Where did the Catalan genius of surrealism draw inspiration for his inimitable paintings: Joan Miró

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Joan Miró became one of the most influential avant-garde artists of the 20th century in Europe. He was inspired by the surreal and cubist movements that emerged across Europe at the turn of the century, and continued to develop his own distinctive style, creating unusual and sometimes whimsical pieces.

Joan Miró was an influential 20th century painter, sculptor, ceramist and engraver who was born in 1893 in the Catalan region of Spain, near Barcelona. He began painting as a child and later attended business school as well as the La Longja School of Fine Arts.

In his youth, he became acquainted with the rich folklore of Catalonia, which later influenced his imagery, in which he saw all natural forms as creatures, including pebbles and trees. During a visit to the Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona, he also got acquainted with the completed interiors of churches with frescoes from the 9th-12th centuries, with their relatively rough execution and simple, flat and caricatured images.

All of these elements can be seen in the artist's work, as well as the use of scale differences, where one shape is disproportionately larger than others, a technique often used by children when they make the objects most important to them the largest objects in the image.

After three years at business school, Joan got a job as an accountant in a pharmacy that his parents had chosen for him. There he overworked and became seriously ill, on the verge of a "nervous breakdown", which was followed by an attack of typhoid fever. Then his parents took him to their new country farm Montroig, located in a secluded Catalan village. His health condition forced his parents to allow him to do what he most wanted to do - to paint. He attended the Gali Academy in Barcelona (a freedom-loving academy influenced by contemporary foreign artists, where he also had an interest in literature and music). He also learned to paint with just touch, not sight.

During the Dada period, Ferrat began reading avant-garde surrealist poets such as Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdi. He met Josep Llorens y Artigas, who became his lifelong friend and with whom he was to collaborate on pottery projects in the following years. Joan was also influenced by Fauvism (in particular, Henri Matisse) and Cubism, which began in the early years of the 20th century, initially giving his preference to painting still lifes.

From 1915 to 1918 he painted nudity, then portraits and landscapes. And then he began to geometrize forms and use colors regardless of their existence in nature (like the Fauves, who used bright colors that are not visible in nature). He also began looking for signs and symbols depicting people and animals in tension or movement. In his youth, he was most influenced by Paul Cezanne, Manet, Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh. The Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona was a gathering place for foreign visitors. It was there that Joan met Francis Picabia, a Dadaist painter.

Throughout his life he was influenced by his Catalan heritage, such as decorated Catalan ceramics and Catalan frescoes, which were restored in the 1920s and painted with flat folk-style patterns. Over time, he began to gravitate towards surrealism.

Miro has exhibited his work in surreal exhibitions, and was particularly influenced by the surrealist poets, who, in their quest to penetrate the subconscious, played games such as Exquisite Corpse in order to compose poetry. Exquisite corpse (aftermath) is a technique whereby a vocabulary is passed on to a group of poets, each of whom selected a word at random. Whatever words appeared, they lined up in a poem. This is how the expression "Exquisite Corpse" was created. They also used the techniques of mental automatism (for example, free association) and "systematic feeling disorder".

Eventually, Joan and other artists developed a way to transfer these techniques to their visual environment, using their dreams and visual free associations. At that time, Ferrat painted about a hundred paintings from his dreams and this was his most surreal period. He also illustrated surreal poetry in collaboration with poets.

After moving to Paris, Joan's art underwent great changes: he moved to more symbolic forms (for example, hieroglyphs), geometric shapes and general rhythm. His forms included cats, butterflies, mannequins, and Catalan peasants, and there was visual movement in his imagery.

Later he began to paint figures borrowed from Catalan folk art and paintings based on postcards of some Dutch interiors he saw in Holland, by artists such as Jan Steen. The images he worked with were overflowing with forms. Joan gradually simplified the forms and cut the image heavily, using geometric divisions and bending movements in compositions.

He then completed the first phase of his creativity and began to question and re-evaluate his work for the next ten years, which were struggles for him, financial and artistic. He began experimenting with materials - he made papier collages and collages using images of common objects such as household utensils, cars, as well as real nails, ropes, etc. This period of experimentation helped him to throw away any traditional practices and get rid of familiar details. and a technician at work.

By using objects that have no meaning, artists can concentrate on the abstract qualities of the objects rather than the associated meanings or emotions, which allows for greater formal freedom. These neutral objects, having no special aesthetic value or significance, divert attention from the subject and direct it to the form and content of the image. After creating such collages, Miro transferred the image of the collage to the canvas.

Although Miro is often described as an abstract artist, he himself believed that this was not so - he even considered it an insult to call his work abstract, since he argued that every form in his images is based on something in the external world, simply simplified into his characteristic biomorphic shapes and curved lines.

During the Spanish Civil War, there were many atrocities committed by Franco's fascist troops, as depicted by Picasso in his famous Guernica. Despite the fact that Miro was not a political artist, his forms at this time depict a certain brutality, with distortion and flashy color. He created a fresco for the Spanish pavilion at the Parisian exhibition "The Reaper".

In 40-41 he began his famous series of twenty-two constellations, consisting of black dots representing stars on a white background, using gouache and diluted oil on paper. During the Second World War, the artist remained in Spain and his work began to be influenced by the night, music and stars. His forms became even more abstract, and he used a number of techniques in his work, for example, when the lines intersected, there was a splash of the main color, when red and black overlapped, yellow appeared.

A couple of years later, he returned to painting, now adding calligraphic qualities to his images, and by 44 he began to gain international fame through his retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and his presence at the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, organized by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton.

After the exhibitions, he was invited to order a mural for a hotel in Cincinnati, Ohio. And then he did another mural for the graduate school at Harvard. Throughout the 40s, he also painted some "stick figures", and in the 50s, his images contained shapes that were almost like primitive pictograms. He painted pottery and carved from clay small figurines like primitive goddesses of fertility, and simple vases with birds and heads. His style and techniques were constantly changing, bringing new and more interesting strokes and directions into his work.

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