Printmaking Archives – Daily Art Fixx

Paul Klee: 1879-1940

December 18, 2019 By Wendy Campbell

Born on December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee, Paul Klee was a German-Swiss painter, draftsman, printmaker, teacher and writer. He is regarded as a major theoretician among modern artists, a master of humour and mystery, and a major contributor to 20th century art.

Klee was born into a family of musicians and his childhood love of music would remain very important in his life and work. From 1898 to 1901, he studied in Munich under Heinrich Knirr, and then at the Kunstakademie under Franz von Stuck. In 1901, Klee traveled to Italy with the sculptor Hermann Haller and then settled in Bern in 1902.

A series of his satirical etchings called The Inventions were exhibited at the Munich Secession in 1906. That same year Klee married pianist Lily Stumpf and moved to Munich. In 1907, the couple had a son, Felix. For the next five years, Klee worked to define his own style through the manipulation of light and dark in his pen and ink drawings and watercolour wash. He also painted on glass, applying a white line to a blackened surface. During this time Klee paid close attention to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting and became interested in the work of van Gogh, Cézanne, and Matisse.

In 1911, Klee met Alexej Jawlensky, Vasily Kandinsky, August Macke, Franz Marc, and other avant-garde figures. He participated in art shows including the second Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) exhibition at Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, in 1912, and the Erste deutsche Herbstsalon at the Der Sturm Gallery, Berlin, in 1913. Klee shared with Kandinsky and Marc a deep belief in the spiritual nature of artistic activity. He valued the authentic creative expression found in popular and tribal culture and in the art of children and the insane.

Klee’s main concentration on graphic work changed in 1914, after he spent two weeks in Tunisia with the painters August Macke and Louis Moilliet. He produced a number of stunning watercolours, and colour became central to his art for the remainder of his life.

During World War I, Klee worked as an accounting clerk in the military and was able to continue drawing and painting at his desk. His work during this period had an Expressionist feel, both in their brightness and in motifs of enchanted gardens and mysterious forests.

In 1918, Klee moved back to Munich and worked extensively in oil for the first time, painting intensely coloured, mysterious landscapes. During this time, he also became interested in the theory of art and published his ideas on the nature of graphic art in the ‘Schöpferische Konfession’ in 1920. Klee also became interested in politics and joined the Action Committee of Revolutionary Artists, an association that supported the Bavarian Socialist Republic. Like other artists at the time, Klee had envisioned a more central role for the artist in a socialist community.

In 1920, Klee was appointed to the faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar where he taught from 1921 to 1926, and in Dessau from 1926 to 1931. During this time Klee developed many unique methods of creating art. The most well-known is the oil transfer drawing which involves tracing a pencil drawing placed over a page coated with black ink or oil, onto a third sheet. That sheet receives the outline of the drawing in black, in addition to random smudges of excess oil from the middle sheet.

During his years in Weimar, Klee achieved international fame. However, his final years at the Dessau Bauhaus were marked by major political problems. In 1931, Klee ended his contract shortly before the Nazis closed the Bauhaus. He began to teach at the Düsseldorf art academy, commuting there from his home in Dessau.

In Düsseldorf, Klee developed a divisionist painting technique that was related to Seurat’s pointillist paintings. These works consisted of layers of colour applied over a surface in patterns of small spots. His time in Düsseldorf however, was affected by the rise of the Nazis. In 1933, he became a target of a campaign against Entartete Kunst. The Nazis took control of the academy, and in April Klee was dismissed from his post. In December, he and his wife left Germany and returned to Berne.

In 1935, Klee developed the first symptoms of scleroderma, a skin disease that he suffered with until his death. Despite his personal and physical challenges, Klee’s final years were some of his most productive times. Several hundred paintings and 1,583 drawings were recorded between 1937 and May 1940. Many of these works depicted the subject of death and his famous painting, Death and Fire, is considered his personal requiem.

