The Catalan of Paris

At the beginning of 1920, when Miró was barely 27 years old, he headed to Paris, the center of the art world. There, he quickly became known for a taciturn demeanor. He initially occupied a studio directly next to that of Surrealist painter André Masson (1896-1987), with whom he would share a lifelong friendship. Masson was already being represented by the great art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who eventually took a look at Miró’s work too. Yet the latter’s notorious unwillingness to talk about his work meant the deal with Kahnweiler came to naught.

Miró’s family home, which also housed his father’s workshop, became the scene of the usual operetta: His mother cried a lot, on the one hand touched by the artistic talent of her only son, on the other because it seemed more and more unlikely that Miró would one day follow in his father’s footsteps. He was a daydreaming student who, in 1907 when he was 14 years old, was sent to business college in order for him to do something sensible. At the same time Miró enrolled himself at the La Lonja Academy of Art. 

Futile in such circles 

The business college and La Lonja: Both must have been misery for him. In La Lonja he was considered a poor student, his handling of the material was the subject of particular criticism. However, what was considered clumsy was actually not the result of a lack of talent, but rather an unconventional, unorthodox approach to the material. But first came the business college. Opposing his father’s will would have been thoroughly futile in the circles in which he moved.

In 1911 Miró went down with a cold which then turned into typhus. His family was extremely worried about him and decided to buy a house in the country in Montroig, to the southwest of Barcelona. It was here that Miró regained his strength. His father finally consented to his son becoming an artist. Montroig remained a place of refuge for Miró in later life too, and he spent the summer there during his first years as an artist. 

A vote for dilettantism 

Between 1912 and 1915 Miró attended a private art school in Barcelona, where he met, among others, Josep Llorens Artigas, with whom he would create his ceramics some years later. In 1916 Miró joined the group of artists in Barcelona that would meet at the Josep Dalmau Gallery. He saw works by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger, witnessed works by the fauvists and read avant-garde magazines. Francis Picabia, who promoted dilettantism, was particularly encouraging: “Picabia and others galvanized me because they didn’t want to get bogged down in creative problems, rather they much preferred to make a joke out of them.” (Miró)

It is more of a succession of details than a composition, and yet the image never appears fussy. This masterpiece was indeed exhibited, yet nobody wanted to buy it. In the evenings Miró trained in boxing and got to know Ernest Hemingway. Three years after completion of the image the writer was able to scrape together the purchase price of 5,000 francs in order to gift the painting to his wife for her birthday and never to relinquish it again. 

In the midst of civil war 

In the meantime though, Miró had changed his style of painting and thus also his speed. He threw reality and spatiality overboard, and the image backgrounds of his paintings began to resemble the faded walls of old farmhouses. In 1924 Miró painted his “Catalan Peasant with a Guitar”: He takes the form of a stick man, anticipating the figures of A.R. Penck (*1939). In his right hand he holds a pipe in which sparks burst from the black tobacco, whilst in the left – and here we have to take the painter at his word – he holds a guitar. Furthermore, the peasant wears the traditional headwear for men in the Catalonian countryside, a “barretina”, reminiscent of the Phrygian caps of the French Revolutionaries.