Joan Miró

Joan Miró Ferra was born in Barcelona on April 20, 1893. At the age of fourteen he attended a commercial school and also the Academy of Fine Arts La Lonja in Barcelona. Three years later he found a job as an accountant, but due to a period of exhaustion he abandoned the trade and resumed his art studies, attending Francesc Galí's School of Art from 1912 to 1915. In 1917 he met Francis Picabia and the following year held his first solo show in the gallery of the art dealer José Dalmau, in Barcelona.
In 1920 he went to Paris for the first time where he met Pablo Picasso. He has since divided his time between Montroig, Spain, and Paris, where he frequents poets Pierre Reverdy, Tristan Tzara and Max Jacob and participates in Dada activities. In 1921 Dalmau organized his first solo show for him in Paris, at the Galerie La Licorne and in 1923 the artist participated in the Salon d’Automne. In 1924 he joined the surrealist group. He exhibited in a solo show at the Galerie Pierre in 1925, where, in the same year, he also took part in the first exhibition of the Surrealists. In 1928 he visited the Netherlands, where he began a series of paintings inspired by Dutch masters and made the first papier collé and collages. In the same year Miró began to work in ceramics with Josep Lloréns y Artigas and to deal with prints: from 1954 to 1958 he devoted himself almost exclusively to these two activities. In 1958 he received the Guggenheim International Award for the wall decorations of the UNESCO building in Paris; the following year he resumed painting, starting a series of large canvases. In the sixties he devoted himself intensely to sculpture. In 1974 the Grand Palais in Paris held an important retrospective of his; in 1978 the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Center Georges Pompidou, exhibited over five hundred works on the occasion of a vast retrospective of his drawings. Miró died on December 25, 1983 in Palma de Mallorca.