English practice 37

The Birth of Surrealism

Joan Miró was a Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1893. as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeoise society, and famously declared an “assassination of painting” in favor of

that was gathering in Montparnasse and in 1920 moved to Paris. There, under the influence of the poets and his unique style: organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. Generally thought of as a Surrealist because of his interest in automatism and the use of sexual symbols, Miró’s style was influenced in degrees by Surrealism and Dada, yet he rejected membership in any artistic movement in the interwar European years.

Andre him as “the most Surrealist of us all.”

and thus, with Andre Masson, represented the beginning of Surrealism as an art movement. Miró chose not to become an official member of the Surrealists in order to be free to experiment with other artistic styles without compromising his position within the group. He pursued his own interests in the art from automatic drawing and Surrealism to Expressionism and Color Field painting.

In his final decades, Miró his work in different media and produced hundreds of ceramics, including the Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun. He also made temporary window paintings (on glass) for an exhibit. In the last years of his life Miró wrote his most radical and least the possibilities of gas sculpture and four-dimensional painting.

He died bedridden, at his home in Palma, Mallorca, on December 25, 1983. He suffered from heart disease, and a clinic for respiratory problems two weeks before his death. Many of his pieces are exhibited today in the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona and the U.S.

National Gallery in at the Montjuïc cemetery. Today, his paintings sell for between $250,000 and $17 was the auction price for the La Caresse des Etoiles on May 6, 2008, and is the highest amount paid for one of Miró’s works to date.