"I want to assassinate painting.", Joan Miró, 1927
Joan Miró (April 20, 1893 – December 25, 1983) was a Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist, born in Barcelona and active across his long career between Catalonia, Paris, and the Balearic Islands. The son of a goldsmith and watchmaker and the grandson of a blacksmith and a cabinetmaker, he came to art through the working craft traditions of his family rather than through any formal aristocratic or academic path. After two unhappy years as an office clerk and a serious mental and physical breakdown in his late teens, his parents finally permitted him to enrol in art school in Barcelona in 1912.
His 1920 move to Paris placed him within the avant-garde circles of Picasso, André Masson, and the early Surrealists, and across the 1920s he developed the biomorphic, dream-rooted vocabulary of figures, stars, animals, and signs for which he is now best known. He never formally joined the Surrealist group, preferring to work outside its strictures, and his 1927 declaration to the critic Maurice Raynal, that he intended to "assassinate painting", captured the radical refusal of conventional pictorial values that ran through his work for the rest of his life. He produced major bodies of painting, etching, lithography, ceramics (often in collaboration with Josep Llorens Artigas), and large-scale public commissions including murals, mosaics, and sculpture for civic buildings across Spain, France, and the United States. His work is held in essentially every major collection of twentieth-century art, including the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (founded 1975), the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Palma, Mallorca (founded 1981), the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museo Reina Sofía, the Tate, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.