Joaquin Mir Trinxet or Joaquin Mir y Trinxet (Catalan: Joaquim Mir i Trinxet) (Barcelona 6 January 1873 – 8 April 1940) was a Catalan artist known for his use of color in his paintings. He lived through a turbulent time in the history of his native Barcelona. His paintings helped to define the Catalan art movement known as modernisme.
Barcelona and Paris
Mir Trinxet was born in Barcelona to a well-off Catalan family. His father was representative of foreign firms, some of them from Nuremberg Mir studied at the Llotja before joining the Colla del Safrà group with Canals, Nonell, and Pichot. Thanks to an agreement with his uncle Avelino Trinxet Casas, he was able to work as a painter and in 1899 Mir went to Mallorca with Santiago Rusiñol, where he met the mystic Belgian painter William Degouve de Nuncques, whose work would influence his own. Working in isolated circumstances in Mallorca, Mir painted odd landscapes in which forms and chromatic colors merged. In his first exhibition in Barcelona in 1901, the critical reviews were positive but the public found his paintings difficult to comprehend. He started in Mallorca a solitary artistic process, full of colors without forms, which finished when he suffered an accident in 1905.
In 1913 he returned to more realistic positions, receiving recognition for his work. From this period, his paintings tended to become more mystic, more abstract, and highly colored evocations of nature rather than topographical scenes.
Among the artists he met in this period of his life, and who influenced him, were Laureà Barrau, Santiago Rusiñol, Eugène Carrière, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and Ignacio Zuloaga.
He was one of the rare Spanish painters of the period who did not continue his artistic education in Paris. But he visited Ramon Casas i Carbó (Casas) and Rusiñol, who lived together at the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre, regularly, along with painter and art critic Miquel Utrillo and the sketch artist Ramon Canudas. Rusiñol chronicled these times in a series of articles "Desde el Molino" ("From the Mill") for La Vanguardia.
He had not the same influence from the French impressionists as Casas. The style that would become known as modernisme had not yet fully come together, but the key people were beginning to know one another, and successful Catalan artists were increasingly coming to identify themselves with Barcelona as much as with Paris.
Meanwhile, the bohemian circle that included Casas and Rusiñol began with greater frequency to organize exhibitions of their own in Barcelona and Sitges. With this increasing activity in Catalonia, he settled more in or around Barcelona.
Mir Trinxet contributed several murals to Casa Trinxet after his trip to Majorca with Santiago Rusiñol, where he met the mystic Belgian painter William Degouve de Nuncques in 1899, and before his move to Reus. He started his work in the house in 1903.
The personal papers of Joaquim Mir are preserved in the Biblioteca de Catalunya.
Mir Trinxet Private Art Manifiesto
Mir Trinxet summed up his private art manifesto in 1928: "All I want is for my works to lighten the heart and flood the eyes and the soul with light."
Colour and light meant everything to Mir, and he used them to build a personal idiom in which he created a surprisingly modern oeuvre, beyond the art movements like Impressionism or Symbolism with which critics have often sought to associate him. Although his artistic development varied between realism and abstraction, two features crop up throughout his entire output: the urge to establish a new vision of nature and an unremitting search for beauty marked by genuine creative tension.
Mir Trinxet painted landscapes in Tarragona and Majorca (perhaps his best known works, and certainly the ones that contributed most to create the myth of the artist that merged with nature and lost himself in a delirium of light and colour). In his late works created in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Mir Trinxet intensified the realist side of his work. He also produced works during his campaigns in places like Andorra, Montserrat, Miravet and Gualba.
Casa Trinxet
Special consideration has the major works for the Casa Trinxet in Barcelona, in which Mir Trinxet captured his total conception of the landscape.
Casa Trinxet was a building designed by Catalan Modernistarchitect Josep Puig i Cadafalch and built during the years 1902–1904, in the Eixample district of Barcelona. Casa Trinxet was "one of the jewels of Barcelona Modernism" and one of the buildings of Barcelona's Illa de la Discòrdia ("Block of Discord"), because of the competing attitudes of Domènech i Montaner, Puig i Cadafalch and Antoni Gaudí.
