Miro wanted to murder painting. He said so. 'I want to assassinate painting,' he told an interviewer in 1927. He meant that he wanted to destroy the conventions of easel painting and replace them with something more direct, more childlike, more alive. He then spent the next sixty years making paintings, which is either a contradiction or the longest murder in art history.

He grew up in Barcelona, the son of a goldsmith and watchmaker. He studied at the Escola de Belles Arts and at Francesc Gali's art school, where Gali made students draw objects by touch, blindfolded, to develop their sense of form. Miro went to Paris in 1920 and fell in with the Surrealists. Andre Breton called him 'the most Surrealist of us all', which was a compliment. Miro's paintings from this period look like dreams transcribed by someone who has never seen a dream depicted before: biomorphic shapes, stars, eyes, birds, and moons floating on flat fields of colour.

The Constellations series, twenty-three small gouaches painted during the Second World War, are his masterwork. He started them in Normandy as the German army advanced, continued in Palma de Mallorca after fleeing, and finished them in Barcelona. Each one is dense with interlocking forms connected by fine black lines, like a musical score or a star chart.

His late work includes monumental ceramics, tapestries, and public sculptures. The Barcelona airport has a floor mosaic. The Joan Miro Foundation on Montjuic, designed by his friend Josep Lluis Sert, opened in 1975. He burned canvases, stabbed them, walked on them. He was eighty-five and still trying to murder painting.