Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893. The family’s roots in the Tarragona countryside and in Majorca are continually present in his work. His early paintings show influences of Van Gogh, Cézanne, the Fauves, Cubism and Futurism. In Barcelona he frequented the Galeries Dalmau, a centre of avant-garde art where foreign artists gathered during the First World War and where Miró held his first exhibition, in 1918. It was in that year that he began to develop a new pictorial style that was more detailed and calligraphic. Following the example of other Catalan and Spanish artists, in 1920 he made his first visit to Paris. There he had his first studio, at 45 Rue Blomet, alongside the painter André Masson, who was visited by young poets and writers. These contacts, and Miró’s discovery of the writings of Apollinaire, Jarry, Lautréamont and Rimbaud, brought about a change in his pictorial language. He abandoned all realism in favour of the imagination, with the idea of going beyond visual art in much the same way as the Surrealists. At the end of the 1920s, Miró underwent a crisis in his painting and began working with new media such as collage and assemblage.
In the early 1930s he returned to painting with the idea of achieving “the maximum clarity, force and visual aggressiveness; in other words, to first provoke a physical sensation in order to finally reach the soul”. But drama and tension were to predominate in his art after the summer of 1934, as a presentiment of the approaching disaster that was the Spanish Civil War. Miró wanted to express the atmosphere of tragedy that oppressed him, the anguish of death, and he did this by creating the monsters that emerged in what he called his “savage paintings”, in which detailing, perspective and shading reappeared. With the outbreak of the Second World War, which Miró experienced at close hand in France, the expression of his disgust gave way to a longing for escape and regeneration through his art. He put aside tragic realism, shading and chiaroscuro and established the basis of a new language, a new harmony that was the result of the communion between the celestial and the earthly. In the series of Constellations he created a vocabulary of forms - a personal alphabet or language of his own based on the terms woman, bird, sun, moon, star - which he continued to use all his life.
In the canvases from the 1960s onwards Miró persisted with the gradual isolation of these signs and the simplification of forms and colours, in a clear demonstration of his idea of achieving the maximum intensity with the minimum of means. In some cases, even the sign itself disappeared. His painting became increasingly more gestural.
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