Paul Klee died in Muralto, Locarno, Switzerland, on June 29, 1940. He was buried at Schosshalde Friedhof, Bern, Switzerland. A museum dedicated to Klee was built in Bern, Switzerland, by Italian architect Renzo Piano. Zentrum Paul Klee opened in June 2005 and holds a collection of about 4,000 works.

Sources: MoMA, Guggenheim Museum, Wikipedia,

Edvard Munch: 1863-1944

December 12, 2019 By Wendy Campbell

Born on December 12, 1863, in the village of Ådalsbruk in Løten, Norway, Edvard Munch was a symbolist painter, printmaker and draughtsman, and his work is recognized as an important precursor of the Expressionist movement.

In 1879, Munch studied engineering at Kristiania Technical College where he learned scaled and perspective drawing. He was absent much of the time however due to frequent illness. In 1881, Munch decided to become a painter and studied for one year at the Royal School of Design. Upon leaving school, Munch rented a studio with a group of colleagues in Karl Johan Street, in the centre of the city.

In these early years, Munch experimented with different styles including Naturalism and Impressionism. In 1889, he had his first solo show and the recognition he received led to a two-year state scholarship to study in Paris under French painter Léon Bonnat.

Munch was impressed by the modern European art in Paris. He was particularly influenced by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and their methods of using colour to convey emotion.

By 1892, Munch had developed his own unique form of Synthetism where colour was the symbol-laden element. In that same year, the Union of Berlin Artists invited him to exhibit at its autumn exhibition. His paintings however, created a bitter controversy (dubbed “The Munch Affair”) and the exhibition closed after only one week. The “Affair” also gave Munch a great deal of publicity and he was invited to exhibit in other parts of Germany.

Apart from spending summers in Norway, Munch lived in Germany for three years. While there, he sketched out most of the ideas for his major work The Frieze of Life, a series of paintings in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, and melancholy. His best known painting, The Scream (1893) was also painted during this time.

Munch learned to make drypoints in 1894 and he printed his first colour lithographs and woodcuts in 1896. His method of woodcutting was innovative, using the structure of the wood itself, emphasizing the expressiveness of the material. His woodcuts had a significant influence on later artists, particularly the German Expressionists.

In 1896, Munch moved to Paris, where he continued to develop his woodcut techniques. Many Parisian critics still considered his work “violent and brutal” but his exhibitions were well attended and he received considerable attention.

After constant travel in France and Germany, and a dramatic romance with a Norwegian woman, Tulla Larsen, Munch entered the sanitorium of Kornhaug in Gudbrandsdalen in 1899, and stayed until 1900, to restore his nerves and physical strength.

In 1902, Munch achieved a definitive breakthrough in Berlin. The Frieze of Life was exhibited at the Berlin Secession which led to artistic recognition and financial success. His Paris Salon exhibitions in 1903 and 1904 attracted considerable attention, but his greatest success at this time was his exhibition in Prague in 1905. Also during this time, Munch received many commissions for portraits and prints which improved his financial condition.

In 1908, Munch’s physical and psychological health broke down – his excessive alcohol consumption and brawling had become severe. He entered the sanitorium of Dr. Daniel Jacobsen in Copenhagen where he received treatment for the next eight months. During this time, he continued a series of full-length portraits, arranged sales of works to Norwegian collectors, and prepared for a retrospective exhibition in Kristiania.

Munch’s loyalties were divided at the onset of WWI, as he stated, “All my friends are German but it is France that I love”. In the 1930s, his German patrons, many Jewish, lost their fortunes and some their lives during the rise of the Nazis. Munch’s art was removed from German museums and classified as “degenerate”.

By the time Germany invaded and occupied Norway in 1940, Munch was living an isolated existence on his estate in Ekely, Oslo. Norwegian museums had also removed his paintings and prints from view. With nearly an entire collection of his art in the second floor of his house, Munch feared Nazi confiscation. Seventy-one of the paintings previously taken by the Nazis had returned to Norway through purchases by collectors.

