Book Description

Book Description

Nature, the cosmos, and humanity were all subjects which Juan Miró (1893-1983) pursued in a tremendous array of styles and in nearly every known medium. This beautiful new book communicates the scope and quality of his art, including the most important works over his life.

Tracing Miró’s entire career, this pictorial journey begins in the 1920s with his introduction to surrealism, cubism, and dadaism, and with the flowering of his friendships with Picasso, Braque and other influential artists and poets. It moves on to his creation of a universal iconographic language, a style which reached maturity in the 1940s, and which forever distinguished Miró from his contemporaries. This book includes nearly one hundred of his greatest works, displaying the subconscious expression of this lyrical painter, whose brilliant use of color, line, and shape resulted in unique and dazzling compositions. Fascinating photographs depict the artist at various stages of his life while perceptive essays about his work round out this exciting vision of the world as seen through Miro’s eyes. ... Read more

Book Description

Himself a painter, Walter Erben interviewed Joan Miro several times at the artist’s house in Mallorca. Here he reveals Miro’s own interpretations of his most significant works and insights into his world of magic and mysticism. Rich color reproductions are featured throughout. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

A great book about Miro
This book about Miro is presented in an interview format and is a wonderful representation of the artist's life, not only in the words but in the reproductions as well. ... Read more

Book Description

Reviews (1)

Great Book
This was a great book and it was very interesting. I learned many things about Miro and his styles of painting. ... Read more

Book Description

During the early days of the Second World War, the Catalan painter Joan Miró created a startling series of twenty-three gouaches, his Constellations, works redolent of the nightmare of contemporary event. In 1958 the French poet André Breton composed his own Constellations, a set of hermetic prose poems meant to "illustrate"--that is, not simply to shed light on, but to lend luster to--Miró's paintings, and to resume a peripatetic dialogue about exile. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Unreadable!
I could not make it through the first chapter of this book. I am not an English teacher, but the run-on sentences and atrocious sentence structure drove me crazy! The author tries to provide a political context for the Constellations, both paintings and poetry. However, he jumps from year to year and place to place without transition. I found this extremely confusing and also incomplete. I was also disappointed in the black and white illustrations. I don't think the paintings can be appreciated at all in this book. Don't buy it! ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Great Lithographs
This book contains the prints of lithographs made by Miro' first produced in 1944, at the time of World War II. The illustrations are all black and white - some forms are quite whimsical, others reflect the influence of Picasso and surrealism. Though Miro's works usually contained bold colors, these works are all the more pwerful for the tonal values of black and white.
If you are interested in art, especially of the Surrealist Movement, this is a great place to start.

Miro
What can I say about Miro's art? I love it. Art is a purely subjective thing. I enjoy the subtle technigues you notice in his art when you look closely. Sitting back and absorbing the art allows all sorts of images to come to mind. Miro has some very lovely backgrounds for his work, using shades of color to add depth and a sense of realism to his work. Some of my favorites are "femme et chat" and "animal composition". ... Read more

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Miro the beuty
This book is one that shows how Miro and maybye how people felt in that time period,which he lived so long.He made many beutyfull pictures and some that were just nonsense.I like his paintings so much i belive this book and him have inspiered me to be an artist one day.I am not very good but miro did not paint good but it was what he felt and that made him care and that is all that really matters. ... Read more

Book Description

Miro's art has been seen as innocent and child-like, but one should dubt the innocence, or see the child in quite brutal Freudian terms. This study of the crucial formative period of Miro's art—from 1917 to 1934, from his first emergence in the avantgarde of Barcelona and Paris to his acclaim by the Surrealists and the generality of critics as a modern master—concentrates on the sometimes painful, sometimes ecstatic processes of his early development, working either in Paris or in seclusion at his farm in Montroig in Catalonia. Almost as ascetic as Mondrian, Miro drew deep on his own inner life in perfecting his imagery, which was both controlled and spontaneous, both calculated and free, both painting and "anti-painting.' this book charts to a greater degree than any others earlier the aggressiona dn determination that Miro brought to his search for genuine expression, avoiding the "poison," as he put it, of "art," which would have turned his works into "rotting corpses."

Arriving in Paris in 1920, some years the junior of the likes of Picasso and Matisse, Miro had a great deal to catch up on, and his zigzagcourses between the poles of abstraction and surrealism, his handling of cubism (from which he learned a great deal, though he set out "to smash [the Cubists'] guitar"), his response to dadism and the fermenting movements of the time, required a pugilistic determination as well as skill and artistic integrity. Indeed, his aggression was turned more frequently on his own production than on others', and it is his continuing refusal to be satisfied that marks him out as a true innovator. He was well versed in critical theory, and his correspondence with intellectuals such as Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, and Michel Leiris throws fascinating light both on his work and on the pulse of the period.

