Tema-65.-Picasso-Dali-y-Miro-en-su-contexto-artistico

Introducción

• Thema65 focuses on Picasso, Dalí, and Miró within their artistic context.
• These Spanish artists of the 20th century transcended European boundaries, becoming international references.
• Picasso embodied the evolution of 20th-century painting with his continuous production and iconoclastic approach.
• Dalí is known for his surrealist imagery, imaginative art, and public attention-seeking persona.
• Miró significantly impacted the international avant-garde through expression and experimentation, especially in Surrealism.
• Understanding these artists is crucial for comprehending 20th-century art.
• They broke with academic painting, pioneering original expressive paths that continue to influence art today.
• The topic's development includes:
  • International artistic context.
  • Picasso, Dalí, and Miró as exponents of the Spanish avant-garde, including Dau al Set and El Paso groups.
  • The Spanish avant-garde in the first and second half of the 20th century.
  • Life and work of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Joan Miró.

Contexto Artístico Internacional

• Understanding 20th-century art requires analyzing the painting scene and the European mindset at the start of the century.
• Rapid political, social, cultural, and economic changes in early 20th century Europe, intensified by World War I, significantly impacted art and culture, leading to vanguard movements.
• These movements championed a new artistic approach and aesthetics, moving away from nature imitation to focus on forms and colors.
• They emphasized the unconscious and demanded mental reconstruction of artwork by the viewer.
• Styles became specific to artist groups rather than international.
• Historical avant-gardes aimed to eliminate academic art remnants from the 19th century in the first three decades of the 20th century.
• Their origin lies in a turbulent sociopolitical, economic, and cultural context marked by:
  • The rise of fascism.
  • The triumph of communism after the Russian Revolution, and the spread of Karl Marx's ideas (1818-1883).
  • The international crisis following the 1929 crash.
  • The revitalizing and critical vitalism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).
  • The discrediting of reason and reality by Sigmund Freud (1854-1939).
  • The discovery of quantum theory and the theory of relativity.
  • Mechanization and production system changes.
  • The development of media and transport.
• The rejection of Impressionist painters from the “Salón de París” marked a major conflict between the artistic and intellectual world, leading to the stereotype of the misunderstood, bohemian artist.
• Painting faced a crisis of originality due to the advent of photography, which challenged its traditional function.
• Painting shifted from faithfully representing reality to modifying and intentionally deforming it through the artist's unique perception.
• This shift led to various artistic movements, including Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism.
• These movements integrated into society, uniting diverse artistic manifestations beyond traditional arts.
• Contestation became widespread and radical, questioning the very principles of art production and evaluation.
• The avant-garde challenged canonical models of art history within a political program rejecting bourgeois traditions.
• These movements closely interacted with philosophical and literary thought, creating notable and effective cultural mixing.
• Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) guided Cubist painters in France, while Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944) in Italy blended visual and verbal art in Futurism.
• Dadaism similarly deconstructed words and pictorial representation, and Surrealism showed close ties between figures like Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) and Dalí.

Picasso, Dalí y Miró: Exponentes de la Vanguardia Española. Dau Al Set y El Paso

La Vanguardia Española en la Primera Mitad de Siglo

• Avant-garde movements were strong in Central Europe, with significant impact in France, Italy, Spain, and Latin America.
• In Spain, the avant-garde developed from the 1920s in visual arts, literature, and poetry (Generation of '27), differing somewhat from the rest of Europe.
• Spain's art market was primitive, focused on traditional works, hindering the penetration of new ideas, which mainly affected intellectual and specialized sectors rather than the general public; thus, the first Spanish avant-garde was markedly formalist.
• From the 1930s, Surrealism strongly established itself, aligning the Spanish avant-garde with the international scene.
• The cultural and artistic flourishing was cut short by the Civil War and the Franco regime.
• Spanish artists shifted towards greater commitment to sociopolitical reality, favoring a realist avant-garde.
• Many artists went into exile.
• The Spanish School of Paris emerged at the beginning of the century, attracting those seeking to broaden horizons and experiment with art.
• Artists like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Joan Miró began their artistic careers there, participating in and originating avant-garde movements like Cubism (Picasso).
• Their works became decisive models for Spanish contemporaries.
• Paris held special significance in the artistic world of the 19th and early 20th centuries, enabling Spanish artists to develop their creative potential.
• Paris provided the backdrop for their aesthetic quests, friendships, dealers, early failures, and later critical successes.

Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí y Joan Miró

• Picasso, Dalí, and Miró radically renewed the visual arts, placing Spain at the center of the artistic avant-garde.
• Finding common ground among these figures is challenging due to their disparate aesthetic approaches.
• Only Dalí and Miró were part of the same avant-garde group, yet their productions were too diverse to share a style.
• Picasso and Dalí displayed immense artistic ego and personality, while Miró worked quietly in his studio like a craftsman.
• Many other Spanish artists had similar trajectories and developed important art, deserving recognition for their contributions to a brilliant phase of Spanish creativity.
• Lack of suitable conditions in Spain hindered the sustenance of such creative power.
• Many artists collaborated on the Spanish pavilion for the 1937 Paris Exposition, which featured Picasso's "Guernica."

La Vanguardia Española en la Segunda Mitad de Siglo

• Several groups emerged to renew and investigate new avant-garde art.
• In 1948, the Dau al Set group was created in Barcelona, becoming a major player in the latter half of the century.
• Members like Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012), Modest Cuixart (1925-2007), Joan-Josep Tharrats (1918-2001), and poet Juan Eduardo Cirlot (1916-1973) shared their ideas in the magazine Dau al Set.
• Their proposals linked to pre-war avant-garde, especially Surrealism, Dadaism, and the painting of Paul Klee (1879-1940) and Henri Rousseau (1844-1910).
• It played a prominent role in post-war Catalan culture, opposing the Franco regime and promoting the renewal of Catalan cultural traditions.
• Most members shifted towards abstraction.
• By the late 1950s, avant-garde art trended toward greater democratization, with increased exhibitions and galleries.
• In 1957, El Paso was founded, an abstract group oriented toward Informalism that had a great impact.
• Its members aimed to represent a brief but necessary stage in the advancement of contemporary Spanish painting.
• Members included Antonio Saura (1930-1998), Rafael Canogar (1935), Manuel Rivera (1927-1995), Manolo Millares (1926-1972), and sculptor Pablo Serrano (1908-1985).
• The group became a paradigm of new Spanish art, present in prominent international avant-garde events.
• Alongside Informalism, a new figuration was experimented with, thanks to the hyperrealism of Antonio López (1936) and proposals close to Pop Art.
• The return of some artists, the regime's openness from the 1950s, and the triumph of democracy favored cultural and artistic effervescence, visible in figures like Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) and Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002).

Pablo Picasso

Los Primeros Años de Su Vida

• Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) was born in Málaga, living there for the first ten years of his life.
• His travels through different Spanish cities and his father's profession as a painter and drawing teacher allowed him great artistic training, helping him master technique from a young age.
• Under his father's direction, he painted his first oil painting, "El picador amarillo."
• In 1891, he and his family moved to La Coruña, where he participated in an exhibition at just thirteen years old.
• He resided in Barcelona during his youth, frequently traveling to Paris and Madrid.
• “Ciencia y caridad” exemplifies one of his early works, reflecting typical Restoration themes.
• His stay in Madrid, where he moved in 1897 to train as a painter at the Academia de San Fernando (though his training there was brief), allowed him to encounter the work of El Greco (1541-1614) and Velázquez (1599-1660), whom he always admired.
• Back in Barcelona, he was linked to avant-garde artistic circles, Els Quatre Gats, and held his first solo exhibition.
• In 1900, he moved to Paris, where he encountered the Post-Impressionists, influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901).

