Joàn Miró - the Catalan artist genius for young and old

Children love Miró, and adults who have received a childlike immediacy and curiosity of the reception of visual language also love him. Joàn Miró painted a lot of pictures that are simply cheerful, although (or precisely because) he had to fight his artistic career hard:

Joàn Miró was born in 1893 as the son of a craftsman in Barcelona , ​​the petty -bourgeois family opposed the artistic ambitions of the young Joàn at the beginning. So he first had to complete a commercial training and work as an accountant, only a nervous breakdown combined with a typhoid disease made his family rethink.

Miro was now allowed to register in 1912 at the private art school Escola d'Art of the advanced Francesc Galí, which he visited from 1912 to 1915. Galí introduced the highly gifted student to modern French art and made him known to Antoni Gaudí's architecture .

In the same year Miró also got to know the works of the cubists (Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, Jean Metzinger and Fernand Léger). In parallel, Miró also visited the free drawing academy “Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc”, which was rather cautiously opposite the avant -garde until 1918, sometimes in this conflict, I struck his work: "Sometimes I, desperately as I was, desperately chosen his head against the wall," he is later quoted from that time.

But as early as 1915, Miró, together with EC Ricart in Barcelona, ​​set up a first studio, from 1916 he was encouraged by art dealer Josep Dalmau, in 1917 Francis Picabia introduced him to the Dadaist .

In 1918 Miró had his first solo exhibition in the Galerías Dalmau in Barcelona, ​​and now founded a group of artists together with Ricart, Francesc Domingo, JF Ràfols and Rafael Sala, which was named after the progressive Gustave Courbet and wanted to emulate him.

The joint exhibitions showed highly lively and colorful works , but were not very successful. In 1918 Miró also traveled to Paris , where he Pablo Picasso , at the end of 1920 he moved into a studio in Paris, in 1921 he had his first, also not very successful solo exhibition in Paris.

Hemingway also bought a picture from Miró during this time that had now joined the surrealists , but remained a quiet outsider among them. However, he exhibited with the surrealists in 1925, had his second solo exhibition at the same time and was allowed to work with Max Ernst on the stage design and on the costumes for Djagilew's Ballet Romeo and Juliet , he was slowly getting better known.

When he moved into a studio on Montmartre in 1927, René Magritte , Hans Arp, Max Ernst and Paul Éluard were his neighbors. In 1928 he also met the sculptors Alexander Calder and Alberto Giacometti, who should stay his friends for life and should influence his works. In 1929 it went back to Miró's suggestion that Salvador Dalí joined the group of surrealists in Paris, Miró married in the same year and became the father of a daughter in 1931.

Miró now finally turned away from conventional painting, which found its place as a bought but not considered status symbol in the upper middle class. This not only influenced the choice of his topics and materials, but also clearly shows Miró's rebellious attitude towards commercialized art when he speaks of the "Assassinate de la Peinture" (the "murder of painting").

The next big exhibition was only in 1936, in which Miró was shown together with greats like Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Arp, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy and Meret Oppenheim. Shortly afterwards, he was able to participate in an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and an international surrealist exhibition in London.

Now it went upwards, in 1937 Miró was commissioned with a monumental painting and an exhibition poster for the Spanish pavilion of the world exhibition in Paris, followed in 1938 the “Exposition International Du Surréalisme” in the Beaux arts gallery in Paris. When France was occupied by the German troops in 1940, Miró returned to his birthplace to Spain and worked there.

From 1944 he made ceramic work together with the Catalan ceramist Josep Llorens I. In 1947 Miró was invited to the United States, where he designed a mural for a hotel in Cincinnati, at the same time his pictures were shown at a surrealist exhibition in Paris.

In 1948 he returned to Paris, where his ceramic sculptures were just exhibited, and spent a few busy years there.

In 1956 Miró retired to Palma de Mallorca and mainly worked on sculptures in the following years. He worked several times for and in America until 1960, and in 1968 his 75th birthday was celebrated with an exhibition and many certificates of honor.

Then came his last time, a time of anger, in which he defended himself against a recovery by Franco's authorities and against the commercialization of his works by designers and poster painters.

The “Murder of Painting” reached its peak in 1973 in the five -part series “Burned Linen walls” , in which Miró cuts entire areas with a soldering lamp.

When asked about the motive for the brachial power, Miró later said: "... was the real reason that I just wanted to treat myself to the pleasure, the people who see their commercial value in art alone - all those who believe and say that their works are worth a fortune! ' to call. "

In concern for his creative legacy, he also caused the lively construction activity, which Mallorca is more and more disferred in the tourist current, he initially handed over part of his property as a gift from the city administration of Palma, from which a foundation was created in 1981, which was founded in 1981.

Miró had already initiated the foundation of a first foundation in 1971, which was opened in 1975 under the name Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. In April 1983, Joàn Miró was still able to experience the exhibitions, publications and honors with which he was celebrated on his 90th birthday worldwide before died in Palma de Mallorca in December 1983.

In his long and eventful life, Miró has created an incredible number of works : around 2000 oil paintings , around 500 sculptures and approx. 400 ceramics are supplemented by around 5000 collages and drawings and a graphic work of around 3500 work.

Joàn Miró not only painted, he created “image poems”, beautiful and puzzling and full of symbols such as flowers and snails, women and stars.

At Miró, these symbols stand for the essential areas of cosmos and humans, flora and fauna, with which he had dealt with his whole life.

Only that with the fight against commercialization did not quite work out: Miró's “Étoile Bleue” was auctioned in London in June 2012 for 29 million euros at Sotheby’s and thus lined up among the 50 most expensive paintings in the world.