Famous Catalan artist Joan Miró standing in front of ‘The Ski Lesson’, one of his paintings.
Joan Miró is best known for his bold and unusual works which inhabit a unique space between abstraction and Surrealism. He achieved significant international success during his long life, and he is hailed today as one of the most important and innovative artistic figures of the 20th century.
Miró’s work remains popular at auction more than 40 years since his death in 1983. His pieces are especially popular in the UK and the US, and prints dominate his market, accounting for a massive 92% of his work sold at auction, with most fetching prices between £1,000 and £5,000.
Despite his fame, Miró’s life was fairly ordinary, and it appears to have been structured and highly organised. As the artist himself said, “I live like a normal citizen. But there is a Catalan saying that the procession marches inside you. What happens is inside.” Read on to discover five things you might not have known about Joan Miró.
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Catalonia Inspired Him
Catalonia is an autonomous community in the north-east of Spain with a strong spirit of independence. Joan Miró was born in its capital and largest city, Barcelona, in 1893, and Catalan identity and nationality remained hugely important to him all his life; as he said, “Where I am rooted the strongest is in Catalonia.”
Though his early work was not overtly political, it did feature signs and symbols of Catalan landscapes and traditions. But it was only during the Spanish Civil War that Miró began creating work that had a clear message – his 1937 mural, El Segador (The Reaper), for instance, featured a Catalan peasant bearing a sickle and clenching his fist in a Republican salute. The mural was either destroyed or lost some time afterwards, but Miró had taken a clear public stance, supporting Catalan identity and standing against the Nationalists.
Miro’s commitment to Catalonia continued during the brutal years of Franco’s dictatorship, during which Catalan culture was forcibly repressed. One series of 1968 lithographs, for instance, was titled Les Essències de la Terra (The Essences of the Land); it was based upon several old Catalan texts and the writings of Joan Perucho in honour of Miró’s Catalan origins.
His Most Expensive Prints Sold For Over £118,000
Homentage à Joan Prats is a series of 15 lithographs published in 1971. They pay homage to Joan Prats, a well-known promoter of Catalan art who became a close friend of Miró’s after they first met at the Llotja art school in Barcelona. Prats played a key role in the establishment of the Fundació Joan Miró, donating his large personal collection of the artist’s work so it could be appreciated by the public. Miró’s lithographic tribute to his friend was published one year after Prats’ death, and the series almost tripled its estimate when it was sold by Galerie Kornfeld Auktionen in June 2022 for £118,210.
Poetry Was Hugely Important To His Work
Joan Miró once claimed:” I make no distinction between painting and poetry.” Indeed, he read voraciously, and poetry infiltrated much of his dazzlingly imaginative work, from the lyrical titles (such as Les Essències De La Terra) to the surreal subject matter – Le Lézard Aux Plumes d’Or for instance, is a series of lithographs based upon Miró’s poem of the same name, which translates as The Lizard with Golden Feathers. To the artist, “The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words.”
He Worked Prolifically Into Old Age
Joan Miró was born in 1893, and he died on Christmas Day 90 years later. He worked feverishly throughout his long career, constantly experimenting with new styles, techniques, and ideas. Indeed, many of his most sought-after pieces were created in the final years of his life, including Sans Titre and Composition, both monotypes from 1977.
Miró’s attitude to his work is perhaps best summed up by a declaration he made in 1978 at the age of 85, when he stated that some of his recent paintings were created “in a frenzy, with real violence so that people will know that I am alive, that I’m breathing, that I still have a few more places to go. I’m heading in new directions.”
Joan Miro working in his studio
He Refused To Align Himself With Any One Artistic Movement
Joan Miró’s art is most often described as a combination of abstraction and Surrealism, but he also borrowed elements from Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, and Expressionism, and his work refuses to fit neatly into any one category. Miró exhibited regularly with the Surrealists led by André Breton, but he never officially joined the movement, despite Breton calling him “the most Surrealist of us all.”
It is the interplay between different artistic styles that helped set Miró’s work apart, along with the striking images he sometimes saw in dreams or hallucinations; he once said that in his early career, he’d be so hungry that he “saw shapes on the ceiling” whilst lying in bed. He called these “hallucinations of hunger”, and he would copy them into a notebook to use later in his art.
