Joan Miro was a Spanish painter.He was born April 20, 1893, in Barcelona and studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and the Academia Gali. His work before 1920 shows wide-ranging influences, including the bright colors of the Fauves, the broken forms of cubism, and the powerful, flat two-dimensionality of Catalan folk art and Romanesque church frescoes of his native Spain.

He moved to Paris in 1920, where, under the influence of surrealist poets and writers, he evolved his mature style. Miro drew on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues of surrealist poetry. The forms of his paintings are organized against flat neutral backgrounds and are painted in a limited range of bright colors, especially blue, red, yellow, green, and black.

Amorphous amoebic shapes alternate with sharply drawn lines, spots, and curlicues, all positioned on the canvas with seeming nonchalance. Miro later produced highly generalized, ethereal works in which his organic forms and figures are reduced to abstract spots, lines, and bursts of colors. Miro also experimented in a wide array of other media, devoting himself to etchings and lithographs for several years in the 1950s . Miro died in Majorca, Spain, on December 25, 1983.