Joan Miró – Lezard aux Plumes d’Or (The Lizard with Golden Feathers)

Description

Joan Miró, Lezard aux Plumes d’Or (The Lizard with Golden Feathers), 1971, is an original lithograph. This print is signed and numbered from the edition of 100.

Joan Miró Ferra was born April 20, 1893, in Barcelona. In 1920 Miró made his first trip to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso. While in Paris he associated with the poets Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and Tristan Tzara and participated in Dada activities. In 1924 Miró joined the Surrealist group. In 1929 he started his experiments in lithography, and his first etchings date from 1933. Miró was included in the 1936 exhibitions Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The following year he was commissioned to create a monumental work for the Paris World’s Fair.

Miró’s first major museum retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1941. In 1944 Miró began working in ceramics with Josep Lloréns y Artigas and started to concentrate on prints; from 1954 to 1958 he worked almost exclusively in these two mediums. 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 the following year. In 1958 Miró was given a Guggenheim International Award for murals for the UNESCO building in Paris. The following year he resumed painting, initiating a series of mural-sized canvases. During the 1960s he began to work intensively in sculpture. Miró retrospectives took place at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1962, and the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1974. In 1978 the Musée National d’Art Moderne exhibited over five hundred works in a major retrospective of his drawings. Miró died on December 25, 1983, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an “assassination of painting” in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting. The Spanish artist’s innovative use of line, organic shapes, and color represents a major contribution to Surrealism.