Overview
French father of Surrealism Andre Breton called Spanish artist Joan Miro (1893-1983) the most Surrealist of us all," while Miro himself infamously called for "the assassination of painting." Particularly between 1927 and 1937, transformative years during his very long career, Miro worked to both attack and reinvigorate painting. Though he maintained his freedom, experimenting with other movements such as Expressionism and Color Field painting and never truly becoming a member of the Surrealist group, Miro was among the first to incorporate automatic drawing into his practice. He left behind a distinctive body of mixed-media work--including paintings, murals, sculptures, mosaics and ceramics--whose influence has only continued to grow. This fully illustrated publication, with an essay by leading Miro scholar Jacques Dupin, reveals new aspects of the artist's life and work.
Joan Miro was born in 1893 in Barcelona. After his first trip to Paris in 1920, and through 1931, Miro generally spent half of each year in the French capital and half in his native Catalonia, returning to live in France after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. One of the twentieth century's greatest Modern artists, Miro created a pictorial world of intense imaginative power, in which visionary and cosmic elements are inextricably intertwined with the earthly and mundane. He died in 1983 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain."