Miró spent more than seven decades working out a single, sustained refusal of the conventional values of European painting, picture-making, representation, the fixed motif, the single style, and the body of work he produced in pursuit of that refusal is among the most distinctive and recognizable artistic vocabularies of the twentieth century.
Miró came to art slowly and against significant personal opposition. The Barcelona household of his childhood expected him to enter the commercial professions, and the breakdown that followed his two years of office work in his late teens marked the decisive moment of his early life. The convalescence at his parents' farm at Mont-roig del Camp, near Tarragona, established his lifelong attachment to the Catalan countryside; the working land, the ploughed fields, the animals, and the small stone-built farmhouses of Mont-roig would become the immediate visual material of his early major paintings.
His Paris years across the 1920s placed him within one of the most generative moments in modern European art. He befriended the leading Surrealists, André Breton, Max Ernst, Paul Éluard, Yves Tanguy, and absorbed both Surrealism's automatic-drawing methods and its commitment to the dream and the unconscious as primary artistic material. The painting that consolidated his early style was The Farm (1921–22), the long-laboured canvas that translated Mont-roig into a precisely rendered, deliberately childlike world of objects, animals, and atmospheric sky.
The years that followed produced the breakthrough into the biomorphic, sign-based vocabulary that would define his mature work. Harlequin's Carnival (1924–25), the Dutch Interiors of 1928, and the long sequence of dream paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s combined the Surrealist commitment to the unconscious with Miró's particular love of stars, ladders, dogs, biomorphic figures, and the colour fields of his Catalan childhood. The radical declaration of his intent to abandon conventional painting was followed, across the 1930s, by experiments with collage, peinture-poésie, paint on sandpaper and Masonite, and the deliberate avoidance of the conventional easel canvas.
The Spanish Civil War and the Second World War forced him through a sequence of moves between Spain, Paris, and Normandy, and produced the Constellations (1940–41), a series of small, densely worked, star-and-sign paintings made on paper in the months before he and his family fled to Mallorca to escape the Nazi advance into France. The Constellations are widely regarded as one of the most important small-format painting projects of the twentieth century.
His postwar career, conducted from studios in Barcelona, Mont-roig, and increasingly from the Sert-designed studio in Palma where he settled permanently, extended his vocabulary into ceramics, large-scale tapestry, monumental bronze sculpture, and the public mural commissions for which he is now also widely known. He continued to work into his late eighties, and the two foundations he established in his lifetime, Barcelona in 1975 and Mallorca in 1981, have served as the principal institutional homes of his work since his death.