This book is the English-language edition of an exhibition only at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, March–June 2004. Memorable exhibitions at the Grand Palais in 1974 and in Barcelona and New York in 1993 sought to embrace the entirety of an oeuvre that developed across more than sixty ears, but the intention here is to scrutinize and document the most important years of Miro's art, his self-questioning formation and his first and finest masterpieces. Essays on Miro and the period by William Jeffett, Rosalind E. Krauss, Remi Labrusse, Robert Lubar, and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine are accompanied by a richly documented and illustrated Chronology and more than 200 color plates. ... Read more

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An ancient Incan folktale about Miro's quest
"Naupa pacha" ("Once upon a time"), a prince was born to the Sun King in the great city of Cuzco in the ancient Incan kingdom of Peru. At the same time in a mountain home far away a girl named Miro was born who raced with her brothers, cared for the llamas living on the grasslands, and learned the language of the wild birds. But while Miro grows strong the young prince grows weak and the priests tell the Sun King that only if the prince drinks water from the lake at "pachap cuchun cuchun," one of the corners of the earth, can he be saved. Miro's brothers, swift runners, search for the lost lake, but they fail to find it, leaving it to their sister to try and save the life of the young prince.

Jane Kurtz came across an Inca folktale "The Search for the Magic Lake" while preparing for a trip to Central America. Originally told to Genevieve Barlow by descendants of the Inca Indians in Ecuador and retold in her 1966 book "Latin American Folktales." Kurtz keeps the plot of the original story but develops the main character in the Miro of this version of the tale. "Miro in the Kingdom of the Sun" also works in details about how people in the Inca Empire lived before 1532, which was the year when Francisco Pizarro and his Spanish soldiers killed the last king of the Incas.

With colorful woodcuts by David Frampton the story of "Miro in the Kingdom of the Sun" provides a lyrical retelling of a folktale from a long vanished culture. It has the feel of an ancient story, where magic allows young Miro to survive the obstacles that stand between her and the lost lake, and is rich in cultural detail that most young readers will not be able to appreciate, although certainly Kurtz turns Miro into more of a modern heroine than we would have seen in the original version of the tale.

MEMORABLE STORY OF A STRONG HEROINE IN THE LOST INCA CULTURE
Jane Kurtz enriches this Inca folktale with details of pre-Colonial Incan life, creating a book which will find enthusiastic audiences among those choosing books for pleasure and teachers and students studying the Inca, as well. The author's beautiful prose is enhanced by David Frampton's richly hued woodcuts, creating a memorable story of a strong heroine in a lost culture ... Read more

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Miro in his Own Voice
For those who only know Miro as a painter of "abstract" or "childlike" pictures, Joan Miro : Selected Writings and Interviews reveals the true radicalism of his thought, a radicalism which, in the realm of visual art, equals that of Lenin in politics. Unlike other works, which ignore his theories about, for example, the "murder of painting," or acknowledge them only to distort their true meaning, here, "the most surrealist of us all" speaks in his own voice, enabling one to track the evolution of his thought from schoolyard days, through the frustration of his time in the army, to the development of ideas about the pen and brush which challenged the very world as it exists. The man who challenged his father by declaring the sky was purple was an intractable enemy of consensus reality. Yet in his ruthless charge towards the future, he did not cease from being a maker of pictures existing in all time and even outside of time. This work's precious insight provides little comfort for those who, as a defense mechanism or out of studied denial, belittle Miro's connection to surrealism, or the importance of his revolutionary role.

Corrosponding Realities
This selection of Miro's writing provides an interesting view into the intentions, beliefs, and personality of a very engaging and seminal Catalan artist. The book covers the great majority of his life and thoughts, dealing with his early fondness for Dada, his relationship with painters such as Masson, his exilic time in France, plus musings on Catalan nationalism, the surrealist movement, and poetry.

For those die-hard Paul Auster fans (Auster translates the french writings in this text), this book is a worthy read and insight into an artist who Auster devotes time to translating, and in doing so illuminates sympathies between the two: a nostolgic and essentialist notion of art as process that somehow remains endearing in the contemporary world, and somehow demands the respect and admiration that such force and sincerity manifests.

A fascinating read, both as a historical document, and an artistic biography: it provides an interesting glance into one of the most influencial modern painters of Europe whose life was centered in the intellectual and historical complexities of late modernism. ... Read more