Spanish Catalan artist Joan Miró (1893 – 1983) is famous for his works in painting, sculpture, and ceramics. His work is strongly influenced by his hometown Barcelona, the scenic seaside, and the distinct style of that area. From early on, he was exposed to the arts through his parents’ professions: His mother was a goldsmith, father worked as a watchmaker.
Miró attended business school as well as art school but fully devoted his time to art after recovering from a severe typhoid illness. His early style was inspired by the art of Paul Cezanne and Vincent van GoghVincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890) is one of the renowned Post-Impressionist artists, best known for his striking use of colour, emphatic brushwork, and contoured forms. As a son of a pastor, the Dutch artist war brought up in a religious and cultured atmosphere. After working unsuccessfully as a clerk at a bookstore, as a salesman, and as a preacher More. In 1981, Miró set up his first solo exhibition at the Dalmau Galleries in Barcelona. Five years later, Miró became acquainted with the artists of the Surrealist movement in Paris and the poetic nature of Miró’s work fit well within the dream-like automatism of the group. Although Miró is widely considered one of the leading Surrealists, he refused to be officially part of the group. However, he pioneered a linear style of automatism – a random way of drawing attempting to express the innermost of the human psyche. He persistently and radically experimented with non-objectivity and explored the subconscious and childlike, manifesting in geometric shapes, pictorial signs, and biomorphic forms. Many of his works in different media, which exhibit semi-abstracted objects, soon earned international acclaim.
Miró’s work has been associated to be a form of SurrealismSurrealism was a 20th-century philosophical, literary, and artistic movement seeking to channel the unconscious to access the imaginary. Proponents of Surrealism rejected the notion of understanding life in rational and conventional terms in favour of asserting the value of the unconscious mind, dreams, the strangely beautiful, and the uncanny. André Breton, the leader of a group of poets and artists More but also veering towards ExpressionismExpressionism in fine arts was a modernist movement, which originated in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century. Its roots of can be traced to Post-Impressionist artists like Edvard Munch in Norway, and Gustav Klimt of the Vienna Secession. Core attribute of Expressionism is the tendency to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting objects radically More and FauvismThe Fauvism art movement applies to a group of modernist artists in the early 20th century including Henri Matisse and André Derain, who emphasized strong colour contrasts and painterly qualities with fierce brushwork over realistic values. Fauvism as a style started around 1904 and continued far beyond 1910. The group of Fauves however only worked together for the years between More. However, his images display a visual vocabulary unmistakably of its own. As a manifestation of Catalan pride, museums in Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca were dedicated to his work in the 1970s and 1980s.