JOAN, JUAN MIRO, his quotes on painting art & life + biography facts of the Spanish painter artist
Joan Miro, his quotes on painting art and sculpture, life stories and biography facts. Miro was a Spanish painter, print-maker, sculptor and poet. His style was influenced by Surrealism and Dada, yet he rejected membership to any artistic movement in the interwar European years. Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism, described him as “the most Surrealist of us all.” Joan Miro was close friends in Paris with the Surrealist painter / drawer Masson and later with the American sculptor Calder (mobiles). At the bottom some art links for more biography and life facts on Joan Miro. – the editor.
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Miro: ‘Figures on red background’, 1939 |
Joan Miro, artist quotes of the Spanish artist on painting art & life + biography facts
– Let’s transplant the primitive soul to the ultramodern New York, inject his soul with the noise of the subway, of the ‘el,’ and may his brain become a long street of buildings 224 stories high. (Barcelona Dada, 1917, fh).
* Joan (Juan) Miro; a Dadaist statement of the young artist, on the modern city New York: letter to Enric C. Ricart, 1 October 1917; as quoted in “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 47
– Down with the Mediterranean!
* Joan Miro; verbal statement at a surrealist demonstration, against the supremacy of Classical culture, 1930s: “Calder Miro”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 32
– …something as sensational as (a) heavy weight prize fight… … a rain of swings, uppercuts, and straight right and lefts to the stomach and everywhere throughout the entire event – a round lasting about twenty minutes.
* Joan (Juan) Miro; remark on a ballet the artist planned to, around 1930: ‘Bravo’ Barcelona 1994; as quoted in “Calder Miro”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 37
– …wherever you are, you find the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists of staying at home, close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters. Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvellous. (Miró admonished art critic Georges Duthuit, fh)
* Juan Miro; comment by which the artist admonished art critic Georges Duthuit, fh): ‘Où allez-vous Miró?’ (Where do you go, Miró), Georges Duthuit in Cahiers d’Art 11, nos. 8-10, 1936; as quoted in “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 40
– We see ourselves confronted with pure abstraction. Small problems and highly obscure subjects are, if you will, always grand in intention, and the layman would casually and quite undisparagingly trample on them if they were to serve as carpet motifs.
* statements by Juan Miro, on using abstraction in visual arts and their perception bij the viewer: review of his Bernheim show, G. J. Gros, Fall 1933; as quoted in “Calder Miro”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 81 note 10
– How did I think up my drawings and my ideas for painting? Well I’d come home to my Paris studio in Rue Blomet at night, I’d go to bed, and sometimes I hadn’t any supper. I saw things, and I jotted them down in a notebook. I saw shapes on the ceiling…
* Joan Miro; statement on ‘automatic painting and drawing’, explaining the start of his work ‘Harlequin’s Carnival’, strongly admired by Surrealists like Breton: ‘Miro on Wikipedia
– I have thought a lot about the question of titles. I must confess that I find any for works that take off from an arbitrary starting point and end with something real… … (Miro allowed Pierre Matisse to make titles, based on the, fh) real things… ….(if they do) not evoke some tendency or other, something I want to avoid completely (probably the artist meant here ‘Surrealism’, to Pierre Matisse – son of the artist Henri Matisse, who showed several modern European painters in New York, fh).
* reflection on giving titles, in a letter to his art gallery keeper: letter to Pierre Matisse, 12 October 1934; as quoted in “Calder Miro”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 82, note 24
– Have you ever heard of anything more stupid than ‘abstraction-abstraction’? and they ask me into their deserted house (probably he meant the group ‘Abstraction-Création, founded by a. o. Hans Arp. Arp and André Breton both coined Miro’s art in 1931 as ‘mobile’ and ‘stabile’, fh) as if the marks I put on a canvas did not correspond to a concrete representation of my mind, did not possess a profound reality, were not a part of the real itself).
* statement on the representational value of his art; artist quotes on paintings, life and sculpture: ‘Où allez-vous Miró?’, art critic Georges Duthuit in ‘Cahiers d’Art 261′, nos. 8-10, 1936; as quoted in “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 61
– Childhood and magic are married in this poem inscribed in infinity, like traces on walls or cracks in venerable walls, superimposed posters lacerated by wind, rain and poetry; calligraphy and ideograph intermerge in this equation… …in this sign).
* Joan (Juan) Miro; reflection on a poem and the ‘automatic writing’ aspect: a letter to art seller Pierre Matisse (son of the famous French artist Henri Matisse, fh), 19 February 1936, in Pierre Matisse Gallery Archives, The Pierpont Morgan Library New York MA 5020
– And then, as you can see, I give greater and greater importance to the materials I use in my work (1936, fh). A rich and vigorous material seems necessary to me in order to give the viewer that smack in the face that must happen before reflection intervenes. In this way, poetry is expressed through a plastic medium, and it speaks its own language).
* quote on the great importance and influence of materials in the process of viewing his art by the public: ‘Où allez-vous Miro?’, Georges Duthuit in Cahiers d’Art 11, nos. 8-10, 1936; as quoted in “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, pp. 81-82 note 11
– … to try also, inasmuch as possible, to go beyond easel painting, which in my opinion has a narrow goal, and to bring myself closer, through painting, to the human masses I have never stopped thinking about).
