group at high risk for affective illness and should be assessed and counseled accordingly. Ideal treatment requires the following: a sensitive understanding of the possible benefits of mood disorders to creativity, as well as the severe liabilities, including the risk of suicide and of untreated depression and mania; use of available medications with awareness of side-effects potentially damaging to the creative process; minimization, whenever possible, of drug (especially lithium) levels; the recognition and sophisticated use of seasonal patterns in moods and productivity; and sensitivity to the possible role of alcohol and drugs in inducing, maintaining, or exacerbating mood states.
Post [1994] reported that despite the relationship with pathological matters, and the attempt to restore the balance, it is imperative to bear in mind that the subjects were, over and above their astonishing giftedness, admirable human beings.
Joan Miró’s Biography Summarized
Joan Miró I Ferrà was born in Barcelona on April 20th, 1893. He studied commerce according to his father’s wish, but enrolled in La Lonja School in order to study drawing. At the age of 17 years, he finished his studies of commerce and began to work for 2 years. After this period, he retired to Mont-Roig (Tarragona) due to a disease. Miró’s illness served a specific purpose: his ill health permitted him to persuade his father of his condition, since he was reluctant to accept that his son was too sick to work. When he returned to Barcelona, he made the decision to become an artist and studied at the Art Academy until 1915.
His first exhibition was in Barcelona in 1918 with a clear influence of French trends of postimpressionism, cubism and fauvism. His first trip to Paris was in 1920. There, he met other artists, such as André Masson or Pablo Picasso. During that time he painted The Farm (Paris 1921–1922), which represented the culminant work of the “detailism.” Joan Miró described this work as the summary of all his life in the countryside.
Along with others, Joan Miró founded (with the poet André Bretón at the head) the surrealist movement in 1924. One of his main works at this time was The Harlequin’s Carnival (Paris 1924–1925). This work was the beginning of the surrealism phase. One year later, in 1925, he painted Birth of the World, which may be seen as a precursor of abstract expressionism.
In 1928 he travelled to Belgium and the Netherlands, visiting the most important museums. When he returned to Paris he painted a series of paintings known as Dutch Interiors, inspired by originals by other authors, but modified with “mironian” shapes, placing importance on composition elements instead of physical proportions.
From 1928 and 1930, Joan Miró left the idea of surrealism behind and dedicated himself to the collage. He produced a number of collages that were striking for their inclusion of non-artistic materials and their overtly crude construction. This anti-art strategy echoed the widespread sense of social, economic and cultural crisis, and at the same time it sought to provoke a new model of artistic identity. From 1930 onwards, he also dedicated his time to sculptures and ceramics [Jeffett, 1996].
Tim Adams [2011] summarized the three periods of Miró’s constantly reimagined career: his formative years in Catalonia; his exile in Paris in the years of the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of the Second World War; and his enthusiasm for the radicalism of the 1960s, when he was approaching the late period of his work.
He died from heart disease in Palma de Mallorca on December 25th, 1983. His work is admired all over the world.
Joan Miró and Cyclic Depression
There is substantial evidence, from his own descriptions as well as those of his friends and biographers, that Joan Miró experienced periodic episodes of depression [Schildkraut and Hirshfeld, 1995, 1996]. Deep feelings of sorrow, isolation and of loneliness were rooted in Miró’s childhood. Schildkraut [1996] reported Miró’s comments: “I was very much alone. Nobody paid any attention to me. Very much alone because I always looked beyond all those narrow things. I felt that loneliness in a very painful, violent way when I was very young, a mere child.” It seems that the heightened awareness that Miró possessed contributed both to his artistic talent and to his isolation from other people, even his father. As Dupin comments, Miró’s love of solitude and his taciturnity without doubt have no other origin [Schildkraut and Hirshfeld, 1995, 1996].
Miró’s first known episode of depression occurred in 1911, when he was about 18 years old. Describing this experience, Miró stated, “I was demoralized and suffered a serious depression.” Roland Penrose, Miró’s friend and biographer, noted: “This was the first major crisis in his life… punctuated with periodic upheavals”. Miró recalled that he began drawing to escape from his unhappiness [Schildkraut and Hirshfeld, 1995, 1996].
Between 1925 and 1927, there was a dramatic increase in Miró’s productivity. The surrealist group noted that during this period Miró was in the midst of an almost delirious intellectual effervescence. During these years, Miró painted a series of highly poetic canvases that Dupin termed “dream painting” works that may have been stimulated by hunger-induced hallucinations, as Miró asserted. He could not afford to eat a proper meal every day, and he suffered from hallucinations provoked by hunger and overwork. His continuous discoveries were driving him to work on and on without rest or interruption [Schildkraut and Hirshfeld, 1995, 1996].
During the 1930s Miró’s art moved in several directions. He made strange and haunting constructions. In some works, his colors began to look irradiated and malevolent; and he depicted angry, ugly figures that seem to have freed him of his nightmares [Kimmelman, 1993]. From the beginning of 1934 and due to the situation in Spain and Europe, Miró found himself unable to draw anything but monsters; the human figure became a grotesque image of teeth and genitals [Adams, 2011]. Miró had sublimated his anger and frustration over the brutality erupting around the world into what he called his “savage paintings” (1934–1938), inspired by his thoughts about death [Schildkraut and Hirshfeld, 1995]. In an interview at this time, Miró was asked about his state of mind. “I am pessimistic, I am tragically pessimistic” he said. “No illusions are permitted. More violently than ever before there will be a struggle against everything that represents the pure value of the spirit” [Adams, 2011]. Miró frequently referred to his depressions, describing in his letters, interviews, and articles how they affected his art. “My nature is tragic and taciturn. … When I was young, I went through periods of profound sadness…. I’m a pessimist. I always think that everything is going to turn out badly. If there is something humorous in my painting, it’s not that I have consciously looked for it. Perhaps this humor comes from a need to escape from the tragic side of my temperament” [Schildkraut and Hirshfeld, 1995, 1996].
Miró revealed his depression and his desire to transcend suffering in many of his paintings, including the self-portraits that he painted through his midlife period (1937–1938). His comments on his state of mind when painting the Constellations, which Miró created from 1940 to 1941 in the shadow of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, shed light on how Miró was able to transform his depressed feelings into energy for painting. Through introspection and meditation, Miró’s spiritual beliefs sustained him in his suffering, allowing his depressions to fuel his artistic creativity [Schildkraut and Hirshfeld, 1995, 1996].
Referring to the depressive side of his temperament in a 1947 interview, he noted: “If I don’t paint, I worry, I become very depressed, I fret and become gloomy and get ‘black ideas’ and I don’t know what to do with myself” [Schildkraut and Hirshfeld, 1995, 1996]. Thus, it seems that art making, in part, served a healing function for Miró.
Schildkraut et al. [1994] showed how depression played a crucial role in the artistic development of Joan Miró and documented the relationship of the artist’s spiritual beliefs and yearnings for transcendence both to his depression and to his art work. The identification of genius with depression and suffering which we have noted is not necessarily pejorative; however, the romantic genius is destined to play out the drama of life in public [Rose, 1996].
Schildkraut et al. [1994] explored similar issues in the mid-twentieth century abstract expressionist artists of New York, many of whom were strongly influenced by Miró, who may be seen