What I am seeking... is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called the eloquence of silence.
From early in his career Miró sought to establish means of metaphorical expression-that is, to discover signs that stand for concepts of nature in a transcendent, poetic sense. He wanted to portray nature as it would be depicted by a child equipped with the intelligence of an adult; in this respect, he had much in common with the Surrealists and Dadaists, two schools of modern artists who were striving to achieve similar aims by more intellectualmeans than those used by Miró.
From 1919 onward Miró lived alternately in Spain and Paris. He was one of the many artists who made their way from abroad to Paris during the first two decades of the 20th century. Most of these foreign artists elected to become French citizens after coming into contact with the exciting French artistic metropolis, but Miró remained attached to his Catalan homeland.
During the 20's Miró combined meticulously detailed realism with abstraction in landscapes. He gradually removed the objects he portrayed from their natural context and reassembled them as if in accordance with a new, mysterious grammar, creating a ghostly, eerie impression,
From 1925 to 1928, under the influence of the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Paul Klee, Miró painted "dream pictures" and "imaginary landscapes" in which the linear configurations and patches of colour look almost as though they were set down randomly, as in The Policeman (1925). In paintings such as Dog Barking at the Moon (1926), he rendered figures of animals and humans as indeterminate forms. Miró signed the manifesto of the Surrealist movement in 1924, and the members of the group respected him for the way he portrayed the realm of unconscious experience. The poet André Breton, the chief spokesman of Surrealism, stated that Miró was "the most Surrealist of us all."
After a trip in 1928 to the Netherlands, where he studied the 17th-century Dutch realist painters in the museums, Miró executed a series of works based on Old Master paintings titled Dutch Interiors (1928). In the 1930s Miró became more experimental, working with techniques of collage and sculptural assemblage and creating sets and costumes for ballets. He designed tapestries in 1934, which led to his interest in the monumental and in murals. His paintings began to be exhibited regularly in French and American galleries.
At the time of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, Miró was living in Paris. Although he typically was not political in his work, the turmoil in his native country inspired him to embrace social criticism. For example, he depicted a peasant revolt in The Reaper, a muralhe painted for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Paris World Exhibition of 1937. He also imbued his pictures of this period, such as the nightmarish Head of a Woman(1938), with a demonic expressiveness that mirrored the fears and horrors of those years.
Mature work and international recognition
During World War II Miró returned to Spain, where he painted Constellations (1941), a series of small works scattered with symbols of the elements and the cosmos, expressing the happy collaboration of everything creative. During the last year of the war (1944), Miró, together with his potter friend José Lloréns Artigas, produced ceramics with a new impetuosity of expression: their vessels were often intentionally misshapen and fragmented.