Joan Miro´ was born on April 20th 1893 in the Pasaje del Credito, Barcelona. Situated near the Plaza Reale with its arcades, its palm trees and the streetlamps of the young Gaudi´, it was a passage between light and shade. As Miro´lived there, worked there, and kept up a studio there until 1956, when he definitively setted in Majorca, this verdant passage leads us to think of ´Passage de lÓpera onirique´celebrated in the 1926 by Aragon in Le Paysan de Paris. Miro´, rarely loquacious, has never spoken of the chimera he may have encountered there: he simply presented his opera bauleux´ (Rimbaud). But we know that for the adolescent painter, it was a place of severe internal struggle. ´Between me and my parents there was an insurmountable barrier´..Cesi est la couleur de mes reves,. Occassionally critics have tride to establish a creative link between Miro and his father who was a silversmith and clock-maker.
My father´, he spat at me one day, ´repaired watches!
Galli´s school was a microcosm, wide open to modernist ideas wich, in Barcelona, more than anywhere else, was ´vitalist´and committed to the idea ot ´total art´, encompassing the actualities of daily life. A life to be re-invented, re-oriented after the example of Baudi´, who had exploded the bourgeois model and the constrictions imposed by the industrial age. Under Galli´, music, poetry, walks in the country carried equal weight in the curriculum. Miro´had found freedom, inspiration and help in developing his means of expression.