Joan Miró

JOAN MIRÓ I FERRÀ (Barcelona, 1893 - Palma de Mallorca, 1983).
Untitled, 1973.
Colored pencils on book page "Ode to Joan Miró".
Dedicated to Jacques Lassaigne, French art critic and chief curator of the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris.
Signed and dated.
Attached certificate issued by ADOM.
Measurements: 33 x 24 cm; 73 x 58 cm (frame).

"Miró has not failed to introduce into painting a healthy humor. His poetic power leads him to transcend the most humble supports and to invent forms generating optimism and joy that constitute the best of a modern mythology". With these words the French critic Jacques Lassaigne concluded his preface to the book on Joan Miró in 1963, one of the many essays the Frenchman wrote on art (he also wrote about Kandinsky, El Greco or Matisse, among other important masters). The multiplicities of organic lines made by Miró define in this drawing an image that can be admired from different perspectives, which in turn generate multiple discourses or evocations, where the body is suggested without becoming completely tactile.

Joan Miró was trained in Barcelona, between the Escuela de la Lonja and the Galí Academy. Already in the early date of 1918 he made his first exhibition, in the Dalmau Galleries in Barcelona. In 1920 he moved to Paris and met Picasso, Raynal, Max Jacob, Tzara and the Dadaists. There, under the influence of surrealist poets and painters, he matures his style; he tries to transpose surrealist poetry to the visual, based on memory, fantasy and the irrational. From this moment on, his style began an evolution that led him to more ethereal works, in which organic forms and figures were reduced to abstract dots, lines and spots of color. In 1924 he signed the first surrealist manifesto, although the evolution of his work, too complex, does not allow him to be ascribed to any particular orthodoxy. His third exhibition in Paris, in 1928, was his first great triumph: the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired two of his works. He returned to Spain in 1941, and that same year the museum dedicated a retrospective to him that would mean his definitive international consecration. During the fifties he experimented with other artistic media, such as engraving, lithography and ceramics. From 1956 until his death in 1983, he lived in Palma de Mallorca in a sort of internal exile, while his international fame grew. Throughout his life he received numerous awards, such as the Grand Prizes at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and the Guggenheim Foundation in 1959, the Carnegie Prize for Painting in 1966, the Gold Medals of the Generalitat de Catalunya (1978) and of the Fine Arts (1980), and was named Doctor Honoris Causa by the universities of Harvard and Barcelona. Today his work can be seen at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, inaugurated in 1975, as well as in major contemporary art museums around the world, such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the MoMA in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the National Gallery in Washington, the MNAM in Paris and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.