Joan Miró

Constellations is a series of 23 small paintings on paper, initiated by Joan Miró in 1939 in Varengeville-sur-Mer and completed in 1941 between... Mallorca and Mont-roig del Camp. The Fundació Joan Miró preserves a work of this series and The Morning Star, one of the most important pieces of the series. The painter gave to his wife and she later donated to the Foundation. In August 1939, a month before the outbreak of the World War II, Miró, with his family escaped Paris and moved to Varengeville-sur-Mer, a small town in Normandy. This sentiment of escaping is clearly reflected in this series' harmonic and poetic production. At Varengeville-sur-Mer he painted the top ten works in the series which was later called Constellations, beginning with The Dawn and The Scale of Evasion. After escaping from France, Miró continued the series of Constellations in Mallorca, creasting a more complex group of ten more. The last three were created in 1941 in his ancestral home in Mont-roig del Camp. Whilst completing this series he began the first sketches of the Barcelona Series engravings, where he would repeat part of his imagery.
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Paintings on masonite is a series of 27 abstract paintings made ​​by Joan Miró in 1936 using the type of proprietary hardboard known... as Masonite, just after the Spanish Civil War started on 18 July 1936. These works break with his earlier phase which was known as his wild paintings period. This was a label established by the Miró to describe the work done during the two years preceding the Civil War, between 1934 and 1936. Rosa Maria Malet Ph.D, President of the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, compares ​​masonites with the wild paintings immediately preceding, painted on copper and other materials: The Museum of Modern Art in New York also emphasizes the violence of the technique: The works were painted in Mont-roig del Camp and Barcelona. Shortly after he finished these paintings, the artist left the country and went back to Paris, in the fall of 1936, where he would stay for four years.
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André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist. Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Oise, but was brought up in Belgium. He began his study of art at the age of eleven in Brussels, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of Constant Montald, and later he... studied in Paris. He fought for France during World War I and was seriously injured. His early works display an interest in cubism. He later became associated with surrealism, and he was one of the most enthusiastic employers of automatic drawing, making a number of automatic works in pen and ink. Masson would often force himself to work under strict conditions, for example, after long periods of time without food or sleep, or under the influence of drugs. He believed forcing himself into a reduced state of consciousness would help his art be free from rational control, and hence get closer to the workings of his subconscious mind. From around 1926 he experimented by throwing sand and glue onto canvas and making oil paintings based around the shapes that formed.
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Hieronymus Bosch ]; , was a Dutch painter. His work is known for its use of fantastic imagery to illustrate moral and religious concepts and narratives. Hieronymus Bosch was born Jheronimus van Aken . He signed a number of his paintings as Jheronimus Bosch . The name derives from his birthplace,... 's-Hertogenbosch, which is commonly called "Den Bosch". Little is known of Bosch’s life or training. He left behind no letters or diaries, and what has been identified has been taken from brief references to him in the municipal records of 's-Hertogenbosch, and in the account books of the local order of the Brotherhood of Our Lady. Nothing is known of his personality or his thoughts on the meaning of his art. Bosch’s date of birth has not been determined with certainty. It is estimated at c.
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Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement.... Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.
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Jean Arp / Hans Arp was a German-French, or Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper. When Arp spoke in German he referred to himself as "Hans", and when he spoke in French he referred to himself as "Jean". Many people believe that he was... born Hans and later changed his name to Jean, but this is not the case. Arp was born in Strasbourg. The son of a French mother and a German father, he was born during the period following the Franco-Prussian War when the area was known as Alsace-Lorraine after it had been returned to Germany by France. Following the return of Alsace to France at the end of World War I, French law determined that his name become Jean. In 1904, after leaving the École des Arts et Métiers in Strasbourg, he went to Paris where he published his poetry for the first time. From 1905 to 1907, Arp studied at the Kunstschule, Weimar, Germany and in 1908 went back to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian. In 1915, he moved to Switzerland, to take advantage of Swiss neutrality.
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Alexander Calder was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing mobile sculptures. In addition to mobile and stable sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry, jewelry and household objects. Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in Lawnton,... Pennsylvania, on July 22, 1898. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them in Philadelphia. Calder’s grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland and immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868. He is best known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia's City Hall tower. Calder’s mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a professional portrait painter who studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She then moved to Philadelphia where she met Alexander Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Calder’s parents were married on February 22,1895. His sister, Margaret "Peggy" Calder, was born in 1896.
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