MIRO, JOAN

born April 20, 1893, Barcelona, Spain died Dec. 25, l983, Palma, Majorca, Spain Catalan artist, one of the foremost exponents of abstract art and Surrealist fantasy. The influence of Paul Klee is apparent in his dream pictures and imaginary landscapes of the late 1920s. His mature style evolved from the tension between this fanciful, poetic impulse and his vision of the harshness of modern life. He worked extensively in lithography and produced numerous murals, tapestries, and sculptures for public spaces. Mir's father was a watchmaker and goldsmith. Both the artisan tradition and the austere Catalan landscape were of great importance to his art. Mir's artistic development did not progress with the directness of his countryman Picasso, who could draw like a master while still a boy. Instead of being allowed to go to an art school, Mir was expected to complete high school, though he failed to do so. He then attended a commercial college and worked for two years as a clerk in an office, until he had a mental and physical breakdown. His parents took him for convalescence to an estate, Montroig, near Tarragona, which they bought especially for this purpose, and finally allowed him to attend an art school in Barcelona. His teacher at this school, Francisco Gal, showed a great understanding of his 18-year-old pupil, advising him to touch the objects he was about to draw, a procedure that strengthened Mir's feeling for the spatial quality of objects. Gal also introduced his pupil to examples of the latest schools of modern art from Paris as well as to the buildings of Antonio Gaud, Barcelona's famous Art Nouveau architect. Whereas artists of the contemporary Fauve and Cubist schools deliberately attempted to destroy the canons of tradition in order to attain a new kind of pristine vision, Mir possessed such a vision naturally. In his paintings and drawings he sought above all to establish means of metaphorical expressionthat is, to discover signs that stand for concepts of nature in a transcendent, poetic sense. He wanted to depict nature as it would be depicted by a primitive man or a child equipped with the intelligence of a 20th-century adult; in this respect, he had much in common with the Surrealists and Dadaists, two other schools of modern artists who were striving to achieve similar aims by more intellectual means than Mir used. Mir's art developed slowly from his first clumsy attempts at expression to the apparently playful masterpieces of his later period. His fanatical honesty and his conscientious craftsmanship compelled him to work on many of his pictures for years. From 1915 to 1919 Mir worked in Barcelona, at Montroig, and on Majorca, painting landscapes, portraits, and nudes in which his interest centred on the rhythmic interplay of volumes and areas of colour. His colours were still dark and heavy, though he delineated details as if superimposing on a heavy earthly ground a filigree of luminous leaves and blossoms. His manner was the same in landscapes, portraits, and nudes. Mir was one of the many artists who made their way from abroad to Paris during the first two decades of the 20th century and enriched French painting, which was to influence the art of the whole world. Most of these foreign artists elected to become Frenchmen after coming into contact with the French artistic metropolis, but Mir remained attached to his Catalan homeland, in his choice both of dwelling places and of subjects for his pictures. From 1919 onward Mir lived alternately in Spain and Paris. In the paintings he produced in the period between World Wars I and IIthe great still lifes, landscapes, and phantasmagorias set free from both space and timehe gradually removed the objects he portrayed from their natural context and reassembled them as if in accordance with a new, mysterious grammar, creating a ghostly, eerie impression. From 1925 to 1928, under the influence of the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Paul Klee, he painted dream pictures and imaginary landscapes in which the linear configurations and patches of colour look almost as though they were set down randomly. After a trip to The Netherlands, where he studied the 17th-century Dutch realist painters in the museums, the figurative elements in his pictures once more assumed a firmer shape. But, when a tendency toward beautiful, tasteful forms emerged in his works, he countered it with more brutal signs, collages, and objects made up of the waste products of industry. By the 1930s Mir's artistic horizons were expanding. He designed decor for ballets. His paintings began to be exhibited regularly in French and American galleries. In 1934 he designed tapestries, and that led to an interest in the monumental and in murals. At the time of the Spanish political turmoil and Civil War in the late 1930s, Mir was living in Paris. In their demonic expressiveness, his pictures of this period mirrored the fears and horrors of those years. At the Paris World Exhibition of 1937, he painted for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic a mural, The Reaper, containing a strong element of social criticism. During World War II Mir returned to Spain, where he painted his Constellations, a series of small works that constitute symbols of the happy collaboration of everything creative, of the elements and the cosmos. They represent a challenge to the anonymous powers of corruption in social and political life, the cause of misery and wars. During the last year of the war, Mir, together with his potter friend Artigas, produced ceramics that revealed a new impetuosity of expression. From 1948 onward he once more divided his time between Spain and Paris. That year saw the start of the series of very poetic works the symbols of which were based on the theme of woman, bird, and star. Pictures wildly spontaneous in character came into being alongside others whose forms were executed with punctilious craftsmanship. Both approaches were also combined in Mir's sculptures; in them all his earlier figurations were happily amalgamated to form erotic fetishes or signals towering into space. In the years following World War II, Mir became world famous; his sculptures, drawings, and paintings were exhibited in many countries. In 1950 he painted a wall for Harvard University. His ceramic experiments were crowned by the great ceramic wall in the UNESCO building in Paris (1958), for which he received the Great International Prize of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In 1962 Paris honoured him with the first major exhibition of his collected works in the National Museum of Modern Art. The architect Jos Luis Sert built for him on Majorca the large studio of which he had dreamed all his life. Among his later works were several monumental sculptures, such as those executed for Chicago and for Houston, Texas. In 1980, in conjunction with his receipt of Spain's Gold Medal of Fine Arts, a plaza in Madrid was named in Mir's honour. In spite of his fame, however, Mir continued to devote himself exclusively to looking and creating. A taciturn, introverted man of short stature, Mir had not found it easy to attain the wisdom permeated by irony that ultimately characterized his work. From his youth, he had felt compelled by an almost anarchic obstinacy to keep his eyes firmly fixed on his goal despite the resistance he met from society or from the prevailing artistic theories. His late works manifest an even greater simplification of figure and background than his early ones. In order to realize his inner visions, it had become enough for Mir to set down a dot and a sensitive line on a sea-blue surface; in this the spectator could still find himself in a state of total enchantment. His early works anticipated the representational techniques of his later style; thus, although the former playful or aggressive irony gave way to a quasi-religious meditation, all of his works form a coherent whole manifested by a common quality of rejuvenation and deepening. Walter Erben The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica Additional reading James Johnson Sweeney, Joan Miro (1941, reprinted 1969), a brief work, was the first comprehensive presentation of Mir's life and work. Walter Erben, Joan Mir (1959), reproduces many different examples of the artist's work at his home and studio on Majorca. Jacques Dupin, Mir (1962), is a standard work written by an art historian and longtime friend of the painter and containing a detailed (though now dated) bibliography of writings on Mir as well as a catalog of his pictorial and sculptural works. Roland Penrose, Mir (1970, reissued 1985), is also by a longtime friend. Works written since the artist's death include Pere A. Serra, Mir and Mallorca (1986); and Guy Weelen, Mir (1989).