£2,500
Contemporary & Post-War Art | 595
Auction: 16 April 2020 at 12:00 BST
Signed, inscribed and dated 28.X.80, pencil drawing
Provenance: Miro created this work for the vendor, as a favour for one of his artist friends, Baruj Salinas.
Biography:
Joan Miró Ferra was born in 1893 in Barcelona. At the age of 14, he attended La Lonja’s Escuela Superior de Artes Industriales y Bellas Artes, followed by Francesco Galí’s Escola d’Art from 1912-15. Miró was encouraged by the dealer José Dalmau, who organised his first solo show at his gallery in Barcelona in 1918.
In 1920, Miró made his first trip to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso and began to participate in Dada activities. The following year, Miró held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie la Licorne in Paris, which was again organised by Dalmau. He continued to travel between Spain and France, but Miró was welcomed into the Parisian art world and exhibited in the Salon d’Automne of 1923.
In 1924, Miró joined the Surrealist group and was included in the first Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Pierre the following year. At the end of the 1920s and into the early 30s, he experimented with papiers collés (pasted papers), collage, and lithography, and began to make Surrealist sculptures, which incorporated painted stones and found objects.
His work, whether painting, ceramic or sculpture, explored the subconscious and was filled with biomorphic forms, geometric shapes, and abstracted and semi-abstracted objects.
Miró fled Spain in 1936 because of the civil war but returned in 1941. The same year, Miró was included in the exhibitions ‘Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Also, in 1937, he was commissioned to create a monumental work for the Paris World’s Fair.
The first major museum retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1941. From 1954-58 Miró worked almost exclusively in ceramic and print. In 1954, he received the Grand Prize for Graphic Work at the Venice Biennale in 1954, and in 1958 he was given a Guggenheim International Award for murals for the UNESCO building in Paris.
Miró returned to painting but began to work intensively in sculpture during the 1960s. In the following two decades, major retrospectives and exhibitions of Miró’s works were held at the Musée National d’Art Moderne and the Grand Palais in Paris. Miró died on December 25, 1983, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.