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Summary

Joan Miró was born in a room with stars painted on the ceiling. He grew up in the city of Barcelona, where rugged independence and creativity go hand in hand. In 1907, he enrolled in art classes at La Escuela de la Lonja, an academic and professionally oriented school of applied arts where a young man named Picasso had impressed the teachers ten years earlier. Then he entered Galí’s private classes. Unlike the Lonja School, it offered a setting where Miró’s distinctive ways of seeing were rewarded. At Gali’s academy, Miró met some of the men who would become not only fellow artists but intimate friends. He and Enric Cristòfol Ricart soon rented a studio together near the Barcelona Cathedral. Later identified as a Surrealist, Miró never really espoused any school or established style of art. “It was clear in his mind,” as one critic has put it, “that he had to go beyond all categories and invent an idiom that would express his origins and be authentically his own”. Over the course of his career, he even worked hard not to follow his own traditions. Clearly Miró had studied Cubism’s broken forms and had learned to admire the strident colours of the Fauves. But he had an eye of his own, and his paintings combined twisted perspectives, heavy brushwork, and surprises in colour. He was finding ways to merge the stylish two-dimensionality of the times with inspirations taken from Catalan folk art and Romanesque church frescos. Joan Miró began to recognise that, like Picasso, if he was going to become an artist in earnest, he needed to move to Paris. For a while he rented a studio at 45 rue Blomet, next door to the painter André Masson. Masson was just the first link in an entire community of artists with which Miró found a home, just as they were beginning to coalesce in the movement of art and sensibility they called “Surrealism”. It was a movement of thought that at once extolled the individual and the imagination and at the same time flaunted tradition, rationality, and even common sense. Influenced by the practitioners of surrealism, Miró never really joined their ranks. The joyful freedom espoused by the Dadaists was more to his liking than the manifestos and dogma of the Surrealists. His naïve originality drew the attention and admiration of them all, however, and he was soon the favoured illustrator for the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste. In his last years, Joan Miró spoke to his grandson of his lifelong love of Catalonian folk art - the natural forms, the independent spirit, the naiveté that is both beautiful and surprising. “Folk art never fails to move me,” he said. “It is free of deception and artifice. It goes straight to the heart of things”. In speaking of the art from the countryside that had nourished him, Joan Miró found the best words to describe himself. With his honesty, spontaneity, and childlike enthusiasm for shape, texture, and colour, he created a universe of artworks sure to delight, puzzle, and reward.

• The Arts