The famous Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker and ceramist decided at the age of eighteen to devote himself to painting, in a climate dominated by the latest French artistic trends, thus initiating a great body of work based on an equilibrium between expression and experimentation, synthesising
An art movement which developed in Paris in the early 1900s. It took its name from the word used by the critics—
fauves, wild beasts—to define a group of artists who exhibited their works at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. By simplifying forms and using bold colours, they attempted to create highly balanced and serene works, a goal totally removed from the intention to cause outrage usually attributed to them. For many of its members Fauvism was an intermediary step in the development of their respective personal styles, as exemplified to perfection by the painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954).
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A term coined by the French critic Louis Vauxcelles (1870-1943) to designate the art movement that appeared in France in 1907 thanks to Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963), which brought about a definitive break with traditional painting. Widely viewed as the first avant-garde movement of the twentieth century, its main characteristic is the representation of nature through the use of two-dimensional geometric forms that fragment the composition, completely ignoring perspective. This visual and conceptual innovation meant a huge revolution and played a key role in the development of twentieth-century art.
and combining the real with an abstraction that originated in his contact with Surrealism -in which he was an active participant- and was later to develop into
This contemporary painting movement emerged within the field of abstraction in the 1940s in the United States, from where it spread worldwide. Rooted in similar premises and postulates as Surrealism, the Abstract Expressionist artists regarded the act of painting as a spontaneous and unconscious activity, a dynamic bodily action divested of any kind of prior planning. The works belonging to this movement are defined by the use of pure, vibrant primary colours that convey a profound sense of freedom. The movement’s main pioneers were, among others, Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) and Hans Hoffman (1880-1966). Leading Spanish exponents of the movement are Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) and José Guerrero (1914-1991), who lived for some time in New York City, where they were in first-hand contact with the many artistic innovations taking place there around that time.
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Miró used prints as a means to reach a much wider public. His inventiveness and experimentation with new materials afforded many new approaches in the process of engraving that added further expressiveness to the work. The end results were undoubtedly those of a master who broke away from academic conventions yet without reneging on tradition.
This work is part of the series
Oda a Joan Miró comprising nine lithographs made in 1973 and printed by Polígrafa, in which the artist illustrated poems by his good friend Joan Brossa, who he had met in the forties through Josep Vicenç Foix.
In the words of Brossa, Miró’s contribution to his visual poetry was like a kind of music that flowed in parallel, yet keeping its distance and maintaining the independence of both expressions.