Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Andy Warhol each significantly shaped the development of art in the 20th century. These modern masters are the subjects of four small books, the first volumes in a series featuring important artists in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Each book presents a single artist and guides readers through a dozen of his most memorable achievements. Works are reproduced in colour and accompanied by informative and accessible short essays that provide background on the artworks and on the artist himself, illuminating technique, style, subject matter and significance. Written by Carolyn Lanchner, former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum, these books are excellent resources for readers interested in the stories behind masterpieces of the modern canon and for those who wish to understand the contributions of individual artists to the history of modern art.

For nearly seven decades the ebullient art of Joan Miro (1893-1983), Spanish painter, sculptor, ceramist and mythmaker, has intrigued and enchanted art lovers worldwide. This collection of his writings presents a portrait of the artist in his own words. Miro's notebooks, letters, and interviews reveal the work and life of a brilliant artist revered for his uncanny expression of the subconscious.

Taking Joan Miró's notorious declaration of 1927--"I want to assassinate painting"--as its point of departure, this richly illustrated volume is the first to focus on Miró the "anti-painter," identifying the core practices and strategies the artist used to challenge painting between 1927 and 1937. Joan Miró Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 surveys the various material, iconographical and rhetorical forms of Miró's attacks on painting by presenting, in chronological sequence, 12 distinct series of works, beginning with a remarkable group of paintings on unprimed canvas and concluding with Miró's return to Realism in "Still Life with Old Shoe" (1937). Acidic color, grotesque disfigurement, stylistic heterogeneity and the use of resistant, ready-made materials are among the key tactics of aggression that are explored in this extraordinary presentation of the interrelated and oppositional series of paintings, collages, objects and drawings Miró produced during this crucial decade of his long career. This volume integrates close scrutiny of Miró's materials and processes with historical and iconographic analysis, leading to an expanded understanding of the underappreciated aggressiveness of an artist long regarded as Surrealism's most lyrical painter-poet. Joan Miró was born in 1893 in Barcelona. After his first trip to Paris in 1920, and through 1931, Miró generally spent half of each year in the French capitol and half in his native Catalonia, returning to live in France after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. One of the twentieth century's greatest Modern artists, Miró created a pictorial world of intense imaginative power, in which visionary and cosmic elements are inextricably intertwined with the earthly and mundane. He died in 1983 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

Joan Miro (1893-1983), the foremost painter associated with Surrealism, studied in his native Barcelona before going to Paris in 1920. He was enthralled by the work of the Cubist and Fauve artists, who influenced his early style. During the 1920s he met regularly with a number of Surrealists, with whom he began to exhibit in 1925. His free-form abstractions from the 1920s draw on fantasy, dream, and myth, and many have been characterized as attempts at psychic automatism, or direct transcription of the subconscious. Despite such links with the Surrealists, however, Miro was never an orthodox member of the group. After 1930, he developed his lyrical mature style, distinguished by playful juxtapositions of freely flowing lines and brightly colored, abstract or organic forms. With remarkable consistency, he would continue to work in this visual world he had made for the rest of his career. During World War II he created an astonishing series of works on paper known as the Constellations, among the most personal of all artists' responses to the disasters of that time. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, Miro produced a number of monumental paintings, including murals for hotels in New York and Cincinnati and for the Graduate Center at Harvard University. In 1958 he designed one of his largest works, the ceramic mural for the UNESCO Building in Paris. Besides paintings, Miro produced a large body of lithographs, a medium especially suited to his simplified forms and wiry lines.

Published as a tribute to Miro on his eightieth birthday, 140p. 64 illustrations (22 in color). 71 reference illustrations. 2 foldouts. Illustrates the most important and comprehensive public collection of Miro"s work in the world. Each of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, and objects in the MOMAs collection is illustrated and discussed.

La Serie Menor de Taschen, libros sin parangn: magnficas reproducciones, textos inteligentes, precios sin competencia. The Bookseller, Londres Arte del bueno ... y para todos Actualidad Cultural, Bogot