Joan Miró

Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, and designer. He first visited Paris in 1919 and from then until 1936 (when the Spanish Civil War began) his regular pattern was to spend the winter there and the summer at his family's farm near Barcelona. His early work shows the influence of various modern movements—Fauvism, Cubism (he was a friend of Picasso), and Dadaism—but he is above all associated with the Surrealists, whose first manifesto he signed in 1924. Throughout his life, whether his work was purely abstract or whether it retained figurative suggestions, Miró remained true to the basic Surrealist principle of releasing the creative forces of the unconscious mind from the control of logic and reason.