This morning King Felipe VI visited the great Miró-Picasso exhibition, with which the Fundació Miró and the Museu Picasso jointly celebrate the friendship that both artists maintained throughout their lives, their affinities and divergences, and their relationship with Barcelona , where both wanted to have their own museum. Hours before tonight's institutional inauguration - tomorrow a second popular one will be held, which will be attended by 1,000 people at each center - the monarch toured the rooms behind closed doors, accompanied by the directors of the museums, Emmanuel Guigon and Marko Daniel, and guided by the explanations of its curators, Margarida Cortadella and Elena Llorens, on behalf of the Picasso Museum, and Teresa Montaner and Sònia Villegas, on behalf of the Mironian entity.
The monarch's visit to the two Barcelona museums, the first he made as King (in 2011 he inaugurated The Staircase of Evasion in Miró with the then Princess Letizia), was conceived during the meeting he held last September with the mayor. Jaume Collboni at the Palauet Albéniz. Its presence is more than justified since it is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the Picasso 1973-2023 Celebration, with more than 250 works from all over the world, some of which had never been seen in the city, such as The Three Dancers (The Dance), a 1925 piece by Picasso that has come from the Tate Modern, or rarely seen in Barcelona, like The Farmhouse, Miró's great work from 1921-1922 that was owned by Ernest Hemingway
King Felipe VI began his visit at the Picasso Museum, where the Minister of Culture and Sports, Miquel Iceta, the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, and the director of the Museum, Emmanuel Guigon, were waiting for him, who were joined by the delegate of the Government in Catalonia, Carlos Prieto, the commissioner of the Picasso Year, Carlos Alberdi, and Trinidad Jiménez, director of Global Public Affairs Strategy at Telefónica (sponsor of the exhibition). Before entering the rooms, the King stopped before the enlarged image of the photograph that Jacqueline Picasso took of the artists during Miró's visit to Picasso in Mougins in 1967. Once inside, one of the pieces that attracted His attention was the gigantic loom of the set that Picasso created for Satie's ballet Mercure, choreographed by Massine, and whose performance, at the Théâtre de la Cigale, Joan Miró attended in June 1924.
At his next stop, Miró, Felipe VI was received at the door of the Fundació by the president of the board Sara Puig, while Marko Daniel and Joan Punyet Miró, the artist's grandson, were waiting for him inside along with the curators and to the director of the BBVA Foundation, Rafael Pardo, who sponsors this part of the exhibition. As soon as the tour begins, two of the works that best speak of the artists' relationship. On the one hand, Portrait of a Spanish Dancer (1921), a work by Miró that Picasso kept in his collection throughout his life, and, on the other, the still life from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Horse, the Pipe and the Red Flower ( 1920), also by Miró, painted in Mont-roig after his first stay in Paris, in which he places the book Le Coq et l'arlequin, by Cocteau, on a dresser, open to a page on which a drawing of Picasso.
The curators and the director of Miró also drew his attention to the 1938 Self-Portrait that he remade 30 years later and is currently part of the collections of MoMA and Peinture (Escargot, femme, fleur, étoile, 1934, on loan from the Reina Sofia of Madrid. Finally, the King took a final institutional photo with all the king took his institutional photo with the rest of the authorities before the model of the monumental sculpture Deux personnages fantastiques (Parella d'enamorats dels jocs de flors d' ametller).
Miró-Picasso, a true event, includes masterpieces from major international museums, although the bulk are the collections of both museums, some pieces of which have been exchanged. Thus, for example, one of the paintings from Picasso's Las Meninas cycle and El Arlequín, the first work that the artist gave to the city, have been moved to the Miró Foundation, while from the center of Montjuïc they have gone down to the street Montcada Flame in space and naked woman or The morning star. On Friday, the 20th, both museums will hold an open day (previous registration required) with shuttle service between the two centers.
