Hungry in bed : unrestful sleep with remembered dreams - the Surrealist championing of the subconscious also began to influence Miro. He often mentioned working from hallucinations caused by hunger, which shows how little money he had for food, even though he always seemed to have enough money for soap, shoe polish, paint and trips back and forth to Spain.
The first Surrealist manifesto was published in November 1924. The following definition was contained in the lengthy manifesto : "Surrealism, noun, masculine. Pure psychic automatism, by which one intends to express verbally, in writing or by any other method, the real functioning of the mind. Dictation by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.
Encycl. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought..."
Other artists involved in the Surrealist movement was Paul Klee, Giorgiode Chirio, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabin, Man Ray, Andre Masson, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
Automatic drawing and painting - letting the pencil or brush wander over a pictorial ground without a goal in mind - helped Miro find his motifs without looking for them.
Chance markings could develop into things...
But this does not mean that the paintings developed spontaneously. Preliminary drawings exist for Miro's paintings, and they often include written mentions of colours, the format of the finished canvases and their titles.
Despite all his romantic fantasy, Miro was a careful and meticulous planner. His pictures existed in a preliminary form in his mind and on paper long before they hit the canvas.
Miro used the Surrealist method of letting the image come to him while working for his paintings "Constellations" were to have a profound effect on the New York School of Painting and change the work of such artists as Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock. Miro's all-over distribution of forms, the variety of recurring elements, the application of automatic drawing principles and the idea of working in series began to blossom in American painting. These results would, in turn, be taken up in answer by Miro.
Miro by Janis Mink, 1993, Midpoint Press, Germany
