Joan Miró (Spanish 1893-1983)
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Catalan (Spanish) painter, sculptor and ceramicist born in Barcelona . Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeoisie society, and famously declared an "assassination of painting" in favor of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.
Born to the family of a goldsmith and watchmaker, the young Miró was drawn towards the arts community that was gathering in Montparnasse and in 1920 moved to. There, under the influence of the poets and writers, he developed his unique style: organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. Generally thought of as a Surrealist because of his interest in automatism and the use of sexual symbols Miró's style was influenced in varying degrees by Surrealism and Dada, yet he rejected membership to any artistic movement in the interwar European years. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, described him as "the most Surrealist of us all."
In 1959, André Breton asked Miró to represent Spain in The Homage to Surrealism exhibition together with works by Enrique Tábara, Salvador Dalí , and Eugenio Granell . Miró was the first artist to develop automatic drawing as a way to undo previous established techniques in painting, and thus, with Andre Masson, represented the beginning of Surrealism as an art movement.
In his final decades Miró accelerated his work in different media producing hundreds of ceramics, including the Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun at the UNESCO building in Paris. He also made temporary window paintings (on glass) for an exhibit. In the last years of his life Miró wrote his most radical and least known ideas, exploring the possibilities of gas sculpture and four-dimensional painting. Many of his pieces are exhibited today in the Fundació Joan Miró in Montjuïc , Barcelona and the U.S. National Gallery in Washington, D.C.; he is buried nearby, at the Montjuïc Joan Miró won several awards in his lifetime. In 1958 he was given the Venice Biennale print making prize, in May 1959 the Guggenheim International Award, and in 1980 he received the Gold Medal of Fine Arts from Juan Carlos of Spain.