Joaquín Mir Trinxet

Joaquin Mir Trinxet (Barcelona 6 January 1873 – 8 April 1940) was a Spanish 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 Landscape (around 1900-03). 496 × 646 mm. Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.

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. 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 Terraced Village (circa 1909). 121 × 164 cm. Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. 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. 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.

The building was commissioned by Mir Trinxet's uncle Avelino Trinxet Casas, of the textile industry family Trinxet, from Barcelona. Avelino Trinxet was also the owner of the Trinxet factory built in 1907 by Joan Alsina i Arús in Can Trinxet, Hospitalet, near Barcelona, in a modernist fashion.

The vidres were made in picture-style appearance, like the commissioned by Trinxet from the Rigalt, Granell y Cía. firm in 1910-1912, following instructions from Joaquín Mir Trinxet.

The Casa Trinxet was demolished in 1968 despite attempts by artists and intellectuals to save it for conversion into a museum of Modernism, in the period of Porcioles council, for the builders Nuñez i Navarro.

Lastly movements were late to save Casa Trinxet.

Impressionist, landscape artist It is true that the range of colours in his palette coincided with the one the Impressionists used; he also coincided with them in excluding the colour black, using a host of combinations to paint shadow. But Mir used these technical resources to create a world of his own, a new landscape. Rather than assimilate and reproduce the theories predominating at the time, his work developed more out of an inner need brought into being by his idiosyncratic way of looking at nature and light.

Mir Trinxet as a film director Titled Mir's Moving Eye, the audiovisual work presents his activities as an amateur film director. The films, shot between 1930 and 1936 as Mir's life drew to a close, are currently held in the artist's son's collection. In addition to these early film explorations, viewers can see what life was like in the Mir family and compare real scenes with the results in his works. or «Joaquim Mir i Trinxet».