Primeras Etapas (1900-1907)

• Etapa azul (1900-1904)
  • The early years in Paris were tough, with disappointments and financial difficulties.
  • Picasso cultivated friendships with figures like André Bretón (1896-1966) and the poet Apollinaire.
  • During these years, moving between Paris and Barcelona, he created paintings characterized by human themes (beggars, disabled) dominated by cold, blue tones, underscoring misery and desolation.
  • His aesthetic recalled Symbolism and Expressionism.
  • This blue period - started after the suicide of Carlos Casagemas (1880-1901) in 1901 - includes works such as “El entierro de Casagemas”, “El viejo guitarrista”, “Pobres a la orilla del mar”, and “Gran autorretrato azul”.
• Etapa rosa (1904-1906)
  • In 1903, Picasso permanently resided in Paris, setting up his studio in Pablo Gargallo's (1881-1934) studio.
  • Contact with other artists, support from Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), and his relationship with Fernande Olivier favored an end to "pessimism" and start of the "pink period."
  • His themes were still human, but with more pleasant content (children, adolescents, circus characters like harlequins).
  • Colors became warm, dominated by pinks and pastels. Forms became rounder, with softer contours, emphasizing line and drawing.
  • This period includes “Familia de acróbatas con mono”, “Saltimbanquis”, and “Acróbata y joven equilibrista”.
• Etapa precubista (1906-1907)
  • In 1906, Picasso met Henri Matisse (1869-1954), leading to a radical transformation of his work.
  • He sought inspiration in ancient and primitive Spanish art, leading to simplified forms that foreshadowed a new aesthetic.
  • Warm and pink colors continued, but there was a preoccupation with volume.
  • Primitive influences are visible in portraits, such as the famous “Retrato de Gertrude Stein” and “Dos mujeres desnudas”, foreshadowing the start of Cubism.

Etapa Cubista (1907-1914)

• From 1907, Picasso's Cubist period began; “Las señoritas de Avignon” (1907) is considered the first Cubist work of contemporary art.
• Picasso and Georges Braque (1882-1963) initiated this style as a reaction against Matisse's Fauvism.
• Cézanne was a major precursor; primitive Iberian and African art, and new theories of space-time, such as the theory of relativity, also influenced him.. Cubism rejects Renaissance perspective, prioritizing line and form over color and light, and representing objects from all angles and viewpoints.
• He also used new expressive procedures like collage -- a technique initiated by Picasso.
• Between 1907 and 1909, an experimental stage occurred in which the artist pursued a pronounced geometrization of figures.
• Chromatic reduction took place in parallel; ocher tones predominated, as seen in “Desnudo con paños”, similar to the figures of "Avignon".
• “Las señoritas de Avignon” is an icon of European avant-garde art, depicting the interior of a brothel on Avinyó Street in Barcelona.
• It breaks with the predominant artistic language, showing five suggestive nude female figures with geometric shapes and distortions, influenced by African masks and Iberian sculpture.
• It maintained the warm pink tones of his previous stage but showed a deep change in perspective; Cubism was not consolidated until 1909.
• Picasso's first Cubist phase is called analytical cubism (1909-1912), characterized by the decomposition of forms and objects into multiple planes, and the use of muted colors, as found in “Retrato de Ambroise Vollard”, “Hombre con clarinete”, and “Mujer con mandolina”.
• A second phase came with synthetic cubism (1912-1914), with a certain formalist recovery, better-defined planes, and a broader color palette.
• Rather than analyzing and decomposing objects, it synthesizes.
• This phase began with “Naturaleza muerta con silla de rejilla”, an analytic representation but with an oilcloth glued that makes it the first collage in art history. Picasso developed collage or papiers collés technique, adding materials such as stamps, newspapers, fabrics, tin, zinc, etc.
• It included whole words with printed letters like ‘JOU’ from “Journal”. Other important works of this moment are “Violín y partitura” and “Botella de Vieux Marc, copa y periódico”.
• During World War I, Picasso continued to develop Cubist aesthetics; some authors have spoken of Pointillist Cubism and cold Cubism (named for the color palette used), with works such as “Naipes, vasos, botella de ron (Vive la France)" and “Naturaleza muerta: guitarra, periódico, vaso y as de trébol”, respectively.
• He produced numerous still lifes and some naturalist portraits, foreshadowing a shift toward Neoclassicism.

