Miró - Basic Art Series, Book

With a career spanning seven decades, Catalan Joan Miró (1893-1983) was a giant polymath of modern art, producing masterpieces in painting, sculpture, art books, tapestry and ceramics, and embracing ideologies as varied as Fauvism, Surrealism, Dada, Magic Realism, Cubism and abstraction. Throughout his prodigious output, Miró constantly evolved, seeking to avoid categorisation and the approval of "bourgeois" art critics, as well as pursuing his own dream worlds.

Emerging into the public eye in the 1920s, he first experimented with Fauvism and Cubism before developing a distinctive style of symbols and pictograms, organised into elusive visual narratives, with frequent reference to Catalan life. As his career progressed, Miró leaned towards Surrealism and, although he never fully identified with the movement, he became one of its most celebrated practitioners, using techniques such as automated drawing, Lyrical Abstraction and Colour Field painting.

In later years, he diversified his mediums even further, working with ceramics, textiles and even proposing sculptures made of gas. Through his vivid colours, dreamlike fantasies and enigmatic symbols, this book brings together the many threads of Miró's kaleidoscopic oeuvre to present his fascinating career, his interaction with the main modernist movements and how this turned him into a modernist legend.