Object Type: PRINTS

Creation Place: Europe

Medium and Support: Color Lithograph

Credit Line: Purchased with funds provided by the Benjamin D. Bernstein Acquisition Fund

Accession Number: 91-G-3086

See the interpretive label written by Cornelia A. Tsakiridou, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Philosophy and Director, Diplomat-In-Residence Program, for the exhibition Teaching and Learning in the Art Museum: La Salle University Faculty Selections in the online exhibition HERE.


Label for "Beyond Cubism: European Modern Prints, 1920s-1960s", La Salle University Art Museum, March 7 – June 15, 2018:

Joan Miró was born in Barcelona. His family encouraged him to study business as well as art, but he eventually devoted himself entirely to his art, training at various art academies in Barcelona. While he would always find his grounding and inspiration in the Catalonian countryside, he found it very provincial and, starting in 1920, split his time between there and Paris—a pattern disrupted by the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Miró was a major proponent of Surrealism, and his Paris studio was next to that of André Masson, another Surrealist artist. André Breton, the founder and spokesman for the Surrealists, called Miró "the most Surrealist of us all." However, Miró never embraced the automatism advocated by Breton, and when Miró and Max Ernst were invited by Sergei Diaghilev to contribute to the Ballets Russes' Romeo and Juliet, Breton staged a protest considering the collaboration too bourgeois.

Miró’s work changed over the course of his career, shifting from an early Fauvist style, to Magical Realism in the early 1920s, to Surrealism starting around the mid-1920s, in which representational elements evolve into simplified biomorphic shapes, essentially personal ideographs, often achieved using Surrealist methods of “automatism.” This untitled lithograph comes from Miró's late career.

-Thomas Blum, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Mathematics and Science

Current Location: In Storage