Joan Miró – författare

"As regards my means of expression, I try my hardest to achieve the maximum of clarity, power, and plastic aggressiveness; a physical sensation to begin with, followed up by an impact on the psyche." – MiróMiró's line recalls Picasso's in clarity and power; the Catalan's "plastic aggressiveness" led him, as it did his Andalusian friend, to bold, successful experiment and innovation in ceramics, sculpture and printmaking, especially lithography. The lithographic print medium suited and encouraged the artist's lifelong, often radical, obsession with stripping art to the marrow. The 40 plates reproduced here sample the pith of his lithographic production – a series produced in 1944, full of the eerie images and droll distortion he had sought on canvas for decades."It's never easy for me to talk about my painting," wrote Miró, "since it is always born in a state of hallucination induced by some kind of shock, objective or subjective, for which I am not personally responsible in the least." Miró hallucinates on stone for these prints, filling them with monstrous beasts and one-eyed aliens adrift in a heaven of moons and stars and black nebulae, floating breasts and generative organs. These lithographs were executed shortly after finishing the famous "constellation" series of paintings (called by one critic "the most intricate, most elaborately developed of all Miró's compositions"), right around the time his mother died and he fired his first ceramics in collaboration with Artigas.Falling in a period of intense creative mingling of whimsy with the grotesque, these prints characterize an important juncture in Miró's career. They also enlarge the boundaries of lithographic technique as they simultaneously show Miró, now "stripped" of his brilliant colors, to be an equal master of black-and-white.

This volume sets out to explain the conditions that have favoured the expansion of the European social dimension during the turbulent decade of 2010–20, when Europe was confronting strong countervailing pressures, including the euro crisis, the refugee crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.The study begins by diagnosing a widespread, although slow-burning, crisis across the European Union (EU) resulting from the cumulation of social problems and the systemic tension between EU market integration on the one hand and nationally bounded welfare states and the other. Eight in-depth case studies analyse the political dynamics behind a variety of EU social initiatives aimed at addressing the consequences of free movement of workers, youth unemployment, poverty, eroding wages, environment and climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic. To identify the specific drivers of EU social policymaking empirically, the authors have reconstructed the struggles over concrete policy proposals as they unfolded in the European multilevel setting.The volume introduces a novel analytical framework for interpreting the transformation of the EU social dimension in times of crisis, when some degree of social co-ordination becomes crucial to bond deeply different (welfare) states together. This in-depth study offers an invaluable analysis for researchers, academics and professionals interested in the functioning of the European polity.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

This volume sets out to explain the conditions that have favoured the expansion of the European social dimension during the turbulent decade of 2010–20, when Europe was confronting strong countervailing pressures, including the euro crisis, the refugee crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.The study begins by diagnosing a widespread, although slow-burning, crisis across the European Union (EU) resulting from the cumulation of social problems and the systemic tension between EU market integration on the one hand and nationally bounded welfare states and the other. Eight in-depth case studies analyse the political dynamics behind a variety of EU social initiatives aimed at addressing the consequences of free movement of workers, youth unemployment, poverty, eroding wages, environment and climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic. To identify the specific drivers of EU social policymaking empirically, the authors have reconstructed the struggles over concrete policy proposals as they unfolded in the European multilevel setting.The volume introduces a novel analytical framework for interpreting the transformation of the EU social dimension in times of crisis, when some degree of social co-ordination becomes crucial to bond deeply different (welfare) states together. This in-depth study offers an invaluable analysis for researchers, academics and professionals interested in the functioning of the European polity.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Automation, digitalisation, the post-industrial transition and climate change are creating new social risks which are not adequately supported by established welfare state institutions. In this timely book, Maurizio Ferrera, Joan Miró and Stefano Ronchi propose critical social and institutional policy reform in response to the nation state’s inability to maintain a balanced ecosystem between democracy, the market economy, welfare and the rule of law. Social Reformism 2.0 provides a diagnosis of the critical issues facing the welfare state, namely the transition to post-industrialisation, globalisation and European integration, and the fourth technological revolution. Situating the European social model within a multi-crisis context, this book surveys the current reform trends in social policy, addressing decades of global development, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the climate emergency, before proposing a number of strategic policy reforms. It ultimately champions a transition towards a greener economy and a realignment of progressive politics, highlighting the central role Europe plays in coordinating and stimulating change. Offering a highly detailed yet accessible critique, this socially pertinent study will strongly appeal to students and academics with an interest in political science, European studies, sociology, social and public policy analysis and welfare state research. It will also highly benefit policymakers, bureaucrats, practitioners and stakeholders involved in social governance processes at a national and European level.

In 1973 Joan Miró produced an original silk-screen poster for Swedish collector and physician Nils Tryding (1929–2021). The poster was to manifest the first exhibition of his unique collection arranged by the museum in Kristianstad. Now, many years later the entire collection have been donated – through two instalments in 2003 and 2012 – to the municipality of Kristianstad, through the Kristianstad’s Konsthall (Centre for Contemporary Art). This book documents this magnificent donation. The core of the donation consists of the 154 original posters created between 1937 and 1983. Most of them take the form of lithographs but there are also serigraphs and one woodcut. Some of them are signed by the artist and a few have personal dedications from Joan Miró to Nils Tryding. Today the collection, Miró’s Posters and Other Original Works of Art on Paper, consists of more than 420 works. It also includes a large library of books, records and films about Joan Miró. This book contains initiated texts by Joan Punyet Miró, art historian and the artist’s grandson, Thomas Kjellgren, the former director of Kristianstad’s Konsthall and Nils Tryding, the collector himself. Preface by Marika Reuterswärd, present director of Kristianstad’s Konsthall and today responsible for the collection. The book includes a complete catalogue of the donation, fully illustrated.