Etapa Neoclásica y Surrealista

• In 1917, the painter traveled to Rome to create stage decorations and costumes for Diaghilev's Russian ballet, which included dancer Olga Koklova (1891-1955), whom he married.
• During his stay in Italy, he was deeply impressed by the grandeur of its past, especially Roman sculpture and the mural painting of Giotto (1267-1337) and Piero della Francesca (1415-1492).
• This led to a form of Classicism in works like “Las Bañistas” (1918) and “Dos mujeres corriendo en la playa” (1922).
• This production period is known as the neoclassical stage (1918-1925); this look at the past was not exclusive to Picasso, but also shared by many other artists wishing to return to order after World War I.
• However, “Los tres músicos”, painted in 1921, shows that Picasso never completely abandoned his Cubist aesthetic.
• This work represents Max Jacob (1876-1944), Apollinaire, and himself in a synthetic Cubism, where music becomes the protagonist; Cubism intermingles with Surrealism, to which he linked from 1925.
• Picasso's Surrealist stage was from 1925 to 1936, though he always defended his independence, but he flirted with the proposals of Surrealism, recreating unreal atmospheres and using symbolist icons like the praying mantis.
• This stage includes “La danza” (1925), which, despite being inscribed in synthetic Cubism, contains three clearly surrealist figures.
• Also interesting is “La Bañista sentada” (1930), a stark figure that seems to be the result of a strange geological erosion, with allusions to the mantis religiosa, consumer of men - a symbolic metaphor, probably, a product of his bad relations with his wife Olga.
• In “Desnudo acostado” (1932), he portrays his new lover, Marie-Therese Walter, emphasizing her blonde hair and highlighting the sensuality of her curves, expressing the artist's happiness during that new era.

Nuevo Cubismo

• In the 1930s, Picasso began a neo-Cubist phase, merging Surrealism, synthetic Cubism, and Expressionism.
• One of his favorite themes was bullfighting, of which he created several series using different techniques (engraving, painting, and drawing).
• Bullfights are represented as a bloody ritual, with the bull as a symbol of uncivilized nature.
• In 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, Picasso was appointed honorary director of the Museo del Prado - a position he held until 1939.
• In those years, he composed his great work, "Guernica", made for the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Universal Exposition of 1937 in Paris.
• It merges multiple avant-gardes: Cubism, Symbolism, and Expressionism.
• It constitutes a symbol of the brutality of war and the defenseless people; it is a work of extraordinary dramatic tension and expressive force, achieved through symbols of different interpretations such as the horse and its horrible death, the bull, women, children, screams, the sun represented by artificial light, etc.
• Consciously, the author left the window open to different interpretations of the work, so that the viewer reflected their inner emotions toward a war conflict; therefore, "Guernica" is considered the victory of art over the irrationality of war.
• Picasso never set foot on Spanish soil after the disaster of the Civil War. In later years, in addition to painting, he wrote several literary and theatrical works ("El deseo atrapado por la cola", "Las cuatro niñas", or "El entierro del conde Orgaz").
• The memory of "Guernica" remained present in works such as "El osario" - created with propaganda - where he repeated the same technique and colors as in "Guernica".
• A few years earlier, he had joined the French Communist Party, hence this type of works with a more militant character were common in his production; as he shows us again in "Masacre en Corea" (1951), inspired by "Los fusilamientos del 3 de mayo" by Francisco de Goya (1746-1828).
• However, with the end of World War II, his paintings regained optimism, as shown by "La joie de vivre", made in 1946.
• Picasso continued painting and creating until the end of his life. Among his last works are the series of homage to other painters like Velázquez, with "Las Meninas"; his production in ceramics and sculpture is also important. He died in 1973, at the age of 91.

