Joan Miró, ‘Les Essències de la Terra’, 1968, Wallector

Les Essències de la Terra is an original artwork realized by Joan Miró in 1968. The photolithography is part of a portfolio that includes eight Catalan texts from the 16th and 17th centuries, illustrated with plates (6 in colors and 8 in black, of which 6 in two pages) mainly printed in photolithograph after compositions by Joan Miró. Complete with the publisher's cloth-covered folder. Editions Poligrafa, Barcelona. Very good conditions.

Joan Miró (Barcelona, 1893 – Palma de Majorca, 1983) was a Catalan painter and artist. He combined Abstractionism with Surrealism. He produced many lithographs and numerous murals, tapestries, and sculptures for public spaces. In the 1920s, Miró combined detailed figures with abstract landscapes and began taking objects out from their natural contexts to reassemble them in a new mysterious way. In the 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War, he moved to France. During World War II, he returned to Spain, where he began painting the famous Constellations (1941). At the end of the 1940s, Miró traveled back and forth between Spain and France and created some of his most spontaneous artworks. After World War II, he became famous internationally, and his work was exhibited all over the world. Joan Miró was a prolific printmaker. His witty color etchings and lithographs are so beautiful as his well-known paintings. While he rejected any formal association with movements or groups, including the Surrealists, André Breton recognized him as “the most Surrealist of us all”. Miró’s graphic work includes a component of fantasy and hallucination. His artistic approach encouraged the free play of associations and envisaged “accidents” to provoke reactions closely connected to subconscious experiences. Miró’s famous motifs consist of freely reshaped fragments cut from catalogues for machinery on canvases to form black silhouettes. Even the artist could not always explain the meanings of images. They are unprompted and instinctive expressions of the little-understood and unconscious part of life.

Reference:

Patrick Cramer, Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné des Livres Illustrés, Editeur P. Cramer, Genève 1989, n. 123.

About Joan Miró

Joan Miró rejected the constraints of traditional painting, creating works “conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness,” as he once said. Widely considered one of the leading Surrealists, though never officially part of the group, Miró pioneered a wandering linear style of Automatism—a method of “random” drawing that attempted to express the inner workings of the human psyche. Miró used color and form in a symbolic rather than literal manner, his intricate compositions combining abstract elements with recurring motifs like birds, eyes, and the moon. “I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music,” he said. While he prized artistic freedom, Miró revered art history, basing a series of works on the Dutch Baroque interiors of Hendrick Sorgh and Jan Steen. In turn, Miró has inspired many artists—significantly Arshile Gorky, whose bold linear abstractions proved a foundational influence on Abstract Expressionism.

Spanish, 1893-1983, Barcelona, Spain, based in Paris and Catalonia, Spain