Joan Miro, Maravillas con variaciones acrósticas en el jardín de Miró,1975

At the end of 1971 Rafael Alberti wrote from Rome to Joan Miró in the following terms “(…) I think I have news that you liked my folder dedicated to Picasso and that you are willing to do something similar with me. But I would make some special poems for you, which I would also calligraph, and you would engrave them…”
After Miró’s acceptance, numerous correspondence took place between the two to try to better define their joint project, which goes beyond illustrating poetry with an engraving. Miró talks about making a musical accompaniment to finally finish it with a strong, almost brutal note while Alberti cannot help but dedicate his text to the wonderful youthful impulse so exemplary and unique of Joan Miró, a poem that will lend itself to a certain typographic movement that could be intertwined with the lithographs.
In 1973 Alberti had already decided on the title of his book: Wonders and Acrostic Variations in Miró’s Garden (although this would still undergo a small variation) and sent Miró a complete manuscript copy. During 1975, Wonders with acrostic variations in Miró’s garden by Rafael Alberti will be published, which presents twenty lithographs by Joan Miró.

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Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893, but his emotional landscapes, which will shape him as a person and artist, are essentially Mont-roig, Paris, Mallorca and later New York and Japan.
Mont-roig, a small town in the Baix Camp region, will be the counterpoint to the intellectual agitation that he experienced in Paris in the 1920s alongside the surrealist poets, and to the stimulus of abstract expressionism that he discovered in New York in the 1940s. . Later, in the middle of the Second World War, Joan Miró will abandon his exile in France and settle in Palma de Mallorca, a place of refuge and work, where his friend Josep Lluís Sert will design the workshop that he had always dreamed of.
His roots in the landscape of Mont-roig first and that of Mallorca later will be decisive in his work. The link with the land and the interest in everyday objects and the natural environment will be the background of some of his technical and formal investigations.
Miró flees from academicism, towards the constant search for a global and pure work, not attached to any specific movement. Contained in the forms and public manifestations, it is through the plastic act where Joan Miró shows his rebellion and great sensitivity to the political and social events that surround him. This contrast of forces will lead him to create a unique and highly personal language that places him as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

(Source: Fundació Joan Miró)