On June 30, 1972 Pablo Picasso signed his last self-portrait, where the silhouette of a skull pointed. The painter died a year later, on April 8, 1973. In a few weeks it will be half a century since his death. The 60th anniversary of the constitution of the museum that houses his work on Montcada street in Barcelona will also be celebrated.
Antoni Tàpies was born on December 13, 1923 in the Catalan capital. He was a painter, sculptor and art theorist. An exponent of informalism, much of his work remained in the city where he was born, in a house on Calle Aragó designed by the modernist architect Domènech i Montaner that has housed the Tàpies Foundation since 1984.
Joan Miró had been a pioneer in promoting a foundation with his work. He launched the Fundació Miró with the help of the architect Josep Lluís Sert. The facility was inaugurated on June 10, 1975 –it will therefore be 50 years old in 2025– and since its opening it has become a benchmark center for modernity that also opened the city up to the Montjuïc mountain.
Picasso, Tàpies and Miró are celebrating their anniversary and the city that inspired a good part of the work of the three great painters of the 20th century wants to honor them as they deserve. This year will be that of Picasso, next year that of Tàpies and 2025, that of Miró. A three-year artistic celebration that started last night at the Saló del Tinell with an act organized by Vicenç Altaió in which art, music and performance came together to commemorate that Barcelona is also the city of painting.
“Barcelona welcomed the three painters and it was not by chance. If Picasso had stayed in Malaga or La Coruña he would never have gone to Paris. Miró imitated him. He also traveled to the French capital and put his career back on track. Tàpies began disoriented, because his work ran into censorship and cassocks and he saw that he also had to go to Paris, ”explained journalist Lluís Permanyer, who interviewed Picasso, was a confidant of Miró and a friend of Tàpies, during the event.
Friendship is one of the links that run through these next tributes, because there was contact and complicity between the three artists. Picasso and Miró met in 1917 at the Liceo. When Miró arrived in Paris, the painter from Malaga opened the doors of the city to him. Tàpies also had his colleagues. On Miró's death he wrote: “He will continue by our side, because his world goes beyond the physical. What counts about an artist is what he leaves to inspire those who will come ”.
Sara Puig, president of the Fundació Miró, recalled these words yesterday and stressed that "the generosity and respect between the three artists and the institutions made possible the birth of the Miró and Tàpies foundations and the Picasso Museum."
Now, these entities will unite again to celebrate the three years of tributes that are coming up and that will go through "a multiple, varied program and for all audiences", according to the director of the Picasso Museum, Emmanuel Guigon. Next autumn, the Miró Foundation will host "an exhibition on the friendship between the two artists and itineraries will also be created throughout the city to draw Picasso's cartography in Barcelona, among other activities." he added he.
“Tàpies met Miró in 1948 and began an uninterrupted friendship. Later he traveled all over the world and came into contact with Picasso in his Paris studio in 1951. He admired them both and said that Catalonia has given the best of contemporary art”, explained Anna Saurí, manager of the Fundació Tàpies. Despite those trips, the great source of inspiration for the artist was his city.
The painter wrote: “I found inspiration in Sant Gervasi, in the Gothic quarter, in the extreme neighborhoods, in the exits from the factories and workshops and in all the modernist exuberance”. His foundation is preparing an exhibition and other events to "make the figure of the artist known in all its aspects" that will start on December 13 on the occasion of the centenary of his birth and will last throughout 2024.
With La sardana dels desemparats and El Bolero del Raval by Pascal Comelade performed by the Cobla Sant Jordi-Ciutat de Barcelona as background music, the tribute to "the three painters in love of Barcelona", as Permanyer defined them, began the triennium the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, and the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, also attended.
