In November 1917, Miró, shocked, attended the premiere of Parade from the Liceu coop, the show by the Ballets Russes with music by Satie and staging by Jean Cocteau, for which Picasso had designed the scenery and costumes. Picasso is 36 years old, and Miró is 24. The former is an extrovert and bravado, a cubist and neoclassical at the same time; Miró, shy and silent, is beginning to be. It is the first time that their paths intersect, although they will not meet until two years later in Paris, beginning a friendship of more than half a century that remained firm despite the many differences, both human and artistic, that separated them. They recognize each other in their creative freedom, in their transgressive impulse and in their ability to open new paths. On the mantelpiece of the Mont-roig workshop, Miró placed a portrait of Picasso, and he was accompanied by others in Son Boter in Palma and in the Sert workshop. Miró looked at Picasso. But did Picasso look at Miró? The answer floats in the air in the fascinating exhibition Miró-Picasso, which this Friday opens to the public simultaneously at the Fundació Miró and the Museu Picasso, the museums that both artists wanted to create in Barcelona and that in a titanic effort have brought together 300 works coming from all over the world, some of which had never been seen in Barcelona.
From his world, Picasso looks everywhere and Miró was no exception. He always kept with him the Self-Portrait, from 1919, and the Portrait of a Spanish Dancer, from 1921, and after a visit by the man from Malaga to the studio on Rue Blomet, Miró recounted what he had told him: "After me, you open a new door". The magnificent Self-Portrait can now be seen in the Museu Picasso while The Spanish Dancer (both from the Picasso in Paris) hangs in the first room of the Fundació Miró, next to the Harlequin, a portrait of Massine that Miró discovered when, through his mother, friend of Picasso's mother, visited the family home on Carrer de la Mercè. It is one of the works that Picasso had left behind when he left for Paris and that he later donated for the creation of his museum. The fireworks begin. In the background, radiating throughout the space, The Horse, the Pipe and the Red Flower, from 1920, Miró's response to the cubism that he had just discovered on his first trip to the French capital and his first tribute to the "master" . A still life in which he places the book Le Coq et l'arlequin, by Cocteau, on a chest of drawers, open to a page on which a drawing by Picasso appears.
If separately Picasso and Miró are always an event, together they are much more than that. 'Miró-Picasso', the exhibition, has been designed by four hands by Margarida Cortadella and Elena Llorens on behalf of the Picasso Museum, and Teresa Montaner and Sònia Villegas, on behalf of the Miró entity. More than a story in two chapters articulated chronologically or thematically, the curators have built a single, complex and exciting story for the two venues, exchanging emblematic works from each of them (Las Meninas by Picasso and the aforementioned Harlequín, the first work that the artist gave to Barcelona, have been moved to the Miró Foundation, while from the center of Montjuïc they have gone down to Montcada street (Calla in space and naked woman or The morning star).
Loans of works that had not traveled to Barcelona until now have been added to the own collections, such as The Three Dancers (The Dance), Picasso's violent and suffocating work from 1925 in which he distorts the forms until they are painful for the visitor to see. The farmhouse, Miró's emblematic painting from 1921-1922 that was owned by Ernest Hemingway and which, as the artist himself confessed to La publicitat, focused his entire life on the countryside. "From the tall tree to the small snail, I wanted to put everything I liked in the painting. For nine months I was painting seven or eight hours a day. I suffered terribly, horribly, just like a condemned man," he confessed.
Important works such as The Workshop Window and Spanish Dancer, both from the Israel Museum, have been left along the way, which the outbreak of the war in Gaza has prevented from leaving Israel. The years of the Civil War, which both lived with anguish despite the distance, and their commitment to the Republic, whose cause they supported with many artistic and human actions, among them Picasso's Dreams and Lies of Franco engravings or Miró's poster. Aidez l'Espagne, is one of the central chapters of the exhibition. Both participated in the Pavilion of the Republic of the 1937 Paris Exhibition with two monumental works (Picasso with Gernika and Miró with The Reaper. Catalan peasant in rebellion, painted directly on the ceilings and then disappeared).
