Squiggles and Circles - The Life and Work of Joan Miro i Ferra

-- Squiggles and Circles --

-- The Life and Work of Joan Miro i Ferra --

Three Paintings by Miro (Left to Right): The Farm; Women at Sunrise; Horse, Pipe, and Red Flower

One of the most creative individuals of a century full of creativity, the Spanish-Catalan artist Joan Miro i Ferra helped to redefine the world of modern art, breaking the boundaries of defined styles like expressionism to create art that reflected his inner unconscious self and what he considered the true spirit of artistic creativity.

 

More commonly known just as Joan Miro, he was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1893, and grew up in a family of talented craftsmen in the middle of Barcelona's medieval Barrio Gotic. His father, a goldsmith and watchmaker, enrolled him in private school in his childhood, where he took drawing classes and fell in love with painting. He enrolled himself in a fine art academy at age 14 and had his first solo show at 25, showing a great deal of drive and artistic talent from an early age. Before he committed himself entirely to art, however, he also studied business, working as a clerk until a nervous breakdown in 1912 convinced him to pursue art exclusively.

Joan Miro early in his career

Despite (and probably due to) his groundbreaking style, his work was ridiculed and even defaced at his early shows. Combined with pressure from his parents, who tried to discourage him from pursuing painting as a career, he faced serious opposition to his aspirations as an artist, but was intensely intrinsically motivated and refused to abandon his career or his unique personal style.

Miro continued to work even despite these setbacks, and moved to Paris in 1920 to join the community of avant-garde modern artists there and keep pushing his work forwards. His early work form this time was heavily influenced by the work of the artists around him in Paris, especially the Cubist and Fauvist schools of modern art, but it always maintained a distinctly Miro flavor, reflecting his upbringing and Catalonian pride alongside the French modernist influences.

A piece from his time in Paris - The House with the Palm Tree, 1918

Through his time in France he quickly grew in popularity and global acclaim, and his work began to reflect an even more personal take on modern art as he continued to mature and develop as an artist, growing more modern and surrealist as he used his paintings to explore his mind and the vivid imagery he saw in his dreams. One of his paintings, The Farm, was purchased by Ernest Hemingway, who described it as a masterpiece comparable to James Joyce's Ulysses in its imagery and symbolic power. 

The Farm, 1921

In 1924 he joined the Surrealist group led by Andre Breton, who sought to create social change through art and were defined by a rejection of society and established artistic tradition. From this point onwards, Miro's art would explode in creativity and self-expression, turning from stylized landscapes and farming scenes to vivid, chaotic depictions of the subconscious. He used bright, bold colors and automatic dream-drawing techniques loved by Parisian surrealists to create art that was distinctly surreal, but wholly reflective of his inner self.

The Tilled Field, 1923 (left); The Hunter (Catalan Landscape), 1924 (right)

The Reaper, 1937 (bottom)

Despite unofficially joining the surrealists in the 1920's, Miro refused to be pinned down to a single style, and continued to develop his own brand of modern art. In his over 70-year long career as an artist, he moved in and out of styles and collaborated with boundary-breaking artists from all over the world in his pursuit of creating art that reflected his inner imagination. His art grew more representational and less surreal through the 1930's as his work became more political. One of his most important works, The Reaper, was painted in 1937 as an anti-war protest but was destroyed by a bombing raid during the Spanish Civil War, driving him to include even more political messaging in his work.

During the 1940's he was forced to move across Europe to avoid the fascist takeovers of his homes in both Spain and France. After the fascists won the Spanish Civil War in 1939, he moved to France full-time before being forced to flee back to Spain by the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. The violence of the 1930's and 40's led his art to take on explicitly political meanings for the rest of his life, including both anti-war and Catalan nationalist messages. 

The Hope of a Condemned Man II, 1974 (left); The Great Carnivore, 1969 (right)

As he continued to develop his work, he also adopted new mediums and techniques, incorporating sculpture and writing into his already extensive stylistic repertoire. He continued to work until his death in 1983, and produced a huge amount of paintings and sculptures at the studio in his adopted home in Palma, Spain, including over 250 illustrated books. He never settled on a singular style to place on his art and included elements from all over the changing artistic landscape in his work, from the Cubism, Fauvism, and Surrealism of his early career to the styles of expressionism, lyrical abstraction, and color field painting that emerged after he was already firmly established in the field.

The Caress of a Bird, 1967 (left); Dona i Ocell, 1982 (right)

By the time of his death in 1983, he had grown increasingly radical in both his style and his political theories, calling for the "assassination of painting" to free art from being dominated by "bourgeoise art" and the use of paintings by the wealthy to promote propaganda and cultural identity. His styles at this time grew more and more theoretical as well, creating concepts like four-dimensional painting and gas sculpture, but by now he had long surpassed the critics that had torn his work to shreds in the 1920's, and these radical proposals only served to increase his fame and international acclaim. Dozens of major museums, from the Tate Modern in London to the National Art Gallery in D.C. and the MOMA in New York have hosted huge exhibitions of his work over the last four decades, and an entire museum in his native Barcelona, the Fundacio Joan Miro, was built in his honor.

Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona, Spain

Despite his colossal success, international acclaim, and prestigious awards in his honor, Miro's life was marked by deep struggles with mental illness that sometimes left him bedridden. Miro struggled with depression for most of his life, first writing about it in 1911 when he was 18, but instead of his mental health hurting his artistic output, it provided him an outlet for his emotions and a way to find clarity when he was at his worst. He was first inspired to paint as a career due to a nervous breakdown in his youth and it remained a driving factor in his work for his entire career. Painting gave him a way to take charge of his mental health and redirect his destructive emotions towards creativity, bringing him mental calm and the focus needed to deal with his darkest thoughts and feelings.\

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mir%C3%B3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reaper_(Mir%C3%B3_painting)

https://web.archive.org/web/20141022010044/http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/bios/1024

https://art.nelson-atkins.org/objects/53/women-at-sunrise;jsessionid=0313303DB9B5401B72E5F8178F7CDB17?ctx=b8346514-aa69-4236-9df9-d8f6d8546eae&idx=1