Miró, 1940s Joan Miró Ferra (1893-1983) was born in Barcelona, Spain, into the family of a goldsmith and watchmaker.

Joan Miró studied under Franciso Gali, originally painting in Fauvist and Cubist style. After poor reviews of his first solo exhibition, Miró travelled to Paris to seek out Pablo Picasso, who introduced Miró to the Surrealist, whom he joined in 1924.

Interested by the relationship of art and the subconscious mind and slightly skeptical of Surrealism, Miró began to create his own biomorphic and semi-abstract forms in the late 1920’s. During the Spanish Civil War, he moved to France, but returned home when Nazis invaded France during World War II.

In 1940, in Varengeville (Normandy), Miró started a series of paintings Constellations, the work on which he continued in Barcelona. These 23 works became one of the highest points in his creativity. Stars, moon scythes, discs, eyes, birds and animals, human figures, some indefinite forms either come close together or leave the free space.

These gouaches were created, as Miró admits, under the influence of night, stars, music of Bach and Mozart, which stirred up in him multiple poetic associations reflected in titles: The Nightingale’s Song at Midnight and the Morning Rain. 1940. Ciphers and Constellations in Love with a Woman; Constellation: Awakening at Dawn. 1941. (see image)

“I felt the most intensive urge to break out. I deliberately shut myself off. Music, the night and the stars began to play a bigger and bigger role in my pictures as I envisaged them. I had always been attracted to music, and at the time it began to be as important to me as poetry in the 1920s.”

Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride.

Olga’s Gallery