A new edition of this classic survey on the life and work of Spanish surrealist, Joan Miro, by his close friend, historian and fellow artist Roland Penrose. Among the great 20th-century masters, the surrealist painter Joan Miro stands out for the atmosphere of wit and spontaneity that pervades his work. Miro's art went through many phases, and its major features - his signs and symbols, his series of anguished peintures sauvages in the 1930s, his lyrical, poetic gouaches, his monumental sculptures and ceramics, his unprecedented use of poetic titles, and his attachment to nature and to the night - are discussed here by Roland Penrose, a friend of the artist for almost five decades. A brief epilogue by Eduardo de Benito, London correspondent of the Spanish art periodical Lapiz, illustrates the developments of Miro's last years. This new revised edition, now illustrated in colour throughout, includes a foreword by Antony Penrose, outlining the relationship between his father and the artist, as well as updates to the Bibliography.

Sir Roland Penrose CBE (14 October 1900 - 23 April 1984) was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the key Surrealists in Europe. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage. He was Lecturer to the War Office School for Instructors to the Home Guard and also a Lecturer at the Osterley Park School for Training of the Home Guard.

In the 1940s, Picasso wrote two plays in French: the first, Desire Caught by the Tail, was conceived during the German occupation of Paris and features a cast of grotesque allegorical characters such as the Onion, Silence or Fat Anxiety discussing the crucial wartime themes of hunger, cold and love; the second, The Four Little Girls, came about a few years after the end of the war on the French Riviera, and presents the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of four unnamed girls in a vegetable garden, revealing an unexpectedly evil aspect of childhood. These surreal compositions, which were meant to be read aloud rather than formally staged, are a testament to the great artist's imaginative powers, and have been considered as forerunners to the theatre of the absurd of the 1950s, as exemplified by Beckett, Ionesco and Adamov. This volume also contains the accompanying illustrations by Picasso himself.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The 101 Pages series has been created with the aim of redefining and enriching the classics canon by promoting unjustly neglected works of enduring significance. These texts have been treated with a fresh editorial approach, and are presented in an elegantly designed format.

This updated version of the celebrated biography contains a new final chapter depicting the hurried creativity of Picasso's last years. A surrealist artist and an organizer of a number of major exhibitions, this author was a close friend of Picasso from 1935 until the latter's death in 1973.