Tim Marlow TV - Joan Miro - Tate online - Andrew Graham-Dixon TV -
Joan Miro is one of the great artists of the twentieth century. He died in 1983 at the age of ninety, a proud Catalan whose entire career was an affront to political extremism and creative restraint. As Tate Modern stages the first Miro exhibition in London for fifty years. Tim Marlow on ... Joan Miro
The Farm ... Everything in this painting is clear, recognisable, and detailed. Nevertheless, it hints at something strange. Otherworldly. From the woman doing the washing to the dog seemingly barking at the moon. Every blade of grass, every animal, every crack on the wall, every leaf, seems to have its own space – disparate elements, nonetheless bound together as one harmonious. A kind of Edenic vision in Catalonia. ibid.
I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness. Joan Miro
I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. Joan Miro
My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colours. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details. Joan Miro
The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness. Joan Miro
Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension. Joan Miro
Delicate linear forms float on the open blue that Miró associated with dreams. With André Masson, Miró was the first to create imagery using automatic techniques in which forms seemed to emerge directly from the unconscious. From this he developed his own personal sign language, which simplified familiar things such as stars, birds and parts of the body. He later revealed, for example, that the white shape in this painting signified a horse. Tate online December 2005
Miro saw the soil of Catalunya as his own vision of paradise. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Spain III: The Mystical North, BBC 2008