Munch became ill after an explosion at a munitions depot near Ekely broke the windows in his house. He died on January 23, 1944.

In his will he bequeathed over 1,000 paintings, 15,400 prints, and a large number of their plates, 5,000 watercolours and drawings, and six sculptures to the Municipality of Oslo. The collection went on view to the public after the opening of the Munch-Museet in Oslo in 1963.

Sources: MoMA, Munch Museum, Wikipedia

Katsushika Hokusai: 36 Views of Mount Fuji

October 1, 2019 By Wendy Campbell

Born in the autumn of 1760, Hokusai was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period. As a child, he learned woodblock cutting and was apprenticed to a book-lending shop. At the age of 19, he studied at the school of Katsukawa Shunsho, a leading woodblock artisan of the time, who was known for his portraits of popular actors.

Hokusai studied the techniques of the Kano Yusen, Tsutsumi Torin, and the Sumiyoshi Naikie schools. He was also greatly intrigued by the Western art that entered Japan through Dutch trading.

Beginning in 1814, Hokusai published his Hokusai Manga sketchbooks. The popular books contained thousands of drawings of people, religious figures, and animals.

Hokusai’s “36 views of Mount Fuji” are his best-known prints and are among the most famous of the Japanese woodcuts. He was 69 when he began the project and was already known for his painting, book illustration and surimono (commissioned prints) designs. Hokusai worked on the series for almost ten years before its publication in 1830 and they are considered by many to be his best work. After the original publication, due to their popularity, ten more prints were added.

Hokusai was a prolific artist and in his lifetime produced more than 30,000 print designs. He is said to have been an eccentric man with a restless nature. He changed his artistic name more than thirty times in his career, and changed his residence 93 times. He lived a long and productive life, continuing to produce prints well into his eighties.

Katsushika Hokusai died on April 18, 1849 at the age of 89. His last words were “If heaven gives me ten more years, or an extension of even five years, I shall surely become a true artist.”

To view the complete series of 36 (plus 10 extra) Views of Mount Fuji, visit Wikipedia.

Sources: Artelino, Wikipedia, Monash University

Wassily Kandinsky: 1866-1944

December 16, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on December 16, 1866 in Moscow Russia, Wassily Kandinsky was a painter, printmaker, stage designer, art theorist, and a central artist in the development of 20th century abstract art.

Kandinsky studied economics, ethnography and law in Moscow from 1886 to 1893, and wrote a dissertation on the legality of labourers’ wages. In 1896, Kandinsky decided to become an artist and traveled to Munich, Germany where he studied at the art school of Anton Ažbe. In 1900, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich under Franz von Stuck.

In Munich, the early 1900s was a centre for Jugendstil (Art Nouveau), and Kandinsky’s art grew out of this movement as well as Russian art. His early works included figure studies, scenes with knights and riders, romantic fairytale subjects and other Russian scenes. He worked with tempera and gouache on black backgrounds and later used printmaking techniques including etching and drypoint. Also at this time, Kandinsky began creating small oil sketches using a palette knife on canvas board.

Between 1903 and 1909, he and his companion Gabriele Münter traveled to the Netherlands, Tunisia, Italy, France and throughout Germany. While in France, Kandinsky stayed in Sèvres, outside Paris, where paintings by Paul Gauguin, les Nabis, Henri Matisse and other Fauvists were exhibiting. He was influenced by these artists and his colours became more vibrant.

Between 1904 and 1908, Kandinsky participated in art exhibitions in Moscow and St Petersburg, the Berlin Secession, and the Salon d’Automne in Paris. He was a co-founder of the Neue künstlervereinigung münchen (Munich New Artist’s Association) in 1909, and exhibited with them at the Moderne Galerie Thannhauser in Munich. Kandinsky had developed a distinctive style of painting and his shift from representational painting towards abstraction, focusing on the synthesis of colour line and form began.

