Joan Miró — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

Miró painted like a child set loose in the unconscious — primary colors, floating shapes, creatures that never existed — and called it an assassination of painting. The contempt was the point: he wanted to kill the bourgeois picture and let something wilder take its place.

Biography

About

Joan Miró i Ferrà was born in Barcelona on 20 April 1893, a Catalan who would carry that identity into every canvas. His work landed somewhere between Surrealism, Fauvism, and Expressionism, but the categories never quite held — he was after the subconscious, the childlike, the pieces of mind that don't sit still. From the 1930s on he spoke openly against conventional painting methods, seeing them as props for a bourgeois world he wanted no part of, and he framed his own practice as an "assassination of painting," an effort to tear down the visual grammar everyone else obeyed. International ac…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Joan Miró

Joan Miró

said1936

..wherever you are, you find the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly.

— In: 'Où allez-vous Miró?' (Where do you go, Miró), Georges Duthuit in Cahiers d'Art 11, nos. 8-10, 1936

Joan Miró

said1936

Have you ever heard of anything more stupid than 'abstraction-abstraction'?

— In: 'Où allez-vous Miró?', art critic Georges Duthuit in Cahiers d'Art 261, nos. 8-10, 1936

Joan Miró

said1936

And then, as you can see, I give greater and greater importance to the materials I use in my work [c. 1936].

— In: 'Où allez-vous Miro?', Georges Duthuit in Cahiers d'Art 11, nos. 8-10, 1936

Joan Miró

said12 Oct 1934

I have thought a lot about the question of titles. I must confess that I find any for works that take off from an arbitrary starting point and end with something real..

— In a letter to his art-seller Pierre Matisse, 12 October 1934; as quoted in Calder Miro, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip

Joan Miró

said1933