* Joan Miro; reflection on the importance of big seize paintings: ‘Je rêve d’un grand atelier’, Miro 1938; as quoted in “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 65
– Picasso was wild about it (a remark during his exhibition in Paris, 1938 where Miro showed a big frieze, made for a children’s room and commissioned by art-dealer Pierre Matisse in New York, fh) and said it was one of the best things I have ever made).
* quote on Picasso’s reaction: “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 76
– (the canvas.. ,fh) rubbing in with a handful of straw, with a rag, a scrubbing brush, a Majorcan brush for applying white, with the hand, etc… …(a drawing in a) gigantic rhythm like that of a waterfall cascading down a mountainside… … (works based on) pure signs begun in Varensgeville and finished in Palma… …(with a picture ground of) blue vitriol ( a pesticide) that they use for the vines and that splashes against the walls of the farmhouse…( describing here his ‘attacks on the canvas’, fh).
* a note, describing his ‘attacks on the canvas’ with all kind of materials: “Working notes, 1941 – 1942”, Miro; as quoted in “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 69
– …(to) think, in a certain way, of the power and severity of Romanesque paintings… …Go to the beach and make graphic signs in the sand, draw by pissing on the dry ground, design in space by recording the songs of the birds, the sounds of water and wind… …and the chant of insects).
* “Working notes of the painter, 1940 – 1941”:“Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 69
– Decoration. Very rapidly executed, at one go, spontaneously (reflection on making a mural on the site for the terrace plaza hotel in Cincinnati, on a huge circular wall, fh). What takes a long time in my case is the work of silent reflection; it is impossible for me to predict the duration of this preparatory period. You have to keep in mind that it is by no means a matter of just doing a large picture, and though it will not be possible to paint a true mural by attacking the wall directly, in fresco, to do so will require persistence while maintaining, as much as possible, the spirit of the great tradition of mural painting. I shall have to go to Cincinnati in advance as soon as I can, to view the architecture and its environs, because otherwise I would only create an easel painting in large format.
* Joan Miro; reflections and ideas on making a large mural painting: letter to Pierre Matisse, 26 January 1946; as quoted in “Calder Miro”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 69
– I was very interested in the reproductions of your (Calder’s, fh) sculptures. I have looked at them many times (Calder sent him, fh), and they are something completely unexpected. You are taking a path full of great possibilities. Bravo! Sculpture is of enormous interest to me right now. For the last two years (1944 – 1946, fh), during summer vacation , that’s all I have been doing and it’s very good for a painter to get away from the old story of canvas and frame every now and again.
* statements on sculpture as a refreshing break for painting: letter to Calder, Barcelona, 18 March 1946; as quoted in “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 268
– The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I’m overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains – everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me (1958).
* reflections on little things and huge space in his painting art: “Twentieth-Century Artists on Art; as quoted on ‘Joan Miro on Wikipedia’
– Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world… …it must fertilize the imagination.
* statement on painting and its meaning for the imagination of the viewer: Taillandier, 1959; as quoted in “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 82, note 24 ( great Spanish painter, sculptor and printmaker in surrealist art style ‘Abstract Surrealism’; at the bottom art links for Miro’s history facts and art information)
– I begin my work under the effect of shock, which I can sense and which gets me on the run from reality… …In any case, I need a starting point, even if it’s just a speck of dust or a gleam of light).
* Joan Miro; reflection on starting a painting, out of the area of reality: “On the Readability of Signs: Miro’s path from Mysterious to Comic Pictorial signs”, Sylvia Martin; Düsseldorf 2002, p. 67
– Thirty five years ago .. Sandy (Calder, fh) and (his wife, fh) Louisa came to see me at Montroig, where I conceived the farm (Montroig in Spain, where Miro had a farm in the 1930s, fh); where the trees, the mountains, the sky, the house, the vineyards, have remained the same. There were the mules have always eaten carobs, and where we have the same warming red wine. Well then, one day I invited all my neighbours, the farmers and workmen of the district to see the Circus that Calder had brought. Everyone was transfixed and totally overwhelmed by it.
* quote on a visit of Calder who brought with him the small mechanical circus made from wire: a letter by Miro, 17 March 1964 / Correspondence 61; as quoted in “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 33
– When I first saw Calder’s art very long ago (around 1928 Miro saw Calder performing his ‘Circus’, made from metal wire and wood, fh) I thought it was good, but not art.
* statement on Calder’s circus art: ‘New York Times 3 April 1969; as quoted in “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 29
– Your face had become dark, and, upon the day’s awakening, your ashes will disperse themselves throughout the garden.
Your ashes will fly to the sky, to make love with the stars.
Sandy, Sandy, your ashes caress the rainbow flowers that tickle the blue of the sky.
* short poem on the death of his good old paw the inventor of the ‘mobile’ Sandy Calder, in 1977: his ‘Foreword’, Barcelona 1977; as quoted in “Calder Miro”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 309
– In the current struggle I see the antiquated forces of fascism on one side, and on the other, those of the people, whose immense creative resources will give Spain a drive that will amaze the world.
* Joan Miro; political statement on the struggle of fascism against the power of creativity: “Revelations”, Luis Permanyer, April 1978; as quoted in “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 81 note 10
links for more information on the Spanish artist Joan Miro; + biography & life and art facts
* biography facts of the Spanish artist Joan Miró, on Wikipedia
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