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Joan Miró (1893–1983) was an internationally acclaimed Spanish sculptor, painter and ceramicist, whose work is interpreted as Surrealist with Fauvist and Expressionist influences.

Miró studied at the Lonja’s Escuela Superior de Artes Industriales y Bellas Artes in Barcelona. After suffering a nervous breakdown, he abandoned pursuing business and resumed his art studies, attending Francesc Galí’s Escola d’Art in Barcelona from 1912 to 1915. Miró received early encouragement from the art dealer José Dalmau, who gave him his first solo show at his gallery in Barcelona in 1918.

Surrealist Andre Breton deemed Miró’s arrival in Paris in the early 1920s as an important stage in the development of Surrealist art. In 1924, he joined the Surrealists and adapted this focus on the unconscious mind. His solo show at the Galerie Pierre, Paris, in 1925 was a major Surrealist event. Starting in the late 1920s, Miró began creating paintings based on collage and what he called papiers collés, or pasted papers.

In 1941, his first major museum retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He received the Grand Prize for Graphic Work at the Venice Biennale in 1954, and his work was included in the first Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany in 1955. In 1958, he was given a Guggenheim International Award for murals for the UNESCO building in Paris. Miró has had multiple retrospectives of his work, most notably the 1978 exhibition at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris which included over five hundred of his drawings.