Both reflect the oppressive and dramatic climate in which they live. Cow skulls, crying women, monstrous beings or that bull's head made from the bicycle seat of a Picasso who, with the Second World War invading everything, decided never to return to his country while Franco was alive. Miró, who will decide to return to protect his family, the blackness and the crossfire started by the Nazis caught him in Varengeville, where he tries to escape from reality by creating his own sign language. It is then that he begins to paint his famous Constel • lacions, a joyous explosion of life and poetry in those dark days: Spain was subject to Franco's dictatorship and his friends, poets and painters, were persecuted. Perhaps, too, it was his way of demonstrating his rejection of tragedy. “There is no more ivory tower. Withdrawal and distancing are no longer permitted,” he had declared in 1939 in Cahiers d'art, when asked to what extent the creative act of the events around him was resented.
Miró, a friend of poets and himself a poet - perhaps this is the essential characteristic of all his work - had begun to represent words in his paintings, although it was not until 1936 when, the curators of the exhibition suggest, encouraged by Picasso's experience , start writing long texts. He does it in French. Picasso, in Spanish and French, had begun a year earlier, when he was 54, when plunged into a personal and creative crisis, "he abandoned painting and began to write to free himself from private torments and leave behind an excess of ghosts," as he testified. Pichot. In the museum on Montcada Street there is a room dedicated to Alfred Jarry, a preamble to a future exhibition in which the fascination that both felt for the character of Ubu is shown.
Picasso looks at the world while Miró draws enigmatic shapes from the depths of his mind, but both invented their revolutionary way of painting. They shared friends, irony and eroticism, more stark and truculent in Picasso, but absolutely present in a lascivious Miró who turns a trunk into a circle with which he constructs an assemblage in a vagina or in the Spanish Dancer of 1928, in which he directs our look towards his triangular pubis where he incorporates a label that reads "trou ici" (free entry) and which, according to the curators, has a lot to do with Picasso's 1913 collage, Au Bon Marché, a still life on a table which collapses on a naked woman whose hole he marks with a "trou ici" (hole here).
In one of the most exciting chapters of the exhibition we see the artists in their final years. Picasso, 90, presents 400 pieces, all recently made, in two exhibitions at the Palais des Papes in Avión. Miró, 81, also wants to give the last hour in the retrospective that the Grand Palais dedicated to him in 1974. Picasso, painter, painter, appears vigorous and energetic, engaging in a fierce race against time: as if afraid of interrupting the passage of time. hours, or perhaps to exorcise the panic in the face of the inexorable, given body and soul to creation, between naked women and pairs of lovers. Miró, a revolutionary, wants to show how the youthful dream of murdering painting still lives in him.
The ceramics, the monumental public projects in which they participated (Paris, Chicago, Barcelona), the way they followed similar strategies to ensure their immortality through donations in the museums that they believed were relevant or creating their own in Barcelona are other aspects that , here or there, are declining through an admirable journey in many aspects and whose simple existence, thanks to the complicity of its two directors, Emmanuel Guigon and Marko Daniel, should already be a cause for celebration in itself. The exhibition, which has been sponsored by Telefónica and the BBVA Foundation (the latter on the Miró side) can be visited until February 25 and is worth queuing. One last surprise: for the first time, the Homage to Picasso that Miró made to illustrate the cover of La Vanguardia on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the man from Malaga is on public display. The image of a ludón with a wild eye on which Miró superimposed the calligraphy of both as a symbol of friendship. And he's not the only one. There is also Woman, Bird, Star (Homage to Pablo Picasso), which Miró began in 1966 and finished on the day of his death in 1973.
Below you can see more photos of the exhibition in which Picasso and Miró's eyes meet:
