Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Joan Miro was born April 20, 1983 in Barcelona, Spain and died December 25, 1983 in Palma, Majorca. Miro’s art interest was evident at a young age –even though he did poorly in school, he began drawing when he was eight. In 1907 he attended the Lonja School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, to the dismay of his father, as well as attended the Gali School of Arts in 1912, also in Barcelona, where Gali introduced Miro to the Modern Art and the importance of those artists who were developing works among Barcelona and Paris. After Miro completed his artistic education in Barcelona, he produced portraits and landscapes in the Fauve manner (a style of painting popular around 1900 that emphasized brilliant and aggressive colors).
In 1918 Miro had his first one-man show in Barcelona, sparking his future as a multifaceted artist. Throughout his career, Miro painted, made sculptures, did ceramics, as well as other art forms. His early art, like that of the similarly influenced Fauves and Cubists exhibited in Barcelona, was inspired by Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne. Later in his career Miro experimented with surrealism, automatic drawing and expressionism before he adopted his own style. He was among the first artists who developed the so called automatic drawing, which is defined as the surrealist technique without conscience self-censorship. His work was simple, plastic, colorful, unique and beautiful; and mostly all of it is regarded as childlike with little “rhyme” to it.
Miro’s aim was to rediscover the sources of human feeling, to create poetry by way of painting, using a vocabulary of signs and symbols, plastic metaphors, and dream images to express definite themes. In his paintings he expressed his contempt for conventional painting methods and his desire to “kill”, “murder”, or “rape” them in favor of more contemporary means of expression. He sought “motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called the eloquence of silence”....