Kandinsky was forced to leave Munich after the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and he and Münter stayed for several months in Switzerland. At the end of 1914, he went back to Russia and in December 1915, he traveled to Stockholm, to meet Münter. He returned to Russia in 1916, where he met Nina von Andreyevskaya, whom he married in February 1917.

Between 1915 and 1919, Kandinsky produced numerous drawings and watercolours, as well as prints and paintings on glass. At times he returned to a more representational style, painting realistic landscapes, views of Moscow, figure paintings, and fairytale scenes. However, his work also included completely abstract ink drawings, and geometric shapes became more prevalent.

Between 1918 and 1921, Kandinsky’s activities as a teacher, writer, administrator and organizer occupied much of his time. He played an active role in Narkompros, where he was director of the theatre and film sections and was an editor of a journal for the publication IZO. He was also head of a studio at Moscow Svomas art school. Kandinsky still found time to produce large canvases and many watercolours and drawings.

Kandinsky returned to Germany in 1921 and accepted an offer of professorship at the Bauhaus in Weimar. He became master of the wall painting workshop and taught a course on the theory of form. The faculty, which included Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, developed theoretical courses, led workshops and instruction in crafts and sought to reunite all artistic disciplines.

At the Bauhaus, Kandinsky created about three hundred oils and several hundred watercolours. From the beginning, he had systematically recorded his paintings, and after 1922, he catalogued the watercolours as well. He also produced many drawings which often related to his teaching theories.

During the Bauhaus period, Kandinsky used circles, squares, triangles, zigzags, checker-boards and arrows as components of his abstract works. The shapes became just as meaningful as the abstract images of towers, horses, boats and rowers had been in his art in earlier years.

In 1933, Kandinsky and his wife moved to Paris after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus school. During this time, his art included biomorphic forms, the incorporation of sand with pigment, and a new delicacy and brightness in his colour harmonies. He preferred pastels to the primary colours he had used in the 1920s, and he favoured images derived from biology, zoology and embryology.

Between 1934 and 1944, Kandinsky created 144 oil paintings, about 250 watercolours, and several hundred drawings. His work during this time revealed his personal response to prevailing artistic fashions – the free, organic shapes of Surrealism and the geometric abstraction of Art concret and Abstraction–Création.

Kandinsky became a French citizen shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. He continued working during the period of German occupation and died on December 13, 1944 at Neuilly-sur-Seine.

: Kandinsky, On White II 1923.jpg

Sources: MoMA, Wikipedia

Roy Lichtenstein: 1923-1997

October 27, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is primarily identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate, and his first fully achieved paintings were based on imagery lifted from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction. These paintings reinvigorated the American art scene and altered the history of modern art. Lichtenstein’s success was matched by his focus and energy, and after his initial triumph in the early 1960s, he went on to create an oeuvre of more than 5,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, murals and other objects celebrated for their wit and invention. (from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation) For in-depth information about Lichtenstein’s life and works, visit the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation website.

The nine-minute video below, Roy Lichtenstein: Diagram of an Artist, from the TATE brings together archival footage of Lichtenstein. at home and at work in his studio, as well as interviews with his wife Dorothy and friend Frederic Tuten, to create an intimate portrait of the artist.

Image credit: Roy Lichtenstein, Left: In the Car – 1963 | Middle: Woman with Flowered Hat, 1963 | Right: Nurse, 1964 All images © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

