Joan Miró Quotes

To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.

The plate that a peasant eats his soup out of is much more interesting to me than the ridiculously rich plates of rich people.

Picasso was wild about it and said it was one of the best things I have ever made. [on Miro's exhibition in Paris, 1938 where he showed a big frieze, made for a children's room; commissioned by art-dealer Pierre Matisse in New York]

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. [Barcelona - Dada, 1917]

Quote of Miró on a visit of Calder who brought with him the small mechanical circus made from wire: a letter by Miro, 17 March 1964 / Correspondence 61; as cited in Calder Miró, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 33

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.

Your face had become dark, and, upon the day's awakening, your ashes will disperse themselves throughout the garden.

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

..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 marvellous. [Miró admonished art-critic w:Georges Duthuit ]

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.

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.

In: 'New York Times', 3 April 1969