호안 미로

Joan Miró liked to say that hunger gave him his visions. In the early 1920s he was a young Catalan painter living poor in Paris, and by his own account he would sit staring at the bare walls of his studio, half-starved, watching shapes swim up out of the emptiness. He painted what he saw there — floating blobs, thin wandering lines, a stray eye or star — in pictures like Harlequin's Carnival, which he said came straight out of that hallucination of hunger.

He had come from Barcelona, born in 1893, and he never really left Catalonia behind. Every summer he went back to his family's farm at Mont-roig, and the red earth, the animals, and the folk imagery of that place kept surfacing in even his most abstract work. In Paris he fell in with the Surrealists, the writers and painters around André Breton who prized dreams and the unplanned image, and his loose, floating shapes fit their idea of automatic art almost too neatly.

Miró stayed uneasy with the label, and with painting itself. He talked openly about wanting to commit what he called the assassination of painting, to blow up the polished, respectable pictures the wealthy hung on their walls to flatter themselves. He kept working at that for sixty years, into ceramics, huge public murals, and sculpture. He died on Christmas Day 1983, at 90, in Palma on the island of Mallorca, where he had kept a vast studio for his last decades.