Joan Miro' I Ferrà

Miquel Miró i Ferrà (Barcelona, 20 April 1893 – Palma de Mallorca, 25 December 1983) was one of the most important Spanish painters, sculptors and ceramists of the 20th century and a key figure in Surrealism. Born to goldsmith Miquel Miró Adzerias and Dolores Ferrà i Oromí, he showed extraordinary talent for drawing from an early age, receiving private lessons and attending the Llonja Academy of Fine Arts between 1907 and 1910. After a brief period as an office worker, in 1912 he enrolled at the private academy of Francisco Galí in Barcelona, an innovative teacher who guided him in developing the basic principles of his painting, characterised by an intuitive perception of forms and extraordinary artistic sensitivity. In 1915, he opened his first artist's studio, sharing it with the painter Enric Cristòfol Ricart and collaborating with the ceramist Josep Llorens Artigas. Attracted by the lively artistic community of Montparnasse, he moved to Paris in 1920, where he met Pablo Picasso and Tristan Tzara's Dadaist circle, beginning to develop a decidedly original style influenced by the Dadaists and later oriented towards abstraction due to the influence of Surrealist poets and writers. During the 1930s, Miró developed a universal and common language, characterised by fluid forms, bright colours and floating objects, which made him one of the leading innovators of the European surrealist avant-garde. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he returned to Paris to raise funds for the Republican cause, but when the Nazis invaded France, he returned to Spain, settling between Mallorca and Montroig. In 1940, on the coast of Normandy, he began his famous series of 23 paintings called Constellations, including The Poetess, considered one of the most brilliant episodes of his career. In 1941, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organised his first retrospective, and in 1944 he began to work intensively with ceramics until 1947. In 1968, he received an honorary degree from Harvard University in Cambridge, and in 1975, the Fundació Joan Miró was inaugurated in Barcelona, where over ten thousand of his works were collected. In his later years, he also experimented with gaseous sculpture and four-dimensional painting, creating the official poster for the World Cup in Spain in 1982. Joan Miró died in Mallorca at the age of 90 on 25 December 1983 and was buried in Barcelona in the Montjuïc cemetery, leaving behind an artistic legacy that profoundly influenced the European avant-garde and great masters such as Salvador Dalí.