Little Story Of Joan Miro

This little story explains in an entertaining as well as thorough way the life and artistic career of the Catalan painter Joan Miró. This book is available in the following languages: English, Spanish, Catalan, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Russian.

A unique look at the work of a great artist as seen through the eyes of a child As might be expected of the son of photographer Lee Miller and writer Roland Penrose, Antony Penrose’s childhood was populated with some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. Miró’s Magic Animals is a delightful story, chronicling Antony “Tony”’s encounters with the great Spanish artist Joan Miró. Tony introduces Miró as a quiet, kind, and smartly dressed man who “dreamed when he was awake” and painted wonderfully strange worlds filled with magical animals. The book brings Tony’s memories to life with beautiful reproductions of some of Miró’s finest works, as well as evocative archival photography by Lee Miller and specially commissioned artworks in the style of Miró, painted by children. We see the renowned painter from a new perspective, as the slightly eccentric visitor to Tony’s childhood home, during an excursion to Miró’s farm—filled with extraordinary creatures—and on a trip to London Zoo, during which Miró asked to see “large birds, snakes, and strange creatures of the night.” Vibrant design and playful typography make the package as appealing as the story, and round out the feeling that we’re immersed in Tony’s adventure.

In 1958, artist Joan Miró and critic Yvon Taillandier sat down for an in-depth discussion on Miró's life and work. Their conversation, one of the most illuminating and insightful looks into Miró's philosophy and creative process, was first published in a limited edition of seventy five copies in 1964. Though long out of print, this bilingual "treasure," in the words of Maria Popova, "remains the most direct and comprehensive record of Miró's ideas on art." This beautiful new edition presents an updated English translation of Miró's invaluable text in an elegant and striking package. In addition to Taillandier's original foreword, a new preface by preeminent Miró scholar Robert Lubar provides wider context and insight. An appendix includes the original French text in its entirety. Joan Miró: I Work Like a Gardener brings to life the words and work of one of the most beloved and influential artists of the twentieth century.

Taking Joan Miró's notorious declaration of 1927--"I want to assassinate painting"--as its point of departure, this richly illustrated volume is the first to focus on Miró the "anti-painter," identifying the core practices and strategies the artist used to challenge painting between 1927 and 1937. Joan Miró Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 surveys the various material, iconographical and rhetorical forms of Miró's attacks on painting by presenting, in chronological sequence, 12 distinct series of works, beginning with a remarkable group of paintings on unprimed canvas and concluding with Miró's return to Realism in "Still Life with Old Shoe" (1937). Acidic color, grotesque disfigurement, stylistic heterogeneity and the use of resistant, ready-made materials are among the key tactics of aggression that are explored in this extraordinary presentation of the interrelated and oppositional series of paintings, collages, objects and drawings Miró produced during this crucial decade of his long career. This volume integrates close scrutiny of Miró's materials and processes with historical and iconographic analysis, leading to an expanded understanding of the underappreciated aggressiveness of an artist long regarded as Surrealism's most lyrical painter-poet. Joan Miró was born in 1893 in Barcelona. After his first trip to Paris in 1920, and through 1931, Miró generally spent half of each year in the French capitol and half in his native Catalonia, returning to live in France after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. One of the twentieth century's greatest Modern artists, Miró created a pictorial world of intense imaginative power, in which visionary and cosmic elements are inextricably intertwined with the earthly and mundane. He died in 1983 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

The Joan Miró Foundation was the first public institution set up in Barcelona to focus entirely on contemporary art. Joan Miró and Josep Lluís Sert the building’s designer and a founder member of GATCPAC (a leading group in the introduction of modern architecture in Catalonia) first met in 1932 and became close friends while working on the Spanish (Republican) Pavilion at the ParisWorld Fair in 1937. After the first big retrospective of Miró’s work (1968), the artist had decided to set up a building to make his work accessible to the public on a permanent basis. Sert was commissioned and created an open-plan structure in which the interior space communicated with the exterior, producing a perfect balance between architecture and landscape. Since then, the Foundation has been expanded on two occasions. The architect commissioned to carry out this task was Jaume Freixa, a pupil of Sert's who had worked with him for eleven years at Harvard and had played an active part in the creation of the Foundation.

Introduction: silence in painting -- Calligraphy: vine and sundial -- Extension: toys and rainbows -- Stroke: medium and compass -- Entering painting's thickness: translucence and turning -- Suicide: Leiris and Siriel -- Conclusion: Miró in silence

Considered one of the great artist of the 20th century, Joan Miro has bequeathed us a definitive body of work whose influence has continued to grow over the years. Miro did not paint dreams but instead , through his works, provided the spectator with certain elements so that he would be the one that dreamed. He never worked under the influence of hypnosis, drugs or alcohol. Nevertheless, his artistic personality and the way he represented on canvas what inspiration dictated to him led André Breton to exclaim: Miro is the most surrealist of us all!!. A creative force in the plastic field who felt an equal passion for the word, for the most daring poetic plays, a lover of objects and the bare truth of materials, Miro always revealed himself as an oneiric artist, a seeeker after the constellations that inspired some of his finest works. Jacques Dupin the main authority in Miro work details all those items in his amazing essay: The Birth of Signs. 72 illustrations