Escultura

• Picasso was always attracted to sculpture; in fact, the Catalan sculptor Julio González (1876-1942) taught him ironworking techniques.
• His sculptural works were essentially feminine, with large roundness and charged with a strong eroticism, highlighting the feminine sexual attributes, and sometimes, the masculine ones.
• From 1912, he made collages integrating all kinds of materials such as cardboard, wires, tables, etc., which influenced Dadaism and Pop Art; his “Guitarra” (1912) and “Copa de ajenjo” (1914) exemplify synthetic Cubism.
• “La mujer en el jardín” (1930-1932) is one of the most innovative sculptures of the 20th century, showing surrealist influences; it measures more than two meters high and is a plastic and spatial synthesis of the Cubist heritage.
• Within his sculptural production, his work with found materials stands out: “La cabra” (1950) and “La mona y su cría” (1951) show expressionist tendencies.

Salvador Dalí

Los Primeros Años de Su Vida

• Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech (1904-1989), better known as Salvador Dalí, was born in Figueras, province of Gerona.
• Son of a freethinking notary, he was named Salvador in memory of a deceased brother.
• His relations with the family of Ramón Pichot (1871-1925) - a somewhat renowned painter closely linked to the Catalan avant-garde - Santiago Rusiñol (1861-1931) and Picasso opened the doors of French Impressionism for him.
• From 1918, Dalí began to collaborate with magazines of various kinds, drawing vignettes based on the contemplation of nature within the aesthetics of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
• In 1920, Dalí considered himself an Impressionist.
• When he began his life in Madrid, he already had an extensive youth production consisting of more than eighty paintings of landscapes, portraits, scenes of fishermen from Cadaqués, etc., all affected by a "Catalanist" sensibility.

Su Obra Hasta 1928

• In 1922, he entered the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.
• During his time in Madrid, he lived in the Residencia de Estudiantes until 1926 - when he was expelled for his eccentricity and arrogance; however, his stay there was very positive for the artist, as it allowed him to connect and befriend figures such as Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, Eugenio Montes (1900-1982), Pepín Bello (1904-2008), etc., with whom he frequented Madrid's nightlife of brothels and bars, which he recreated in works such as “Sueños noctámbulos”.
• In 1925, he held his first solo exhibition in the Dalmau gallery in Barcelona and, a year later, traveled to Paris for the first time, willing, in his words, to "dress himself in power".
• His gifts for drawing and mastery of oil technique were his main "virtues".
• Around that time, influences of Cubism are detected in his work, especially Picasso's work from the 1920s, albeit with the rigor of lines and composition that characterized his entire career.
• Under the Cubist viewpoint, we find a series that includes "Naturaleza al claro de luna" (1926), with degrees of abstraction under the influence of Futurism.
• From this period are “Muchacha asomada a la ventana” and “Muchacha de espaldas”, which belong to a series of detailed paintings of a realist tone around the figure of his sister, Ana María - of whom he painted a total of twelve portraits between 1923 and 1926 - revealing a great influence from Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) and Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675).
• Many of the works of this period were made for the Exhibition of the Society of Iberian Artists. In the background, they constitute the symbolic representation of his friendship with Lorca and Buñuel, which is why it is often referred to as the Lorquian stage; in fact, he painted the sets for some of Lorca's plays, such as Mariana Pineda.
• His first approach to Surrealism - classified as Protosurrealism - occurred between 1926 and 1927.
• In “La miel es más dulce que la sangre” (1926), he includes the theme of the putrefaction of a donkey with Dadaist devices for the first time. From then on, eroticism and sex will be recurrent elements in most of his artistic production; “Cenicitas” (1927) shows a large number of sexual icons such as erect fingers and bird heads and wings.

