Joan Miró

Joán Miró was born April 20, 1893, in Barcelona. He attended La Lonja's Escuela Superior de Artes Industriales y Bellas Artes and Francesco Gali's Escola d'Art, both in Barcelona. Prior to 1920, his work shows a variety of influences, including Fauvism, Cubism, and the Catalan folk art and Romanesque church decoration of his homeland. In 1920, he moved to Paris, where he met the circle of Surrealist poets and writers. He shared their interest in memory, fantasy, and the irrational and developed a style of painting - dreamlike and whimsical, with distorted animal forms, organic shapes and geometric constructions - that can be seen as a visual equivalent to the Surrealist exploration of language. Miró's first major museum retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1941. From 1954 to 1958, he worked almost exclusively in print and ceramic. He received the Grand Prize for Graphic Work at the Venice Biennale in 1954, and his work was included in the first Documenta exhbition in Kassel the following year. During the 1960s, he began to work intensively in sculpture. During his lifetime, retrospecitves of Miró's work took place at the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris (1962), the Grand Palais, Paris (1974), and the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris (1978). Miró died December 25, 1983 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.