Takao Tanabe: Painting, Printmaking

September 16, 2016 By Susan Benton

Takao Tanabe, considered one of Canada’s leading painters and printmakers, has shown work nationally and internationally for over sixty years. Though he studied in New York, Tokyo and London, it was his native area of the coast of western Canada that attracted and inspired him to move from the Abstraction painting of his youth to landscape, the painting that he has become most known for. A self-described minimalist painter, his painting and his teaching have garnered him many awards including the Order of British Columbia, the Order of Canada and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Takao Tanabe was born Takao Izumi in the small village of Seal Cove (now Prince Rupert) on September 16, 1926, the son of a commercial fisherman. The fishing village on the coast of northern British Columbia was primarily a Japanese-Canadian community and Takao spent the summers of his youth in fishing camps on the Skeena River. The family moved to Vancouver in 1937, however just a few years later, they were forced to leave their home. The 1941 Japanese attack on the U.S. at Pearl Harbor in World War II saw the Canadian government impose restrictions on Japanese-Canadians and the family was interned at a “relocation” camp in British Columbia as Japanese aliens. The young man, along with his two older siblings, were then moved to eastern Manitoba as indentured workers on a sugar-beet farm.

At the end of the war, Takao, now with the last name of Tanabe, after his mother’s family, went to Winnipeg in 1946. He began courses at the Winnipeg School of Art and also attended the University of Manitoba.

In 1950, Tanabe studied at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School in New York. His work reflected the major genre of Abstract Expressionism that was taking hold in America after World War II. He was fortunate enough to take drawing classes from Hans Hofmann, a major artist of the Abstract movement. Tanabe was to remain an Abstract painter, “using geometric shapes, flat spatial planes, perspective and bold colours in a range of mediums”, for more than twenty years.

Tanabe returned home to Canada in 1952, exhibiting to good reviews in Vancouver and taking a few classes at Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta. Over the next ten years he would have the opportunity to travel and learn different aspects of painting and art in England and Japan. In 1953, he was the recipient of an Emily Carr scholarship and was able to attend the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, England. By 1957, Tanabe was gaining recognition and had a one-man show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as exhibits across the country, and internationally – at the Bienal de São Paulo and in Milan.

Support from the Canada Council for the Arts allowed Tanabe to visit Japan in 1959, where he learned the arts of calligraphy and sumi-e (Japanese ink painting) at the Tokyo University of Arts. His new knowledge impacted his painting, and by the early 1960s he was creating Japanese-influenced ink drawings (Falling Water, 1967).

Tanabe returned to Vancouver in 1961 to teach at the Vancouver Art School and was to stay there for seven years, during which time he painted large-scale murals. In 1968, he went back to the States, working in Philadelphia and then in New York City until 1972, when an offer from Banff Art Centre in Alberta, Canada, not only brought him back to Canada but also coincided with a significant change in his work.

“After 22 years of painting abstract painting, I decided it was time to try something else…painting landscape…” he said. His week-long journey across the prairies to his new position inspired a whole series of landscape painting reflecting the flat and vast prairies. Tanabe has said that it is “simpler for my brain to think in series”, and indeed he has painted many landscape series including a series of 20 of the mountains in winter.

After seven years at Banff, and after influencing hundreds of students, Tanabe and his wife moved to Vancouver Island in 1980 where he could paint full time in a place of which he has said, “If you know B.C., you know the variety of landscapes and seascapes…islands, mountains, and valleys. It’s got a prairie-like atmosphere up in the Cariboo area…you don’t have to go look anywhere else…nothing holds a candle to the variety of views that BC offers.”

When last we checked, Tanabe still paints in his rural B.C. studio every day. His work, purely devoted to nature, explicitly without the human intervention in the landscape (railway lines, telephone poles, silos, etc.) and with the smooth finish of the artist who wants the paint to look as though it “just floated on”, has been collected by the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and many other public and private galleries. He is well known for “his transcendent light and atmosphere, which fluctuates from delicate and misty to stormy and brooding in his landscapes”, and his work appeals to collectors and is in high demand – perhaps for the meaning that Tanabe sees in the weather it depicts.

In 2000, Tanabe said in his artist statement for an exhibition of his work in B.C., “However much we desire order and clarity in all the details of our lives, there are always unexpected events that cloud and change our course. Life is ragged. The typical weather of the coast is like that, just enough detail to make it interesting but not so clear as to be banal or overwhelming. It can be a metaphor for life.”

