Joan Miro

(1893-1983) Joan Miró was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramist born in Barcelona. From very early on, Miró was immediately drawn towards the arts community that was gathering in Montparnasse, France and by 1920 Miró had moved to Paris. In Paris he developed his unique style of organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. He was generally considered a Surrealist because of his influence by the Dadaist movement and his fascination with automatism and sexual symbolism. In 1959, Miró was asked to represent Spain in The Homage to Surrealism exhibition, by André Breton, together with works by Enrique Tábara, Salvador Dalí, and Eugenio Granell. Miró, along with André Masson, represented the beginning of Surrealism as an art movement by developing automatic drawing as a way to undo previous established techniques in painting. However, in order to be free to experiment with other artistic styles without compromising his position within the group, Miró chose not to become an official member of the Surrealists. Miro pursued his own interests in the art world, ranging from automatic drawing and surrealism to expressionism and Color Field painting. Later, Miró’s variation of Cubism became an established art form in France. Many of Miró’s pieces are exhibited today in the Fundació Joan Miró in Montjuïc, Barcelona and the U.S. National Gallery in Washington, D.C.