Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, who maintained a close friendship for more than 50 years, saw how Barcelona gathered part of their work in monographic art centers. Both the Fundació Joan Miró and the Museu Picasso have joined forces in an exceptional project, the “Miró-Picasso” exhibition, a set of more than 300 works from public and private collections around the world with the aim of showing two artists who transformed the art of the 20th century with their own voice and an unprecedented plastic intensity. Like the astral conjunctions, the artistic event of the year in Barcelona is of limited duration: until February 25, 2024. For four months, this first-rate cultural milestone is available to Barcelona residents and residents in a wide radius of territory both sides of the border, from where it is as easy to get to the Catalan capital as taking a train.
The exhibition is organized around six major chronological and thematic axes. From the meeting in 1917 in Barcelona to the latest monumental projects, passing through the episode of the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic in Paris in 1937 or the interest in the ancestral technique of ceramics, the visitor also discovers how these two artists and friends shared many transcendent moments of their careers.
One of the incentives to visit the exhibition is that 76 works on display have never, or very rarely, been seen in Barcelona: such emblematic pieces as La masia (1921-1922), Untitled (Cap d'home, 1937) o Woman, bird, star (Homage to Pablo Picasso, 1966-1973), by Joan Miró; and The Three Ballerinas (1925), Figures a la vora del mar (1931) or La dona que plora (1937), by Pablo Picasso, come from the National Picasso Museum in Paris, the Center Pompidou, the National Museum Centro de Arte Reina Sofia , the National Gallery of Art in Washington or the Tate Gallery in London. There are more than thirty lending institutions in total. In addition, works such as Flama en l'espai i dona nua (1932) and L'estel matinal (1940), by Miró, or Las Meninas (1957) and Arlequí (1917), by Picasso, have left their respective places of custody to visit the museum of the other, that has happened very rarely. A total of 130 pieces have been moved between both museums with the intention that the public have a unique experience of the entire creative dimension of both artists. To facilitate this shared experience, a combined ticket has been created to visit the exhibition in both museums.
The exhibition takes a look at the friendship of more than fifty years that the artists maintained through works and documents that attest to their encounters, coincidences and divergences in the artistic field and shared friendships. It also shows the link between both of them with Barcelona, visible in the legacy in the form of monographic museums. Both share the desire to have created their own museum, evident testimony of the great esteem they felt for the city.
As the directors of both promoting entities, Marko Daniel and Emmanuel Guigon, emphasize in the catalog, “the “Miró-Picasso” exhibition does not aim to be an anthological review, but rather to highlight, once again, the contemporaneity of both artists and to show visitors to the privileged collections kept at the Fundació Joan Miró and the Picasso Museum of Barcelona, which have been complemented for this occasion with outstanding works from international institutions and private collections." “Miró-Picasso” is also part of the events of the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death, which includes a total of 50 exhibitions dedicated to Picasso that will take place around the world between autumn 2023 and spring 2024.
In 1895, at the age of 14, Pablo Ruiz Picasso, from Malaga by birth, arrived with his family in Barcelona, where he lived until 1904. These nine years were those of academic training, the emergence of adolescence and the formation of his character, and the first step in his artistic ascension in a Barcelona immersed in a dense intellectual world, with passionate ideological and social struggles. The artist lived in old Barcelona, in the Gòtic, the Ribera and surrounding areas: he walked through Colom and the Ciutadella, he exhibited for the first time in Els Quatre Gats, he became fond of bullfights in the Torín in Barceloneta, he saw the trains steam that enter and leave the terminal station of the Mataró line... During those years, Picasso created an artistic circle and friendships that he would maintain forever and that would definitively link him to the city.
Not far away, in the Crèdit passage, and shortly before, in 1893, Joan Miró i Ferrà was born, who during Picasso's stay in the neighborhood was a schoolboy who had just begun drawing classes. His biography states that he studied at the Escola de Comerç by day and at the Llotja by night, until 1910, and that later he began to work as an accountant in a drugstore, to be “a profitable man.” But what would decisively influence his artistic vein would be the stay for health reasons at his parents' farmhouse in Mont-roig del Camp in 1911. We thus speak of a “Miró triangle” made up of three places, three emotional landscapes, with vertices in Mont-roig, where the roots, the land and the inspiration of everything else would be; Mallorca, an island refuge where he created for three decades, and Barcelona, where he had his first teachers, such as Modest Urgell and Francesc Galí.
In his hometown he left iconic works such as Dona i ocell in the park that bears his name, the pavement of Pla de l'Os, on the Rambla, and the large ceramic mural on the façade of Terminal 2 of the airport, made jointly with Josep Llorens i Artigas. In 1920, Paris was the scene of the first meeting between both geniuses. As for Picasso, despite having settled permanently, he would also maintain the link with Barcelona; He continued to visit her to see his family, who was still living, and his friends. In addition, he donated works to the city, the first Arlequí in 1919, and presented two monographic exhibitions, in whose organization he also participated.
Two towns in southern Catalonia play a prominent role in the training of Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso as painters. And both have had a train, but they don't have it. Picasso was in Horta de Sant Joan (Terra Alta) twice. The first, convalescent, from the summer of 1898, invited by his friend Manuel Pallarès, a stay that lasted until February 1899; the second, during the period of May-August 1909, in the company of Fernande Olivier. At that time, the project to connect the Baix Aragó by rail with the port of La Ràpita through Vall-de-roures and Xerta was already underway, which would never be completed. Since 1895, a 32 km stretch of tracks between La Puebla de Híjar and Alcanyís did operate. After different episodes, in 1942 the line reached Tortosa.
Subsequently, land grading began for the Tortosa–la Ràpita section, but the rails would never be laid due to lack of profitability prospects. That railway, called Val de Zafán, could not adapt to the needs of modern times and had a short life of 31 years. On September 19, 1973, the collapse of a tunnel between Prat de Comte and El Pinell de Brai led to the definitive closure of the line. Stations such as Horta de Sant Joan have been incorporated into the Terra Alta Greenway, a pedal route that runs through spectacular landscapes through the Pàndols mountain range and the Els Ports natural park. On the outskirts of Mont-roig del Camp, in Baix Camp, is the farmhouse of Joan Miró's parents, where he spent the summer repeatedly. It is the house that appears in the painting The Farmhouse (1921-1922), which Ernest Hemingway acquired.
Other landscapes such as the fields, the beach and the Peiró hermitage, the inhabitants and the town in general have been immortalized in different Miró works. Mont-roig has had a station since 1865, on the Tarragona-Valencia line, although it is located far from the town center, near the center of Miami Platja. It is the case that, since January 13, 2020, it has been left unused due to the commissioning of the new Vandellòs variant of the Mediterranean Corridor, which runs further inland, very close to Mas Miró.