Sources: www.heffel.com, www.gallery.ca, www.ngcmagazine.ca, Exhibition catalogue Takao Tanabe: Wet Coasts and Dry Lands (Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, B.C., 2000), at p. 13

David Hockney: Painting/Photo Collage

July 9, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on July 9, 1937 in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, David Hockney is a painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer. He is considered by many to be one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century.

From 1953-57, Hockney studied at the Bradford School of Art and then at the Royal Collage of Art from 1959-62. He received the Royal College of Art gold medal in 1962 for his paintings and draughtsmanship.

Hockney’s early work was diverse. He became associated with the British Pop Art movement (though he rejected this label), but his work also displayed expressionist elements. In the late 1960’s his work was “weightier” with a more “traditionally representational manner”. He spent much of his time in the United States, and California swimming pools and homoerotic scenes became well-known themes in his work.

In the 1970’s Hockney worked as a stage designer creating set and costume designs for productions including Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Mozart’s The Magic Flute which were produced at Glyndebourne Opera House. Hockney was the subject of the 1974 Jack Hazan’s film called “A Bigger Splash” (named after one of Hockney’s swimming pool paintings from 1967).

In the early 1980’s Hockney produced photo collages which he called “joiners” with subject matter from portraits to still life, and from representational to abstract styles. “Using varying numbers of small Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject, Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. Because these photographs are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work that has an affinity with Cubism, which was one of Hockney’s major aims—discussing the way human vision works.”

In the mid to late 80’s, Hockney made use of computers, colour photocopiers and fax machines to create artwork. In 1985, he was commissioned to draw with the Quantel Paintbox, a computer program that allowed the artist to sketch directly onto the monitor. In 1989, he sent work for the Sao Paulo Biennale to Brazil via fax. Hockney experimented with computers, composing images and colours on the monitor and printing them directly from the computer without proofing.

From the 1990’s onward, Hockney has continued to work on a variety of paintings, photographic and digital work, as well as opera productions. His works have been exhibited across the globe and are in the collections of most major museums. As well, many of his works are now located in a converted industrial building called Salts Mill, in Saltaire, near his home town of Bradford.

Hockney currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California and London, England. “Since 2009, Hockney has painted hundreds of portraits, still lifes, and landscapes using the Brushes iPhone and iPad application, sending them to his friends.”

In 2012, Hockney transferred paintings valued at $124.2 million to the David Hockney Foundation, and gave an additional $1.2 million in cash to help fund the foundation’s operations. The artist plans to give away the paintings, through the foundation, to galleries including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Tate in London.

For more information about David Hockney, visit DavidHockneyPictures.com.

M.C. Escher: 1898-1972

June 17, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Maurits Cornelis Escher, best known for his mathematically inspired prints, was born on June 17, 1898 in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. Escher spent much of his childhood in Arnhem where he attended school. Though he did well at drawing, Escher did not excel in other subjects and received poor grades. From 1919 – 1922, Escher attended the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem where he initially studied architecture but shifted to drawing and printmaking.

After finishing school, Escher traveled through Italy, where he met Jetta Umiker, whom he married in 1924. For the next 11 years, Escher traveled throughout Italy, sketching for the prints he would make back in Rome. The couple remained in Rome until 1935 when growing political turmoil (under Mussolini) prompted them to move first to Switzerland and then to Ukkel, a small town near Brussels, Belgium. In 1941, as German troops occupied Brussels, they moved once again to Baarn, Netherlands, where Escher lived until 1970.

During his lifetime, Escher created 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and over 2,000 drawings and sketches. His work portrays mathematical relationships among shapes, figures and space and many of his drawings are composed around interlocking figures (tessellations) and impossible objects. Escher used vivid contrasts of black and white to enhance different dimensions and integrated into his works were mirror images of cones, spheres, cubes, rings and spirals.

