Miro: Special Edition

Taschen's "Basic Art" is a series of short, full-colour introductions to various artists that all weigh in at only 96 pages. These are an excellent way to discover painters you don't know about yet, and I've enjoyed working my way through the series. This volume on Joan Miro features a text by Janis Mink. Mink charts Miro's stylistic evolution in a clear fashion, often mentioning relationships with other artists and writers of the day that influenced his work. The break from realism to fanciful representation is elucidated, and Mink really inspires a passion for deciphering Miro's language of symbols. Nonetheless, I felt that Mink's text had two weakness. The first is that it often makes reference to paintings that, perhaps for reasons of copyright, could not be reproduced within the book. Entries in the "Basic Art" series are usually entirely self-contained, but Mink would force the reader to seek out another introduction to Miro to understand her writing. The second weakness is that Mink does not say anything about Miro's relationship with the Spanish state in the postwar era, something that would surely interest many readers who know of Miro as "the Catalan national painter". Nonetheless, these are essentially minor quibbles. If you want a quick introduction to Joan Miro, this is a good bet.

This book is one that shows how Miro and maybye how people felt in that time period,which he lived so long.He made many beutyfull pictures and some that were just nonsense.I like his paintings so much i belive this book and him have inspiered me to be an artist one day.I am not very good but miro did not paint good but it was what he felt and that made him care and that is all that really matters.