Abstract

How do artists manage to overcome periods of tribulation imposed on them by external factors? How do they act when confronted with serious events which not only prevent them from working, but force them to consider the very hypothesis of no longer being able to create? The purpose of this paper is to address these questions by examining how one of the most prominent painters of the twentieth century – Joan Miró (1898-1983) – was capable of securing an artistic existence while undergoing a period of severe crisis. To achieve that, this paper examines a notebook of the artist dating from 1940 and 1941, a specific period during World War II in which Miró had to face up to a situation very similar to the one that has just been described. The notebook examined here (F.J.M. 1323-1411) possesses a unique structure, molded by the Spanish Civil War and World War II. It is a key element to understanding the body of notebooks kept by the artist in the early 1940s, a period that is marked by an extensive use of writing in his creative process.