Joan Miró

The son of a goldsmith and watchmaker, he received private drawing lessons at a young age and from 1907 studied at the commercial school and the private art academy La Llotja in Barcelona, where Pablo Picasso's father also taught. Against the resistance of his parents, he decided to pursue a career as an artist after completing his training. His early works are still characterized by the bright colors of Fauvism and the broken forms of Cubism and refer with their powerful two-dimensionality to the folk art of his native Catalonia. In 1919 he travelled to Paris, where he visited Pablo Picasso in his studio, and they became close friends. After a rather unsuccessful exhibition in 1921, a few years later he met the Surrealist poets and writers Louis Aragon and André Breton, whose Surrealist group he joined. In the years that followed, he created dreamlike visions with abstract signs, symbols, and written words that had a strange and sometimes humorous quality and thus appealed to the art of the mind. In the 1930s he developed his own characteristic style, which attracted international attention. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Miro left Spain and lived in Paris for several years but returned in 1940. In addition to large-format paintings, Miro's late work included numerous sculptures, murals, drawings, prints, and ceramics. The artist died on 25 December 1983 in Palma de Mallorca. Miro's pictorial world reflects his constant mental movement between the new modern art and Catalan folk art. For him, the artistic work represented a meditative, spiritual action in order to recognize reality and its phenomena independently of rational object knowledge and concepts.