Joan Miro
Catalan Surrealist who reduced the world to a line, a star, a bird and a woman.
Joan Miro was born in Barcelona in 1893, worked as a clerk before a breakdown pushed him into painting, and reached Paris in 1920. He signed on with Surrealism and made the Constellations during the German advance in 1940, working on small sheets while moving between Normandy, Paris and Mallorca. The vocabulary that came out of it — the star, the crescent, the ladder, the eye, the bird, the reduced female figure — carried him through six decades of painting, ceramics with Artigas, monumental sculpture and public murals. He died at Palma in 1983.
Miro is very heavily forged, and the Successio Miro in Palma is the authority that issues opinions; nothing significant should be transacted without addressing it. The printed output is enormous — lithographs, etchings, carborundum prints and illustrated books catalogued by Dupin and by Cramer — and the crucial distinctions are lifetime versus posthumous printing, signed versus unsigned, and whether a sheet was removed from a book. Unsigned book plates and later reproductions are the most common thing offered as an original print. Ceramics and bronzes exist in editions requiring their own identification.
If you own a work by Joan Miro
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.