By the 1950s Escher had become highly popular and gave lectures around the world. He received the Order of Oranje Nassau in 1955. In 1958 he was featured in Time magazine and had his first important exhibition in Washington. Escher’s work continued to be popular and he traveled several times to North America for lectures and to see his son George who was living in Canada. In 1970 he moved to Rosa-Spier house in Laren, Netherlands, a retirement home for artists, where he died on March 27, 1972.

For more information on M.C. Escher visit MCEscher.com or for a more in depth biography visit The Escher Pages.

A design Escher might have appreciated

Joan Miró: 1893-1983

April 20, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on April 20, 1893 in Barcelona, Joan Miró Ferra was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker and decorative artist and a key figure in the history of abstract art.

Miró studied business at the Escuela de Comercio and art at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de la Lonja in Barcelona from 1907 to 1910. In 1911, an attack of typhus, as well as nervous depression, enabled him give up his business course and resume his art studies. From 1912-15 he attended Francesc Galí’s Escola d’Art in Barcelona.

Between 1915 and 1918 Miró painted in a style that he described as Fauve, using strong, bright colours. During this period he painted portraits as well as landscapes and views of villages in the province of Tarragona. In 1918 Miró had his first solo exhibition in the Barcelona gallery run by Lluís Dalmau, a key figure in the Catalan avant-garde.

From 1918 to 1922 Miró’s paintings became meticulous and precise with a stylization and flatness akin to the Romanesque paintings that had impressed him in the Museu d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona. In 1920, he traveled to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso. From this time on, he divided his time between Paris and Montroig, Spain. In Paris, he associated with the poets Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and Tristan Tzara and participated in Dada activities. Miró had his first solo show in Paris at the Galerie la Licorne in 1921 and his work was included in the Salon d’Automne of 1923.

In 1924, Miró joined the Surrealist group. In 1925, his solo show at the Galerie Pierre in Paris was a major Surrealist event. That same year, Miró was included in the first Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Pierre. In 1928, he visited the Netherlands and began a series of paintings inspired by Dutch masters. It was during this that that he also produced his first papiers collés and collages.

In 1929, Miró began experimenting with lithography, and his first etchings date from 1933. From 1934 to 1936 Miró produced a series of Wild Paintings, which manifested a violence that had previously been unseen. “Aggression, sexuality and drama here took a deformed and grotesque human form which was emphasized by strange and unexpected materials and surfaces; in some cases paint was mixed with sand and applied to cardboard, while in others he scrawled graffiti on masonite or over paper prepared with tar.”

Miró’s first major museum retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1941. That same year, he began working in ceramics with Josep Lloréns y Artigas and started to concentrate on prints. From 1954-58, Miró worked almost exclusively in these two mediums. In 1958, Miró received a Guggenheim International Award for his murals for the UNESCO building in Paris.

In 1960, Miró’s work underwent a dramatic change when he began to use black to outline shapes and to fill them in. This work is “dramatic, even tragic, with colour often suppressed or counteracted by the weight accorded to black. His faith in abstraction was expressed during this period with particular eloquence in large canvases in which broad strokes of colour were set against sensuously painted backgrounds, as in his paintings of the mid-1920s; the simplicity of gesture and boldness of scale and handling make these among his most impressive and influential later works.”

From 1966 onward, Miró worked intensely in sculpture. These works were based mainly on small objects, which he joined in unique ways. Stones, branches and other objects as well as manufactured items, were joined in a Surrealist style but in a way that also revealed his desire for contact with nature and simple things.

A Miró retrospective took place at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1974. In 1978, the Musée National d’Art Moderne exhibited over 500 works in a major retrospective of his drawings.

Joan Miró died December 25, 1983, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. His final work, completed after his death, was the large sculpture Woman and Bird, which was installed in the gardens on the former site of the Barcelona abattoir.

Sources: Guggenheim Venice, MoMA,

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 146

March 4, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Your weekly Mixx – enjoy!