The Fundació Joan Miró (the Joan Miró Foundation) is a museum of modern art celebrating the life and work of Spanish artist Joan Miró. It is located on the side of the Montjuïc hill south of central Barcelona in Catalonia, eastern Spain. The Foundation is part of the Barcelona Museum Pass or Articket scheme which gives you free entrance to six museums around Barcelona and, importantly, the ability to skip the long queues and walk straight in to any of them, for just 30 Euros (about £30).
Brief history of the Joan Miró Foundation
Miró was a native Barcelonan, born there in 1893. He was world famous by the time he had the idea in the late 1960s to establish a foundation to house a good cross-section of his life’s work as well as act as a research and study centre. With the help of old friends he was able to get the funding and buy some land on the side of the big hill, Montjuïc, a 20-minute walk south of the city’s famous central avenue, the Ramblas – and just round the corner from the ornately Victorian and massive Museum of Catalan Art (which is also in the Articket scheme; the well-organised art buff would make a day of doing both).
The cool white Modernist building which houses the Foundation was designed by Josep Lluís Sert (who also designed Miró’s purpose-built studio at his post-war home in Palma, Majorca). Sert’s large airy whitewashed rooms are the perfect setting for Miró’s light and colourful fantasies.
The Foundation owns some 217 of Miró’s paintings, 178 sculptures, 9 textiles, 4 ceramics, some 8,000 drawings and almost all of his prints. It’s a major venue.
Exterior of the Fundació Joan Miró
Five euros buys you a handy audioguide which takes you through the fifteen or so rooms of the permanent collection, and includes photos contemporary with various works as well as thoughtful music to listen to while you contemplate the photos, ranging from Mozart to Stockhausen.
The rooms are in simple chronological order and give a much more complete overview of Miró’s work than the Picasso Museum (which I visited the day before) does of their subject.
Here the early rooms establish that Miró deployed a surprisingly figurative approach well into the post-war period, with many landscapes of the village of Mont-roig (Village and church of Mont-roig, 1919) and portraits, albeit done with a distinctively primitive or naive air.
Portrait of a young girl (1919)
Mont-roig was very important to Miro as a talisman of Catalonian peasant life, landscape and authenticity. The village is about 120 kilometers west of Barcelona, along the coast. Miro made hundreds of paintings of the landscape, people and architecture of the village which provided him with a visual vocabulary of shapes, forms and colours and a primitive approach which helped him escape from 19th century academic tradition. Today the village hosts a Miró Centre which the Miró completist should visit.
In the early 1920s Miró moved to Paris and, like so many artists before him, found in the city of light a heady air of invention and intellectual liberation. In 1924 André Breton published the first of many manifestos promoting the new movement of Surrealism. Miró found something particularly liberating about Surrealism’s combination of art and poetry. The works here suggest how extraordinarily quickly he abandoned traditional perspective and realistic depiction of figurative elements and began to experiment with a more abstract approach to line and colour.
The biggest single discovery seems to have been that a modern painting need have no perspective. It doesn’t have to be a window or a box containing things from ‘the real world’ in a ‘realistic’ relationship. There are roughly two steps in his development: In the earlier Surreal works Miró explores how objects from ‘the real world’ can be portrayed out of any context or perspective – very much the kind of random combinations which Surrealism favoured (though always in French, obviously). The wine bottle and fly are still identifiable in this transitional work.
The bottle of wine (1924)
The next stage was to realise that any shapes or marks or patterns can be presented against this undifferentiated background. Playing with any size or shape of line and experimenting with the effect produced by filling these abstract shapes with primary colours opens up a completely new world.
With one bound, his imagination was set free!
Painting (1933)
Are these people? Bodies? Moving or still? Full of anger or harmony?
What are the key elements of a Miró painting?
- a flat wash background
- black lines creating shapes and patterns
- some of which are filled with blocks of unshaded primary colour, very often yellow, red or blue
- Some of the shapes have individual lines or tufts of lines which look like hairs
- Some of the shapes have what look like eyes which turn them into faces; probably
- there are often star or moon-shaped figures.
It’s amazing that elements which can be described so simply turn out to be capable of generating such a vast array of combinations and variations. One room in fact contains a suite of variations, 27 drawings which play with these basic elements in a bewildering profusion of possibilities.
Also, you wouldn’t have thought such a basic approach would be capable of development, but it really is. The early Surreal works have a feel of their own, with their semi-cubist use of cafe paraphernalia (wine bottles). Some of the works from the 1930s lean towards the smooth melting surfaces of Salvador Dali. Some of the more mature works are blocky, like Painting, above. But by the 1940s and 50s he has settled on using a much thinner line, frail spindly black lines against a solid wash of primary colour, either creating closed shapes which are filled with primary red, yellow or blue, or dangle by themselves to create a kind of trailing fishing-line effect, or are self-contained objects forming child-like stars or crescent moons as below.
The single most distinctive element is the hand-held, imperfect, spindly wavering quality of the lines. Compare and contrast with the mathematically precise shapes of contemporary Modernists like Kandinsky or Mondrian. There are hardly any dead straight lines to be seen – instead there is always a hand-drawn, child-like air to almost all of Miró’s work.
The museum nods towards Miró’s work in other formats. He experimented with fabrics and commissioned this monster tapestry, which is displayed alongside photos detailing its creation by a team of weavers.
Tapestry of the Fundació (1979)
The building is also dotted, inside and outside (in the attractive gardens and around the terraces of the building) with sculptures. Miró’s sculptures stand out from most modern sculpture because of their gaudy colours – most modern sculpture rejoices in the coarse heaviness of steel or bronze or stone; our man likes the bright primary colours of his paintings. It is odd but striking that none of the sculptures, entertaining though they are, have the same visceral impact as the shapes on a flat surface of the paintings.
Pair of lovers playing with almond blossoms (model for the sculptural group at La Défense, Paris) 1975
Miró finally managed to take a long-dreamed-of trip to Japan in the 1960s where he met Japanese artists who gave him a feel for the Japanese art of calligraphy (and also the use of long, narrow canvases echoing the shape of traditional Japanese scrolls).
Calligraphy uses traditional wide brushes to paint rather thick black lines whose imperfections – where you can see the flaws and rasps in the stroke – testify to their authenticity. His later work can be seen as experiments with different sizes (and shapes) of hand-drawn lines in a generally much-pared-back approach, which has moved a long way on from the hectic, shape-filled works of the 1930s.
Two thick calligraphic brushstrokes in effect create this work, although set off by one of his trademark stars and a few blots and rasps.
Drop of water on pink snow (1968)
The ‘thick brush’ approach contrasts vividly with experiments in the opposite – seeing just how much you can say with one simple slender line.
The climax of this approach can be seen in several rooms (which are in fact more like alcoves of just three walls, the fourth being open so you can walk in and out) in which are hung several of Miró’s modern triptychs. These consist of sets of three massive canvases which display experimental variations on really pared-down patterns or designs, and which date from the 1960s.
The simplest set consists of three massive white canvases each of which bears just one thin line. It’s difficult to convey how powerful, how just right, these seem. The audioguide mentions the influence of Japanese Zen philosophy – Less is more. Simplicity. Silence.
Painting on white background for the cell of a recluse (II) (1968)
The next alcove along contains another triptych which plays with rather more elements than just a line, exploring the idea of a coloured blotch set off against a curved but open line, with a field of paint splatters along the bottom forming a sort of ‘shore’ or fringe.
The hope of a condemned man II (1974)
Why do they work? What is it that feels not only restful and calming about them, but so right. I would pay good money to read an analysis of his art by whichever type of scientist it is that researches the science of perception, the psychology of vision, why it is that some colours, arrangements, shapes and patterns are pleasing to the eye, feel ‘right’, go deep into our pleasure centres.
Obviously there’s a lot to be written about Miró’s biography and career; his love-hate relationship with the Surrealists who never quite accepted this quiet Spanish bourgeois; about his take on their use and abuse of Freudian theories; and then on the disruptive and demoralising impact of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War; as well as considerations of Miró’s personal psychological profile. (He was striving for an art which brought calm and peace and contentment to a mind which was often, by his own account, anxious and depressed – ‘Surrealism opened up a universe that soothed and justified my torment’.) But I am concentrating on the impact his works have on the viewer.
Also I was a little dismayed to be told by the audioguide just how many of the apparently abstract figures in the paintings were actually depictions of men and women and moon and stars and ladders and oceans, along with a fairly obvious analysis of what these symbols mean (the ladder motif appears in lots of works and represents escape from the violent or mundane world into a higher sphere of art and poetry etc).
I preferred to close my mind and drift among the shapes and colours in much the same way as you can lie on your back and float for hours in the warm, lulling Mediterranean Sea.
The gold of the azure (1967)
If you only have time for one museum in Barcelona, this one is much better, gives a much more comprehensive overview of its subject and contains many more wonderful paintings, than the more popular but patchy Picasso Museum.
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