Su Obra Entre 1928-1945

• In 1928, the poet Filippo Marinetti, who exerted an important influence on the Catalan avant-garde of those years, highlighted Dalí as a follower of Futurism.
• That same year, the Catalan painter participated in the publication of “Manifiesto Groc” (Yellow Manifesto), a Catalan anti-artistic manifesto of Futurist inspiration, where he showed his rejection of all things Catalan and even asked for the abolition of the sardana and the demolition of the Gothic quarter of Barcelona.
• In 1929, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel prepared the script for the film "Un perro andaluz".
• They recorded it in Paris, where the painter had the opportunity to meet Joan Miró, who put him in contact with the surrealist group headed by André Bretón.
• The latter had published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, questioning the existing reality and life itself after the Great War and Freud's theories about the subconscious.
• Dalí's appearance meant the renovation of French Surrealism, which was then in frank decline; Dalí collaborated with André Breton on the cover of the Second Surrealist Manifesto. In his paintings, Dalí departed from his own self-analysis and was inspired by the ideas of Freud and French psychiatrists. That same year, he met Elena Ivánovna Diákonova, known as Gala (1894-1982), his future wife. Gala was Dalí's great love, but also an effective manager and advisor both in the great intellectual and moral dilemmas and in the insignificant minutiae of life.
• From then on, the artist's work manifested a rejection of the rational and showed a deep interest in the world of the oneiric - of dreams -, the subconscious and the fantastic; in addition, it affirmed everything denied by conventional morality.
• All his concerns appeared in his paintings - he was obsessed with sex and terrified of the idea of coitus, due to the possible transmission of venereal diseases - his fears, phobias, and neuroses.
• His iconographic elements were very rich and extravagant; among his favorites, it would be necessary to mention some recurrent ones: putrefaction - which he identified with feelings -; soft and hard forms - plastic representation of the qualities of moral and psychological character -; the carnuzo or death theme - which served to reflect his fear of death -; the soft watches - symbol of the passage of time -; the flying finger - as a phallic image -; the cork - emblem of the feminine sex -; the toothed vagina - which embodies surrealist fears of the woman who devours men -; the lion - which represents passion -; the hand - referring to his masturbatory excesses -; the crutches - as a symbol of sterilization -, which support decadent bodies - which are identified with moribund European civilization -; and the figure of William Tell - symbol of his father -.
• One of his most emblematic works is "El gran masturbador", painted in 1929, after Gala's return to Paris with her then husband, the poet Paul Éluard (1895-1952).
• In the foreground, a form appears that, from the artist's head, in a horizontal direction and supported on the nose, metamorphoses detumescent and amoeboid, accompanied by an accumulation of surreal symbols such as the hook of his fisherwoman, the stones they collected together on their walks along the beach of Cadaqués, the head of a woman (Gala), the bare torso of a referent felatorio, the hard and soft forms, and the grasshopper with excrement as terrifying elements since his childhood. That same year he painted "El juego lúgubre", in which he offers, with almost a miniaturist technique, a whole catalog of erotic symbols as well.
• At the end of 1929, he developed his paranoid-critical method, based on the fact that a certain type of mental disorder, paranoia, is a way of interpreting the world. In this theoretical work, he offers us the explanation of his canvases; for example, the contrast of hard and soft forms has its reference in this method.
• Two years later he painted "La persistencia de la memoria" (1931); in it, we find again the soft watches and the artist's head detumescent of "El gran masturbador" - which manifests his feeling of guilt before his onanistic excesses -, and a landscape frame of great mineral hardness, which recreates the contrast of hard and soft forms and remembers Cadaqués.
• In November 1934, the painter traveled with Gala for the first time to the United States. The works of the Catalan genius had been known there since the late twenties. It was the first of several trips that led the artist, in the years prior to the war, to change his residence on several occasions. Unlike Picasso, the political dimension of the situation in Spain after the outbreak of the Civil War did not interest him too much; on the contrary, he took advantage of his stay in Italy, where he had settled to flee the conflict, to study the painting and architecture of the Renaissance (Charles, 2008). In 1938 he painted “El enigma sin fin”, a painting in which the artist leaves the viewer the possibility of establishing various interpretive readings, as was common in his work.

