Miro was a Spanish painter who trained (1907-15) in Barcelona at the School of Fine Art and the Academy Cali. As a student he had a great admiration for Catalan art, popular arts and the extreme Art Nouveau forms of Gaudi's architecture. His early painting passed through Cezannesque and Fauve phases. He was in Portugal with Delaunay during World War I and in 1920 settled in Paris, where he met and was influenced by his compatriots Picasso and Gris.
During the 1920s Miro became closely associated with the Surrealists and contributed to all their important exhibitions. His freely invented calligraphy of highly colored forms earned from Breton the description of "the most Surrealist of us all." The decorative complexity of Harlequinade (1924-5) gave way in the 1930s to a simpler use of expressive colors and symbols, which influenced Kandinsky and probably Picasso.
Back in Barcelona from 1940, he continued to paint highly personal subjective images, but nevertheless remained a very influential figure, particularly for U.S. artists like Gorky and Calder. His public commissions include the two ceramic-tile walls, The Sun and The Moon, which won the 1958 Guggenheim International Award. Later works include a mural for the Fondation Maeght, in St Paul de Vence, France (1968) and numerous monumental sculptures and paintings in Barcelona.
Of all of the Surrealistic painters of the period, Miro is credited with being the only one to hold true to the group's original manifesto and basic principle - releasing creative forces of the subconscious mind from the control of logic and reason.
