Joan Miró

Joan Miró was a Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist, who is widely regarded to be one of the most important and influential artists of the twentieth century. The tirelessly inspired artist began to study art at only seven years old. From 1912 to 1915, he attended the School of Art run by Francesc Galí, where the early cubist and surrealist exhibitions in the Montparnasse artistic community inspired Miró and in 1920 he moved to Paris. Miró eschewed any direct connections to any formal artist groups, though at times his work was closely aligned to Fauvism, Surrealism, and other abstract movements. In the 1940s, Miró painted his lauded series, Constellations, the culmination of his interests in abstraction and his personal symbolic vocabulary. In the following years, his practice expanded to include monumental sculpture, book illustrations, and murals. In 1958 Joan Miró produced the murals ‘The Wall of the Sun’ and ‘The Wall of the Moon’ at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, for which he was awarded the Guggenheim Foundation’s Grand Prize. Several important retrospectives were devoted to Miró during his lifetime: the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1941), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1956), the Tate Gallery in London (1964), and the National Museum of Art in Japan (1966). There are two museums in Spain dedicated solely to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona and the Fundació Pilar I Joan Miró in Palma de Mallorca. Miró’s works form highlights of many important international museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid.