Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ON THE MIRÓ TRAIL
When you've seen one Miró, well, youstart to see them everywhere in Barcelona, whether
it's T-shirts for tourists or branding for businesses. There's the large ceramic mural on the
facade of Terminal B at the
airport
, for a start, or the circular pavement mural at
Plaça
de la Boqueria
that catches your attention every time you stroll down the Ramblas. He
designed the starfish logo for the
Caixa de Pensións
savings bank (there's one splashed
across the Caixa Forum arts centre on Montjuïc) and also the
Españalogo
on Spanish Na-
tional Tourist Board publications. There's his towering
DonaiOcell
(“Woman and Bird'”)
in the
Parc Joan Miró
, near Barcelona Sants train station, while a smaller
Dona
stands
with other Catalan works in the courtyard of the
Ajuntament
(city hall). In many ways,
Barcelona's a Miró city, whatever Picasso fans might think.
Paintings and drawings
The works on display strongly emphasize Miró's later period, since the museum was only
proposed (and works specifically set aside) in the 1960s, when Miró had already been paint-
ing for almost fifty years. But among over two hundred paintings in the collection there are
earlyRealist worksfrombeforethemid-1920s,liketheeffervescent
PortraitofaYoungGirl
(1919), while other gaps are filled by a collection later donated by Miró's widow, Pilar Jun-
cosa, which demonstrates Miró's preoccupations in the 1930s and 1940s. During this period
he began his
Constellations
series, in which first appeared the colours, themes and symbols
that later came to define his work - reds and blues; women, birds and tears; the sun, moon
and stars - all eventually pared down to the minimalist basics. The same period also saw
thefiftyblack-and-white lithographs ofthe
BarcelonaSeries
(1939-44),executed intheim-
mediate aftermath of the Civil War. They are a dark reflection of the turmoil of the period;
snarling faces and great black shapes and shadows dominate. For a rapid appraisal of Miró's
entire
oeuvre
look in on the museum's
SalaK
, whose 23 works are on long-term loan from a
Japanese collector. Here, in a kind of potted retrospective, you can trace Miró's development
as an artist, from his early Impressionist landscapes (1914) to the minimal renderings of the
1970s.
Works by other artists
Perhaps the most innovative section of the museum is that containing works by other artists
in homage to Miró, including fine pieces by Yves Tanguy, Henry Moore, Max Ernst, Mar-
cel Duchamp, Robert Motherwell and Eduardo Chillida. The single most compelling exhibit,
however, has to be Alexander Calder's
Mercury Fountain
, which he built for the Repub-
lican pavilion at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1936-37 - the same exhibition for which
Picasso painted
Guernica
. Like
Guernica
, it's a tribute to a town, this time the mercury-min-
