Joan Miro i Ferra (20 April 1893-25 December 1983) was a Catalan Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramist. Miro initially went to business school as well as art school. He began working as a clerk when he was a teenager, although he abandoned the business world for art after suffering a nervous breakdown. His early work was influenced by van Gogh and Cezanne and was called his Catalan Fauvist period. Miro had his first solo show in Barcelona in 1917. In 1920, Miro made his first trip to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso. From this time, Miro divided his time between Paris and Montroig, Spain. In Paris, he participated in Dada activities. The artist's first solo show in Paris was at the Galerie la Licorne in 1921. in 1924, Miro joined the Surrealist group. He visited the Netherlands in 1928 and began a series of paintings inspired by Dutch masters. That year he also made his first papiers colles and collages. In 1929 he began experimenting with lithography. His first etchings date from 1933. During the early 1930s he made Surrealist sculptures. In the 1930s onwards, Miro expressed contempt for conventional painting as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an "assassination of painting" in favor of upsetting the elements of established painting. Because of the Spanish Civil War, Miro left Spain in 1936. Also in 1936, Miro was included in the exhibitions "Cubism and Abstract Art" and "Fantastic Art, Dada Surrealism" at the Museum of Modern Art. Miro's first major museum retrospective was held at MOMA in 1941. In 1944, Miro began working in ceramics and started to concentrate on printmaking. During the 1960s he began to work intensively in sculpture. Retrospectives of Miro's work were held at the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, in 1962, and the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1974. In 1978, the Musee national d'Art Modern exhibited over five hundred works in a major retrospective of his drawings. Miro died on December 25, 1983, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.