Tate exhibition held in honour of Miro

many artists world over, including some Zimbabwean artists.
This include the works of graphic artist and sculptor Richard Jack, the prints produced by academic and print maker Chiko Chazunguza, the surrealist images of Thakor Patel and the early 1990’s ceramics by this writer. All encompass aspects of art and colour theories from Miro and bear allegiance to the works of this great Catalan artist.

From May to September 2011, the Tate Gallery, in London is holding a major posthumous retrospective exhibition of Joan Miro’s works. Following the Tate exhibition, the works will move to his hometown of Barcelona in September, 2011 until March 2012, followed by its debut in Washington, D.C, in the USA later the same year.
But for the uninitiated who was Joan Miro and what was his art about?

Joan (pronounced “uan”) Miro was one of the most versatile and original 20th Century artists. Born in Barcelona in 1893, his early work in the period after World War 1 reveals the influence of cubism and the strong legacy of Catalan art which he experienced before he moved to Paris in 1917.
The painting “Catalan art which he experienced before he moved to Paris in 1917. The painting “Catalan Landscape” (1923) at New York’s Moma represents his artistic coming of age with its abstracted figures and freedom of line, combining a naïve and sophisticated vision in one work.

By 1924, he increasingly turned to a more spontaneous form of painting known as “psychic automatism”, exemplary in the work “Dog Barking at the Moon” (1926), which is housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA. This work reveals his new concern for large areas of pure colour with forms placed against them in an intuitive rather than logical order.

His most characteristic paintings show brightly coloured amoeba-like forms against a largely plain background, creating a vivid sense of restless motion. In 1940, he painted a series of “Constellations” that offered a vision of man in harmony with nature and the cosmos.
He was constantly inventive and his murals for the Unesco building in Paris (1955 – 1958), and Harvard University (1960), were created in an ingenious ceramic technique. His works have been interpreted as “a surrealist sandbox for the subconscious mind and a manifestation of Catalan pride”.

In many interviews dating from 1930’s onwards, Miro expressed contempt for conventional painting methods and famously declared “an assassination of painting” in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established methods of painting. This led to him establishing a very personal style.

He was drawn towards the arts community and Modernists, who were gathering in Montparnasse, France, in the 1920’s and therefore moved to live in Paris. There, under the influence of the surrealist poets and writers, he developed his unique style of organic forms and flattened picture plains, drawn with a sharp line.
Although his interest in automatism associated him with the surrealists and Dada artists, he rejected any membership to any artistic movements. However, the renowned writer, painter and founder of European

Surrealism, Andre’ Brewton, described him as “the most surrealist of us all”. Miro was influenced by Andre Masson, Pablo Picasso and Andre Breton.
In 1954, Miro won the Venice Biennale Grand Prize for graphic work. He was awarded the Guggenheim International Award in 1958. His growing reputation inspired the legendary jazz group Dave Bruebeck

Quartet, famous for their hit “Take Five” to use a Miro painting on their album cover to promote their compilation “Time Further Ouyt”.
Miro and his work of art were thus exposed to musical audiences’ the world over. In 1980, he was conferred with the Golden Medal of Fine Arts by King Juan Carlos of Spain, and in 1979, the University of Barcelona awarded him a Doctorate Honorius Causa, for his outstanding contribution to the visual arts and culture of his native country.

In 1974, Miro created a tapestry for the World Trade Centre in New York City. It was one of the most expensive works of art lost during the ‘September 11′ attacks in which the trade towers were destroyed in an alleged terrorist attack. One year before his death, Joan Miro was commissioned to design a logo for Fifa World Cup held in Spain in 1982, the “Tango Espana”. The logo was in his signature red, blue, green and yellow colour scheme and style.

In 1981, the Palma City council, Majorca, converted his house and old studios to the “Fundacio Pilar I Joan Miro a Mallorca”. The premises had been donated to the city by Miro for the advancement and study of Spanish Catalan art.

He died from a heart complication at his home in Palma, Majorca, on Christmas Day, December 25, 1983.
Today, Miro’s paintings sell between US$250 000, and US$17 million. The latter was the auction price for his painting “La Carese des Etoiles” early in 2008, the highest amount paid for one of his works. A definitive body of his works is on view at the Tate Gallery, London.