Joan Miró (Barcelona, Spain, 1893 – Palma, Spain, 1983) is one of the most original figures in twentieth-century art, an artist whose career can be read as a running argument with painting itself. "I want to assassinate painting," he told the critic Maurice Raynal in 1927, and for years he pursued exactly that: dismantling the easel picture with sandpaper, rope, and torn canvas, rejecting what he saw as painting's comfortable commercial safety, an attack less on the medium itself than on its complacency.

Sent to business school in Barcelona at his father's insistence, Miró took a job as an accounting clerk, but the work brought on a breakdown and a bout of typhoid fever; he convalesced at his family's farm in Mont-roig del Camp, and never fully left it in spirit again. Its fields, animals, and stone farmhouses supplied the vocabulary of his early paintings, most famously The Farm (1921–22), a canvas so beloved by Ernest Hemingway that he bought it. After his first trip to Paris in 1920, Miró took studio space at 45 Rue Blomet, next door to André Masson, and through him entered a circle that included Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos, and Paul Éluard; absorbing Surrealism's interest in automatism, he arrived at the pictorial language for which he remains best known, biomorphic shapes and a personal sign system of stars, birds, eyes, and ladders that functioned less like illustration than poetry.

As the Nazis advanced on Paris, Miró fled first to Normandy and then back to Spain; in this dislocation he began the Constellations, small, densely worked gouaches in which stars, women, and birds interlock like a private cosmology, a search for harmony conducted in hiding from a continent at war. A 1941 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art introduced this work to American audiences and helped position Miró as a link between European Surrealism and the emerging Abstract Expressionists.

In 1975, working with his close friend, the architect Josep Lluís Sert, Miró opened the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, built around his own donated collection and conceived as a living center for research rather than a mausoleum for finished work. He worked prolifically into his final years across nearly every medium available to him, prints, tapestries, ceramics, more than 250 illustrated books, and monumental public sculpture from Chicago to Barcelona, never letting any single medium settle into complacency.