Joan Miro: visionary artist and master craftsman.

THE FINEST PAINTER to be associated with Surrealism, Joan Miro created a pictorial world of radiant, imaginative, and formal power. His unique language of visual signs and his radical treatment of space made possible an art of transformations. He envisioned the world as the site of ceaseless mutations between the terrestial and the celestial. Yet, Miro's art remains very close to the observed, to the sense--if not always to the retinal experience--of things seen. He was adamant that his art was never abstract, maintaining that it always was based on reality. His works are vivid records of what was most real to him--the transactions between the sensous and the spiritual.

Part visionary poet and part meticulous craftsman, Miro succinctly explained his philosophy and approach to making art: "You must always plant your feet firmly on the ground if you want to be able to jump up in the air." His art now stands as the paradigm for all that is free and spontaneous in the art of this century, yet his mastery was achieved by recognizing that discipline and order are not negative qualities, but can be creative and liberating. Passion and pragmatism, freedom and control--these are the essence of Miro's art, and through them he presents his many versions of reality.

Miro's was born in 1893 in Barcelona, capital of Catalonia, Spain. His father was a wacthmaker; his mother, a native of Mallorca, came from a family of artisans. Throughout his life, Miro would stress the importance of his native land, in particular the family farm at Montroig, as a source of inspiration. Combined with this ardent attachment to his Catalan heritage was an equally keen desire to create an art that would transform particularities of place into a universal form of expression.

This drive to reveal the marvelous in the commonplace would help sustain Miro throughout his long and varied career. It first was seen as the young artist took the lessons he had learned from Barcelona's art academies, local exhibitions of international art, and various foreign and Catalan avant-garde magazines and applied them to subjects drawn from his immediate environment--the countryside of Catalonia, his circle of friends in Barcelona, and the contents of his studio and home.

Miro's career began to take its distinctive shape around 1915 in Barcelona, with the artist's early attempts to forge a style out of the conflicting currents of modernism and his deeply felt Catalan identity. The large "Standing Nude" of 1918, with its heavy brushwork, strident color, and exaggerated forms, shows not just an awareness of Cubist structural principles and Fauve colors, but also a will to play one brashly contrasting style against another, creating a hybrid image that is a challenge to both traditional and vanguard artistic values.

During the summer of 1918, Miro's work changed. He began to concentrate solely on landscape, specifically that around Montroig. His color paled and became flatter and more lyrical; his drawing delicate and precise. In a letter to a friend, he referred to those landscapes as "calligraphy," describing the time-consuming nature of painting "blade of grass by blade of grass, tile by tile."

Miro's self-portrait of 1919 manifests this same painstaking attention. Unlike the bold brushwork and vivid colors found in another self-portrait of two years earlier, or in the portraits of his friends E.C. Ricart, Heriberto Casany, and Ramon Sunyer, the chromatic range of this...