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 born:
1893 Barcelona, Spain
died: 1983 Palma de Mallorca
Catalonian painter joan Miró, one of the great pioneers of modern art,
came to painting by a circuitous route. His ancestors were peasants and
artisans, and his father was a goldsmith. Miró began drawing at a young
age, as a way to escape the strictures of family life. His choice of motifs
- tufts of grass, insects, tiny birds - revealed an early affinity for
the organic, a love, as one commentator says, of "the little things" of
this world. After finishing his military service Miró worked in an office,
and attended crafts courses in his spare time. "I was a paragon of awkwardness,"
he confessed. In painting, too, judged by academic standards, Miró was
entirely unsuccessful. "I was very unhappy," he wrote, "and in my feeling
of rebellion; I became an ever greater dreamer." It was as such that he
was to go down in the history of art, as a teller of lyrical and fabulous
tales whose pictorial idiom was shaped out of allusive signs and symbols
derived from subconscious depths. In 1919 Miró travelled to Paris, where
he met Pablo Picasso and made friends with him. From 192o onwards he participated
in Dadaist manifestations and became a close friend of Andre Masson, who
lived in the next studio. This period saw Miró consciously attempting
to forget the principles of art he had been taught, or, as he himself
put it, "to kill painting." He became involved in Surrealism, adding to
it his own, inimitable touch of playful humor. One aesthetic source of
Miró's new approach, as Bönnefoy notes, lay in "the paintings and
sculptures of archaic cultures, which do not seek similarities, but rather
in which symbol and metaphor form the essence of the work." Love belongs
to a group of works of 1925-1927, collectively referred to as "dream paintings,"
which were done in Paris after Miró's stylistic breakthrough in1923-1924.
The artist himself described the picture as follows: "It is a work that
I love very much, and which caused me a great deal of worry, because I
thought it had been lost. .. The idea for the painting came during my
Christmas holidays in Barcelona, as I was watching a dancer - the vertical,
upward line and the circles describe her movements. In a notebook I had
in my pocket I drew a few rapid sketches, which I developed after my return
to Paris in the Rue Blomet" (the address of Miró's studio at the time).
Taken from German section of 'Artistgroup'
www.kuenstlergruppe.de
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