
• The Farm
• The Tilled Field
• Harlequin's Carnival
• Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird
• Dutch Interior I
• Still Life with Old Shoe
• A Dew Drop Falling