Joan Miró

Joan Miró - 'Les Mains Sales'.

Technique: Print aquatint on lithography background

Joan Miró
(Barcelona, 1893 - Palma, 1983)
Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893, but his emotional landscapes, those that would shape him as a person and artist, were essentially Mont-roig, Paris, Mallorca and later New York and Japan. Mont-roig, a small town in the Baix Camp region, would be the counterpoint to the intellectual agitation he experienced in Paris in the 1920s with the surrealist poets, and to the stimulus of abstract expressionism he discovered in New York in the 1940s. Later, in the midst of the Second World War, Joan Miró left his exile in France and settled in Palma de Mallorca, a place of refuge and work, where his friend Josep Lluís Sert designed the studio he had always dreamed of.

His attachment to the landscape of Mont-roig and later to that of Mallorca would be a determining factor in his work. The link with the land and his interest in everyday objects and the natural environment would form the background to some of his technical and formal investigations. Miró shunned academicism in his constant search for a pure, global work, not ascribed to any particular movement. Contained in his forms and public manifestations, it is through the plastic arts that Joan Miró showed his rebelliousness and great sensitivity to the political and social events that surrounded him. This contrast of forces led him to create a unique and highly personal language that made him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.