Joan Miró Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

Joan Miró
The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I'm overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.

Joan Miró
I have thought a lot about the question of titles. I must confess that I find any for works that take off from an arbitrary starting point and end with something real....[Miro allowed Pierre Matisse to make titles, based on the] real things....[if they do] not evoke some tendency or other, something I want to avoid completely [very probably Miro meant here: Surrealism]. [advising Pierre Matisse; who showed then several modern European painters in New York].

Joan Miró
[the canvas..] rubbing in with a handful of straw, with a rag, a scrubbing brush, a Majorcan brush for applying white, with the hand, etc.... [a drawing in a] gigantic rhythm like that of a waterfall cascading down a mountainside....[works based on] pure signs begun in Varensgeville and finished in Palma....[with a picture ground of] blue vitriol [a pesticide] that they use for the vines and that splashes against the walls of the farmhouse.. [Miro describes his 'attacks' on the canvas].

Joan Miró
.. something as sensational as [a] heavy weight prize fight.... a rain of swings, uppercuts, and straight right and lefts to the stomach and everywhere throughout the entire event – a round lasting about twenty minutes.

Joan Miró
And then, as you can see, I give greater and greater importance to the materials I use in my work [c. 1936]. A rich and vigorous material seems necessary to me in order to give the viewer that smack in the face that must happen before reflection intervenes. In this way, poetry is expressed through a plastic medium, and it speaks its own language.

Joan Miró
.. wherever you are, you find the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists of staying at home, close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters. Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvelous.

Joan Miró
I begin my work under the effect of shock, which I can sense and which gets me on the run from reality... In any case, I need a starting point, even if it's just a speck of dust or a gleam of light.

Joan Miró
Let's transplant the primitive soul to the ultramodern New York, inject his soul with the noise of the subway, of the 'el', and may his brain become a long street of buildings 224 stories high.

Joan Miró
I was very interested in the reproductions of your [Alexander Calder] sculptures. I have looked at them many times [Calder sent him], and they are something completely unexpected. You are taking a path full of great possibilities. Bravo! Sculpture is of enormous interest to me right now. For the last two years [1944-46], during summer vacation, that's all I have been doing and it's very good for a painter to get away from the old story of canvas and frame every now and again.

Joan Miró
In the current struggle I see the antiquated forces of fascism on one side, and on the other, those of the people, whose immense creative resources will give Spain a drive that will amaze the world.

Joan Miró
When I first saw Calder's art very long ago [c. 1928 in Paris, Miro saw Calder performing his mechanical 'Circus' for the Paris' art scene, all puppets made from metal wire and wood] I thought it was good, but not art.

Joan Miró
Thirty five years ago.... Sandy [Calder, and his wife] Louisa came to see me at Montroig, where I conceived the farm [Montroig in Spain, where Miro had a farm in the 1930s], where the trees, the mountains, the sky, the house, the vineyards, have remained the same. There were the mules have always eaten carobs, and where we have the same warming red wine. Well then, one day I invited all my neighbours, the farmers and workmen of the district to see the Circus that Calder had brought. Everyone was transfixed and totally overwhelmed by it.
On a visit of Calder who brought with him the small mechanical circus made from wire

Joan Miró
Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world.... it must fertilize the imagination.

Joan Miró
Of his exhibition:
Picasso was wild about it and said it was one of the best things I have ever made.

Joan Miró
Childhood and magic are married in this poem inscribed in infinity, like traces on walls or cracks in venerable walls, superimposed posters lacerated by wind, rain and poetry; calligraphy and ideograph intermerge in this equation.... in this sign.

Joan Miró
[to] think, in a certain way, of the power and severity of Romanesque paintings... Go to the beach and make graphic signs in the sand, draw by pissing on the dry ground, design in space by recording the songs of the birds, the sounds of water and wind.... and the chant of insects.

Joan Miró
To try also, inasmuch as possible, to go beyond easel painting, which in my opinion has a narrow goal, and to bring myself closer, through painting, to the human masses I have never stopped thinking about.

Joan Miró
How did I think up my drawings and my ideas for painting? Well I'd come home to my Paris studio in Rue Blomet at night, I'd go to bed, and sometimes I hadn't any supper. I saw things, and I jotted them down in a notebook. I saw shapes on the ceiling..

Joan Miró
Your face had become dark, and, upon the day's awakening, your ashes will disperse themselves throughout the garden. Your ashes will fly to the sky, to make love with the stars.

Joan Miró
We see ourselves confronted with pure abstraction. Small problems and highly obscure subjects are, if you will, always grand in intention, and the layman would casually and quite undisparagingly trample on them if they were to serve as carpet motifs.

Joan Miró