JOAN MIRO (1893 – 1983)

Master Lithographs from 1948

January 9 – April 18, 2009

In 1948, the year he painted his celebrated mural in Cincinnati’s Terrace Plaza Hotel, which is now installed outside the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Terrace Café, Joan Miró created 13 Lithographies, a portfolio of thirteen masterpiece prints. These black and white lithographs exhibit many of the playful, imaginative forms for which Miró is known. In these prints, highly abstracted linear figures cavort among his distinctive vocabulary of floating, ethereal shapes suggesting the landscape, sun, moon and stars.

Born in 1893 in Barcelona, Miró first visited Paris in 1920, where the influence of Dada and Surrealist writers and visual artists profoundly effected the development of his mature, dreamlike style of painting. He befriended an array of colleagues including Pablo Picasso, Tristan Tzara and Max Ernst. Except for the years of the Spanish civil war, Miró divided his time between France and Spain. Throughout his long prolific career he created paintings, prints, watercolors, pastels, collages and ceramic sculpture. His work is represented in the collections of major museums throughout the world. From the mid-1950s until the end of his life in 1983, he resided in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.