Joan Miro'

Joan Miró Joan Miró Ferra was born in 1893 in Barcelona, Spain. At the young age of 14, Miró concurrently attended business school and art school. Upon graduation, Miró worked as a clerk, however after suffering a nervous breakdown, he gave up business and returned to art, studying at the Francesc Galí’s Escola d’Art from 1912 to 1915. Spotted by dealer José Dalmau, Miró was given his first solo exhibition in 1918 in Barcelona. Two years later, Miró met Pablo Picasso during his first trip to Paris. Subsequently, Miro began to divide his time between France and Spain, mounting his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1921 at the Galerie la Licorne. In Paris, Miró participated in the Dada art movement, and later, in 1924, joined the Surrealists. A very active period in his artistic life, Miró also visited the Netherlands in 1928 and produced his first collages and papiers collés that same year. The following year Miró began experimenting with lithography and produced his first etchings in 1933. New York’s Museum of Modern Art included Miró’s works in two exhibitions in 1936, “Cubism and Abstract Art,” and “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.” That same year, Miró left Spain due to the civil war. His monumental mural, The Reaper was commissioned for the Paris World’s Fair in 1937. Following his return to Spain in 1941, MoMA in New York mounted Miró’s first major retrospective. In the late 1950s, he almost exclusively produced only prints and ceramics, the latter of which he first began making in 1944, a decade earlier. Among his many achievements during this time, Miró was awarded the Grand Prize for Graphic Work at the 1954 Venice Biennale and included in the first Documenta in Kassel, Germany in 1955. Resuming painting in 1959, Miró commenced work on a series of large, mural-sized canvas yet returned again to focusing primarily on sculpture throughout the 1960s. Five years before his death, the Museé National d’Art Moderne in Paris exhibited over 500 artworks in a major retrospective centered on Miró’s expansive drawing practice. The artist passed away in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in 1983 at the age of 90.