JOAN MIRÓ I FERRÀ (Barcelona, 1893 - Palma de Mallorca, 1983)."Fundació Joan Miró", 1975.Lithograph, copy 21/99. Avant la Lettre print run.Signed and justified by hand.Work published in the catalogue raisonné "Miró Litógrafo. 1972-1975", Vol. V, Maeght Editeur, p. 140, ref. 1031.Size: 70 x 50 cm; 87 x 67 cm (frame).Joan Miró was one of the great international figures of 20th century art. He trained in Barcelona, first at the Escuela de la Lonja and later at the Academia Galí, with a more renovating spirit. At that school and at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, also in Barcelona, the young Miró met some of his great friends, such as the critic Sebastià Gasch, the poet J.V. Foix, the painter Josep Llorens Artigas and the art promoter Joan Prats. Thus, from his formative years he was in direct contact with the most avant-garde circles in Barcelona, and as early as 1918 he held 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. These were the crucial years of his artistic career, during which Miró discovered his personal language. In Paris he became friends with André Masson, around whom the so-called Rue Blomet group, the future nucleus of Surrealism, was grouped. Thus, under the influence of the Surrealist poets and painters, with whom he shared many of their theoretical approaches, his style matured; he tried to transpose Surrealist poetry to the visual, based on memory, fantasy and the irrational. From this point onwards his style began to evolve, leading him to more ethereal works in which organic forms and figures were reduced to abstract dots, lines and patches of colour. In 1924 he signed the first Surrealist manifesto, although the evolution of his work, which is too complex, makes it impossible to ascribe him 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. From the 1930s onwards Miró established himself as one of the leading figures on the international art scene and one of the key artists of the 20th century. It was precisely at this time that the artist, a non-conformist by nature, entered a phase he called the "murder of painting", in which he voluntarily renounced being a painter and experimented with other media, such as collage, drawing on paper of different textures and the construction of "objects" with found elements, his first approach to sculpture. Thus, although he soon returned to painting, Miró never abandoned his desire to experiment with all kinds of materials and techniques, including ceramics, bronze, stone, graphic techniques and even, from 1970, tapestry. He returned to Spain in 1941, and that same year the Museum of Modern Art in New York devoted a retrospective exhibition to him, which was to be his definitive international consecration. 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. His work can currently 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 Sofía Museum in Madrid, the National Gallery in Washington and the MNAM in Paris.
