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Miró’s work is loved for its joyful celebration of life and colour. But it also contains ideas of freedom which, in Franco’s Spain, were very dear to the Catalan painter. We look again at the man, and trace his personal journey through six great paintings On the death of General Franco in 1975, Joan Miró was asked what he had done to promote opposition to the dictator, who had ruled Spain for nearly 40 years. The artist answered simply: “Free and violent things.” The first major Miró exhibition in this country for nearly 50 years, which opens at Tate Modern next month, will cast light on that answer. Miró is not always thought of as a political painter, in the broad or the narrow sense. He was not a creator of manifestos, or a signer of petitions; he was not given to provocative gesture like his contemporary Salvador Dali, nor did he pursue his passions at all costs, like his sometime mentor Picasso. For most of the second half of his long life (he died in 1983 at the age of 90), Miró painted in his studio in Palma, Mallorca, charting a unique course among the movements in postwar painting, and always looking very much his own man. Politics was for Miró, however, unavoidable, an accident of birth. He was the son of a blacksmith and jeweller who lived on the harbourside in Barcelona. He came of age with the Catalan independence movement, and shared its deep-rooted sense of the possibilities of liberty. To begin with, he identified this freedom with internationalism; he longed to be in Paris. But once he had escaped, he held on to his identity as a Catalan, as a freedom fighter, all the more devoutly and from it developed an intimate visual language, which sustained him all of his working life. The Tate show will concentrate on three periods of Miro’s constantly reimagined career: his formative years in Catalonia; his exile in Paris in the years of the Spanish civil war and the outbreak of the second world war; and his enthusiasm for the radicalism of the 60s, when he was approaching the late period of his work. Marko Daniel, the co-curator of the exhibition, which will bring together more than 150 works in collaboration with the Miró Foundation in Barcelona, hopes that it will be “a perspective not just on Miró but on the turbulence of the 20th century, the way an artist’s life might be shaped by proximity to these great political upheavals”. The title of the show, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape , comes from a painting, one of a series, that Miró began in 1939 as the Nazi forces were advancing into France. He was living in Normandy at that time and had begun the works as a kind of personal defence against what he knew to be the horrors to come. The series of paintings dwelt on his profound internal sense of connections between things, an entirely singular private universe that he called the Constellations. When he eventually fled with his wife and daughter on the last train out of Paris for Spain, the paintings were rolled under his arm. As the exhibition will make clear, Miró’s instinct for political engagement, though heartfelt and full of risk, often lay in these gestures of withdrawal, of self-defence. André Breton, the surrealist, once referred to Miró, for good and bad, as a case of “arrested development”, a childlike artist. The label stuck for a long time but this exhibition should go a long way to revealing how hard-won Miro’s apparent playfulness was. The ladder in that borrowed exhibition title had long been for him an emergency exit to the safe house of his imagination. In a 1936 interview, with the Spanish civil war a looming reality, he spoke of the need to “resist all societies… if the aim is to impose their demands on us”. The word “freedom has meaning for me,” he said, “and I will defend it at any cost.” Though he was capable of making propaganda images for the Catalan and republican causes, this sense of absolute individual liberty was as much about a sense of wonder at the world; you could find it, he believed, “wherever you see the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists sometimes of staying close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters”. In this spirit Miró created for himself the alter ego of a Catalan peasant, indefatigable and ribald, wild bearded under a barretina , the red cap of the rural radical. The surface of his life, despite the great fractures of the times in which he lived, was relatively orderly and measured, but you do not have to look for long at his work, including the pictures on these pages, to see that he reserved all of his formidable energies for his painting. NORD-SUD, 1917 Aged 24, Miró longs to leave Barcelona for Paris Miró made this painting in 1917, when he was living in his native Barcelona and dreaming of moving to Paris. He was in the final year of his national service as a soldier; Spain was not involved in the first world war, and he was frustrated that the fighting in France had put his ambitions to enlist in the Parisian avant garde on hold. After a period of depression, he had given up on the career in business that his father had planned for him, and had spent the previous four years, when not in uniform, painting full-time; he had that premature, 24-year-old’s sense that life was already passing him by. The presence in his painting of the journal Nord-Sud – founded in Paris that year by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire among others – hints both at this anxiety, and at a solidarity with the ideals of freedom the magazine represented. The caged bird behind it is faced with an open door, but has not yet flown: “I must tell you,” Miró wrote to his friend and fellow painter EC Ricart in 1917, “that if I have to live much longer in Barcelona I will be asphyxiated by the atmosphere – so stingy and such a backwater (artistically speaking).” Miró was, above all, desperate, in the spirit of the moment, to be part of an -ism, or, better, to create one. Impressionism was dead, he suggested: “Down with weeping sunsets in canary yellow… Down with all that, made by crybabies!” He was already anticipating the demise of cubism, futurism and fauvism (though the latter in particular has a strong influence on his painting here). The scissors are open ready for him to cut ties with the past and present, with Catalonia (represented in the characteristic vase), and with Goethe-esque rites of passage. But his hopes of finding that new style, that new way of painting seemed to be beyond him, and to the north. Two years later Miró still found himself maddeningly caught in this limbo, and finding new torments in his friends’ departures: “Ricart must have told you,” he wrote to JF Rafols in August 1919, “that he is determined to go to Paris for a few months. I am afraid that he will get a fright unless he realises that life in Paris is expensive if he does not manage to go there with a good monthly allowance… I am definitely going at the end of November. You have to go there as a fighter and not as a spectator of the fight if you want to do anything…” When Miró eventually did make it to Paris, in 1920, he called on Picasso, whom he had never met, but whose mother was a family friend in Barcelona. Picasso looked out for him, bought a painting that Miró showed him, and helped him into the radical society he had dreamt of. Within a year, Miró’s tiny studio at rue Blomet received regular visits from his new friends: the poet Paul Éluard, the playwright Antonin Artaud and the artist Tristan Tzara. Sud had found his way Nord. THE FARM, 1921 Broke in Paris, he reflects on his roots “When I first knew Miró,” Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1934, “he had very