Su Obra Tras 1945

• After World War II, Dalí made public his sympathies for traditional Catholicism and for the Franco regime.
• His fame was already enormous by then, the price of his paintings extremely high, and he became an even more capricious and unusual being. This exhibitionism has been interpreted by some authors as a manifestation of great personal insecurity in the face of a dominating father (Honour and Fleming, 2004).
• In the last years of his career, Dalí crossed the border of painting to experiment with novel techniques such as artistic holography. He anticipated Pop Art and other isms of the sixties and seventies and was even recognized by Andy Warhol (1928-1987) as one of the most notable influences of the Pop movement. The pictorial work of this stage is no longer as valuable as the previous one due to its recurring sense, where he repeats himself; his bad taste and the constant search for self-publicity have also been criticized. The technical virtuosity and the frequent recourse to optical illusions characterize his final works. Images of Gala as Madonna are very frequent in this period, as we see in “La Madonna de Port Lligat”. Of this moment is also his famous Christ, where the painter offers us the image of the crucified from a high perspective and with a strong light contrast that gives it a dramatic tone. Salvador Dalí died in Figueras, in January 1989; he was 84 years old, and was exhausted and destroyed by the disease; he bequeathed all his artistic creations to the Spanish State.

Joan Miró

Los Primeros Años de Su Vida

• Joan Miró i Ferrà (1893-1983) was born in Barcelona, but his first experiences are linked to Tarragona and, above all, to Montroig, where he developed his love for nature, animals, and the plant world.
• His family forced him to pursue commercial studies, which he alternated with his drawing training at the Lonja (School of Arts and Crafts of Barcelona).
• In 1912, he completed his pictorial training at the famous Escola d’Art de Francesc Galí, a full expression of the Noucentisme that triumphed in Catalonia, where he came into contact with some of the main figures in the artistic culture of the moment.
• Josep Dalmau (1867-1937) offered him his first opportunity to exhibit in 1918.

Su Obra Hasta 1925

• In his first stage, he developed a personal vision of Fauvism and Cubism.
• In 1919, he made his first trip to Paris, where he met Picasso, who encouraged him to live in the French capital, where he settled permanently.
• The Parisian dream ended up becoming a nightmare of economic hardships, although his stay there enriched his training and brought him a great friendly relationship with the sculptor Pablo Gargallo.
• His artistic production, during these early years, synthesizes the influences of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) in color, of Matisse in drawing and of Juan Gris (1887-1927) in composition.
• His first works focused on the landscape and portraits; in them, he made a personal fusion of Cubism and Fauvism. He soon evolved to figuration and developed what he called “poetic realism”, where he recreated a rich peasant culture in which plant motifs, animals, stars, etc. abounded.
• In 1921, he painted “Mesa con guante”, a kind of synthetic Cubism with influences from Juan Gris and Dadaism in which the decorative intention predominates.
• In 1922, he created “La masía”, which represents his family's country house in Montroig, where he demonstrated his change of language, the search for the essential, meticulousness, sensitivity, and attention to detail; it is considered the most representative work of that almost mystical relationship that the painter maintained with the earth in this first stage.
• Between 1924 and 1925 he painted “El carnaval del arlequín”, with which he surprised the world; in this work, he recreates a new iconographic catalog, close to the infantile, such as roosters, dragonflies, the cat that always kept him company while he painted, stars, comets, musical instruments, eyes, sexes, the Eiffel Tower of black color in the background, the ladder of evasion - as a symbol of his desire for transcendence -, and the terrestrial globe - for his aspiration to conquer the world -.
• All these motifs were treated with a miniaturist character; primary colors (blues, yellows, and reds) predominate, trying to represent the magical side of things. Miró said that these compositions were produced by "the hallucinations of hunger". With this work, a new type of composition appeared, called constelada, which opened the way to works that retained references to the outside world and figuration.

Su Obra Desde 1925

• In 1924, Miró joined the surrealist movement and, in 1925, participated in the first exhibition held by the group.
• From 1925 we can consider, therefore, Miró within abstract Surrealism - a style that mixes figurative elements with abstract ones -, of which Miró was its most important representative, despite his own opinions by which he affirmed his "rigorous, absolute and total independence".
• However, his compositions show all the features of Surrealism, to which must be added certain doses of humor, infantilism, primitivism, great color, and the predominance of the line.
• Between 1