Joan Miró

The Catalan artist and his museum in Barcelona

The Catalan painter and sculptor Joan Miró lived in the period 1893-1983.

Joan Miró and the beginning
Among early influences on Joan Miró and his work are Matisse, Hieronymus Bosch and the Romanesque frescoes in northern Spain. In 1919 Picasso met Miró, after having traveled to Paris and he began to be influenced by cubism and naivism.

After reading Kandinsky's work on spiritual art and living in Paris he decided to "assassin the painting" as he called it, i.e. to work in new ways with art and creating new means of expression. In the years after moving to Paris he created a highly creative art and announced that the landscapes in his art no longer had anything to do with the outer world - they were images of inner, dreamy landscapes.

Joan Miró and surrealism

But it would be surrealism, which was the biggest inspiration in the work of Miró, and he quickly became a central figure in the movement, although he refused to sign the treaties and never participated in political actions Surrealists held.

The Surrealists would via the so-called automatism arrive at an expression of the artist's unconscious consciousness and interested in frontier psychological conditions that madness but also children art, which they saw as a strong expression of the uncensored, multifaceted self. Miró said himself that hallucinations caused by hunger and stare at a patch had helped to unravel his imagination.

Sculpture by Joan Miró on roof of museum

The Museum and its surroundings

Joan Miró museum in Barcleona

The Miró Museum in Barcelona

Fundació joan Miró Junta de
Montjuïc. Plaza de Neptú
Open Tuesday to Saturday from 10:00 to 19:00
www.fundació-mirobcn.org
The Miró Museum in Barcelona is one of the best museums in the city. It has the most complete collection of any of the world's Miró Museums.

Apart from the Miró collection in itself, the museum also has interesting exhibits of other artists of the 20th and 21st century.

Museum and Josep Lluís Sert (1902-83)
Miró personal friend, Josep Lluís Sert, listed Miró Museum on Montjuïc hill, Fundación Joan Miró in the years 1972-75. Sert came to play an important role in the introduction of international modernism in Spain, and worked under the functionalist Le Corbusier in the period 1929-31 in Paris.

The museum has a magnificent view over Barcelona from Montjuïc hill and contains around 300 paintings and 150 sculptures. Besides Miró work exhibited contemporary art, including Warhol, Magritte, Rothko and Giacometti.

How to get there?
The easiest way of getting there is to take the underground metro from the Parallel metro station and walking 5 minutes (crossing the street and going to the left when you exit the metro.

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Joan Miró

The Catalan artist and his museum in Barcelona

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