Joan Miró was a Catalan painter, born in Barcelona in 1893, who died in Palma de Mallorca in 1983. He turned stars, birds, eyes and women into a private alphabet of signs, and he is remembered as one of the great Surrealists. In 1927 he said he wanted to assassinate painting, and he was still at it at eighty, when he set his own canvases on fire.
The pictures look like play, as if a child had scattered stars, birds and eyes across the canvas. The man behind them began his working life as an accounts clerk in a chemist's shop, and he ended it burning paintings.
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Miró said it plainly in 1927: he wanted to assassinate painting. He did not mean it as a pose. For decades he attacked the easel picture with collage, with found materials, with acid colors, and then he kept painting anyway.
In December 1973, at eighty, he cut canvases with sharp tools, poured petrol on them and set them alight. He put out the flames with a wet mop and started again. He said that fire destroys less than it transforms.
What was he trying to kill? Part of the answer is in a chemist's shop in Barcelona in 1910, and part is in a burned canvas in 1973.
What You'll Discover
Why a clerk walked out of business.
Who gambled for The Farm.
Why Breton claimed him.
What happened to his giant mural.
Why the stars were painted in flight.
What the fire was for.