Joan Miro's Ceramics

When people think of the works of Spanish artist Joan Miro, most people do not think of ceramics. He was one of the 20th century’s great modernist artists. However, he was more famous for his large sculptures and paintings on canvas. Many think of craft i.e ceramics as not a part of art.

Why do we have to put things into boxes and think in such oppositional terms. In many cases it not artist who make these decisions by curators, historians and art dealers in the 20th century as paintings dominated and were thought to be the apex of the modernist aesthetic pyramid, with ceramics being very near the bottom.

Miro and some other leading artists decided to change this, and use there skills in ceramics. whist the works Miro made had his name to them, Each work is, in fact, part of a collaborative venture, most with Spanish ceramist Josep Llorens Artigas, a contemporary of Miró's with whom he initially began to work during World War II but whom he had known since art school days.

His son took over when Joan Gardy Artigas when the elder became too ill to continue their partnership, and there even are a handful of beautifully grotesque earthenware heads done with ceramist Hans Spinner (better known, perhaps, for his collaboration with British sculptor Anthony Caro) in 1981, only two years before Miró's death at age 90.

The collaborations between Artigas the elder and Miró had a shaky start. Artigas, who had by that time eliminated all decorative elements from his work. He was concurred that Miro would use  his painterly style to just decorate the ceramic pieces as he did in his paintings. 

Miro also new he had to adapt, to learn how to paint on ceramics. Works done in 1944 comprised a series of tiles Artigas provided Miró to paint upon. The results were less than satisfactory, and most were destroyed. Miró and Artigas worked together producing plates, vases, sculptures and plaques until 1971 when the latter bowed out and his son, Joan, took up the collaborative slack.

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