Joan Miró: The Complete Story
Joan Miro was the Catalan painter of floating stars, birds and eyes, one of the inventors of a language painting had never spoken. Born in Barcelona in 1893, he declared he wanted to assassinate painting, and spent seventy years doing it beautifully.
The pictures look like play. The man was a monk of the studio. Here is the discipline behind the floating shapes.
Joan Miró at a glance:
1893: born in Barcelona, son of a watchmaker and goldsmith who wanted him in accounting.
1920: moves to Paris and lives on almost nothing; he later said hunger gave him hallucinations he put into paint.
1937: paints The Reaper for the Spanish Republic's pavilion in Paris, a few steps from Guernica. The mural has been lost ever since.
1958: his two ceramic walls for UNESCO in Paris win the Guggenheim International Award.
1983: dies in Palma de Mallorca on Christmas Day, at 90, months after his 22-meter Woman and Bird went up in Barcelona.
The Farm, and the hardest sale in Paris
Miro reached Paris in 1920, poor enough that he later claimed hunger gave him hallucinations he drew from.
His first great painting, The Farm of 1921 and 1922, an inventory of his family's Catalan farmhouse down to the last snail, found its buyer in Ernest Hemingway, who rolled dice with a rival for the right, borrowed the final payment, and carried it home in a taxi.
It hangs today in Washington's National Gallery.
The most surrealist of us all
Andre Breton, Surrealism's severe pope, called Miro the most surrealist of us all, and the paintings of the mid 1920s show why: fields of blue with a dot, a flame, a word, dream space with the furniture removed. But Miro never signed up for anyone's doctrine, kept Catalonia in everything, and answered the movement's theories with craft: I want to assassinate painting, he said, and meant the polite kind.
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The Constellations, painted in flight
His most loved series was made in the worst years: 23 small Constellations, begun in Normandy in 1940 as the bombers passed overhead and finished in Mallorca in 1941, webs of stars, women and birds in perfect balance. Smuggled to New York for a 1945 show, they electrified young American painters, Jackson Pollock among them, and became a bridge between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.
The myth: childlike
Because the shapes are simple, Miro is called childlike, as if the work were effortless.
His studio practice says otherwise: he worked banker's hours all his life, prepared grounds like an old master, and a single late black line, watched in the film footage, takes him a full held breath to draw.
Picasso had it right when he kept The Farm's painter close: nothing is harder than simplicity with everything at stake.
Barcelona, Palma, and the late giant
Recognition came late and enormous: the Fundacio Joan Miro opened on Montjuic in Barcelona in 1975, built by his friend Josep Lluis Sert, and his Palma studio, where he worked from 1956, is now the Fundacio Pilar i Joan Miro. He made ceramic walls for UNESCO in 1958, a mosaic for Barcelona's Ramblas in 1976, and died in Palma on Christmas Day 1983, at ninety.
Where to see Miró
The Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona and the Palma studio are the pilgrimages; the Pompidou, MoMA and the National Gallery in Washington, home of The Farm, hold the landmarks abroad.
Assassinating painting
In 1927 Miró announced that he wanted to assassinate painting. He meant the polite easel picture, and he spent five decades finding weapons.
There were collages of tar paper and sandpaper, objects nailed together, tapestries he slashed and singed.
In 1973, at 80, he attacked five large canvases with a blowtorch and exhibited the charred results in Paris. The market wanted Mirós; he handed it ashes and made the ashes the work.
The mural years
America gave Miró walls. In 1947 he painted a ten-meter mural for a Cincinnati hotel restaurant, working in a Manhattan studio because the wall itself could wait.
With the potter Josep Llorens Artigas he built two ceramic walls for UNESCO in Paris in 1958, the Wall of the Sun and the Wall of the Moon. President Eisenhower handed him the Guggenheim International Award for them.
The walls kept coming: Harvard, the Barcelona airport, and a pavement mosaic on La Rambla that thousands of pedestrians cross daily without once looking down.
Ubu, giants and a lost mural
The Spanish Civil War pulled Miró off the fence. In 1937 he designed the Aidez l'Espagne stamp and painted The Reaper, a Catalan peasant mid-revolt, for the Republic's Paris pavilion.
When the pavilion came down in 1938, the mural vanished. It has never been found.
Under Franco he kept his politics in code, casting the dictator as Ubu, the bloated king from Jarry's play, across whole suites of prints. In 1978 his giant Mori el Merma puppets jeered a Ubu-like tyrant on a Barcelona stage, three years after Franco's death.
The Joan Miró questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? Floating signs, stars, birds and eyes, on fields of colour: Surrealism's freest language.
What are the Constellations? 23 small works painted through 1940 and 1941, in flight from the war.
Was he really a Surrealist? Breton called him the most surrealist of all; Miro never formally joined anything.
When did he die? On 25 December 1983, in Palma de Mallorca, at ninety.
How much is a Miró worth? Peinture (Étoile Bleue), from 1927, sold for 23.6 million pounds in London in 2012, still his record. The Constellations, when one surfaces, trade privately for more.
What was his relationship with Picasso? A wary, lifelong friendship between two Catalans in Paris. Picasso bought Miró's 1919 Self-Portrait early on and kept it until he died.
More secrets to unlock
The picture Hemingway would not trade
Hemingway never let The Farm go: he wrote that he would not trade it for any picture in the world, and hung it over his bed in Cuba. When his widow gave it to the National Gallery in 1987, the wall label finally settled the dice game's stakes: the hungriest painter in Paris had produced a national treasure.