When Joan Miró died in 1983 at the age of ninety, his passing was cited as the end of an era, for Miró was considered the last of the great European modernists of the twentieth century. Throughout a long and prolific career, Miró had shined alongside such luminaries as Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, René Magritte, and others of similar renown--"the artists born between 1880 and 1900 who reshaped both culture and consciousness," according to Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes. Miró's work blended many elements from the modern age's most daring artistic movements--Cubist painting, Surrealist poetry, and Dada doctrine--into a unique style that is familiar to the viewer, and yet instantly recognizable as his own. Miró became, as James Gardner declared in the National Review, "one of the visual giants of the century. His work is effortlessly and almost infallibly beautiful. His images...