Mapping the Life of the Artist
1893 – Joan Miro was born in Montroig, south of Tarragona in Spain
1907-1911 – He attended business school and took classes at the School of Fine Art (La Lonja) in Barcelona
1912-1915 – He studied at Francisco Gali’s art school in Barcelona
1918 – Had his first solo exhibition in Barcelona at the Dalmau Gallery
1919 – He paid his first visit to Paris; drawn towards collection of avant-garde painters/sculptors settled in Paris
1920 – He moved to Paris; his formative years in Catalonia; his exile in Paris in the years of the Spanish civil war and the outbreak of WWII
1921-1922 – The Farm; painting marked the conclusion of his phase of ‘Magical Realism’
1923-1924 – The Catalan Landscape (The Hunter)
acquired by Andre Breton in 1925 the year after he wrote his Surrealist Manifesto
1924 – He joined the group of Surrealist artists; one of the first to develop automatic drawing as a way to circumvent est. techniques in painting, a pioneer in Surrealism
1924 – The Tilled Field; complex arrangement of objects/figures major early ex. of his Surreal art
1925 – The Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) is acquired by Andre Breton (the year after he wrote his Surrealist Manifesto)
1925 – Participated in their first exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in Paris
1928 – He visited the Netherlands
1929 – Had a major solo exhibition in Paris
1930 – Had a one-man show in New York
1933 – Exhibition in London
1933 – Personages With Star; one of four cartoons for tapestries commissioned by French art collector/gallery director Marie Cuttoli
1939 – Nazi forces were advancing into France
1939 – Miro and his family moved to Varengeville on the Normandy coast; Georges Braque was a neighbor
1939-1945 – WWII
1940-1941 – Constellation series, twenty-three small works painted with gouache on paper over and oil-wash; ranked as amongst the finest achievements of twentieth-century Modernism
1944 – He took up ceramics/sculpture
1945 – Constellation series shown in New York
1947 – His first trip to the United States
1948 – Miro sought refuge on Spanish territory (Barcelona) until 1948
1959 – Miro along with Salvador Dali, Enrique Tabara, and Eugenio Granell represented Spain in The Homage to Surrealism exhibition
1968 – May 1968; now 75 years old, he backs the Paris uprisings; painting to be seen as an act of defiance
1978 – Franco’s demise; now 85 years old he exclaims to his wife Pilar, “I’m heading in new directions!”
1980 – Miro received the Gold Medal of Fine Arts from King Juan Carlos of Spain
1983 – Dies on Christmas day at the age of 90