We will not exaggerate one bit if we calmly say that Daniel Giralt-Miracle (Barcelona, 1944) is one of the most important people in the cultural history of Catalonia. Art critic since 1966, academic and university professor, he founded the Plastic Arts Service of the Generalitat in 1982 and directed it until 1989. A friend of the great names of 20th century art, he has directed the Macba, La Pedrera and has been curator of the Gaudí Year. On the occasion of the publication of his memoirs, 'Guspires de memoria' (Edicions 62), he receives this newspaper in the former Filograf workshops, the graphic industries of his father, Ricard Giralt-Miracle, in the neighborhood of Funny.
Had you always wanted to write a memoir?
No way! The pandemic has done that, I have also had a stroke and I am running out of gasoline. Maybe there will be more sparks, there are some topics that have left me in the pipeline.
The book is a tribute to his father.
We had a very great rapport. I was the errand boy, and that's how I knew all the artists I worked for, making them books, invitations... I am what I am thanks to him.
It has been the best school, right?
Where I have learned the most is not from books, but from people. If you become friends, they reveal to you what they feel and think. Here, I would mention Chillida, Clavé, Alfaro, Brossa, Tàpies... close friends, and many of them were my father's clients. Brossa always came in to browse the workshop, Tàpies came to ask us for the flatbed machine to print his things. I always say that I know abstraction first than figuration. We had them at home.
We discover that the famous photo of Dalí intubated, dying, is by his brother Pau, and not by Robert Descharnes.
I'm afraid that Dalí's heirs will jump on me but it's the family truth. Copyright never collected, but at least I have all the glory. Descharnes claimed authorship and made my brother swear that he would never reveal that he was the true author.
Is it true that you didn't know how to explain contemporary art to the president of the Generalitat Jordi Pujol?
It's not exactly that. I am the first director of Plastic Arts of the Generalitat. The president had me as the expert, for gifts and all kinds of situations. His wife, Marta Ferrusola, always praised my flower and figurative paintings. Once, President Pujol gave a great speech in New York about Joan Miró, he is a 'nerd', he knew it and he did it very well, he was brilliant, but at the end he comes and tells me; 'And they don't put landscapes in this exhibition?' Be careful, I have seen him, in a conference, speaking with great knowledge of Kant. Which European president can talk about Kant? The last time I visited him, a few months ago, he recited Goethe to me in German. We all have vulnerable points, me too, unfortunately he had his but the president is very intelligent. In the book I make a parallel with the other great figure, my neighbor and friend Pasqual Maragall. When I organized the great exhibitions of the Generalitat, Maragall, then mayor, was the first to come to see them.
He explains how Maragall imposed the City Gold Medal on Dalí “with nocturnality and treachery.” Once dead!
He was very hurt that he hadn't done it sooner. Once Dalí died, he called me Margarita Obiols and said 'can we do it tonight?', and right there, on his deathbed, in front of Descharnes, Maragall gave him the medal. He imposes doing that. I have loved Dalí very much, I have done comedy with him, helping him put on acts with the turtles on Tuset Street. He told me 'what do I have to do now' and I said 'the divine Dalí, the archangelic Dalí, the apotheotic Dalí' and he went and did it. But when he was with me or with people he trusted he never acted like a clown, only in front of journalists, he was a very well articulated performer, he knew his lesson. When it was time to think, he had Jorge Wagensberg come and invite the Nobel Prize winners in Physics to discuss space, cells in Figueres... And visiting Sigmund Freud in London for him was like going to see the Pope, he was his oracle! And he drew it.
Explains the incidents of the first major exhibition of Catalan artists from exile.
I went to look for them in New York, to convince them, but some of them didn't want to because the Generalitat was right-wing. They were leftist exiles. Since I came from the government, I could be from the enemy. I had chosen them, they were friends of mine, and in the end I convinced Muntadas, who was on the other side of America, in California, by phone from Miralda's restaurant in Tribeca, in New York, and we did the first exhibition in Barcelona. The truth is that, when they named me head of Arts Plàstiques, I thought they had given me a great ministry, my head swelled and I explained in an article in Serra d'Or everything we would do. I was not aware that the Generalitat is only a part of the State, of a State that in turn is not very big, and that everything is very small and there are no means.
He says: what a pity that our Macba project was ignored.
The Macba has not been fixed yet and it has been working for a few days now, right? With the triangle private foundation-city council-Generalitat it happens that, if they no longer understand each other in politics, in the arts even less so. My opinion is that the director has rarely been given the freedom and autonomy that a director should have, without interference. For me, the configuration of the Macba bases is the donation of Rafael Tous, all the art of the 60s, 70s and 80s, the face of Catalonia without international mimicry. It is a defect of the current Macba to look outside, to the world. Can't we say anything again from here? If I'm wrong, time will tell.
The MNAC will expand and reinvent itself. What do you think?
We need. We are experiencing a very big big bang in arts and culture. I feel absolutely from the 20th century, I am from the avant-garde and abstraction. The XX gave a lot of itself. But the new technologies, the supposed artificial intelligence, the breaking of the limits between disciplines, as Pina Bausch did in dance or the new cinema does... The most improbable explodes everywhere, and it manifests itself in the fact that, for example, theater the Italian style (with a stage) no longer works, or that it is the lighting factors that have changed the streets, what we now see every year at the Llum Barcelona festival will in the end be a common landscape throughout the city, like Shanghai, where all buildings are an Agbar tower. An explosion is taking place that breaks all borders and changes the arts, as happened in the 19th and 20th centuries. The advances in science affect philosophy, theater, newspapers, art... The world has to rethink itself. I am an expectant citizen. I look more than I propose.
Let's go back to Dalí. You explain that Catalonia had no possibility of keeping the inheritance...
It is the Spanish State that had the money to pay for the works that were refugees in Geneva, to compensate Paul Eluard's daughter for hers, to pay in the New York warehouses... They had Miguel Domènech, Leopoldo's brother-in-law, as their lawyer. Calvo-Sotelo, President of the Government. It was a state matter and no president of the Generalitat could solve it.
Among his greatest praises, those dedicated to Oriol Bohigas and Ricardo Bofill stand out.
After Gaudí, the greatest architect we have had is Ricardo Bofill. His book The City in Space is of superior intelligence. His team, who taught me how to smoke joints, is superlative. If Gaudí was a genius of imagination and craft, Bofill was a genius of vision for the future. He was a new architecture, with new ideas. One day we were walking on the beach, he pointed out my father and told me: 'He's just like mine!'
And Oriol Bohigas?
He is the greatest intellectual from architecture after Puig i Cadafalch. He could have been mayor, councilor or minister. But he was so honest that they could not risk trusting him in a position like that, they did not control him and they had him as an advisor or head of Culture.
Now that the Sagrada Familia seems to be ending, what do you think?
Man, I thought they would take a leap forward and integrate new technologies, new arts such as light, new materials, tacit and non-explicit symbolism. He thought that they would adapt religiosity to today's times, that they would make a temple for all religiosities. Rome and the Argentine Pope are moving faster, they are doing things that were unthinkable just five years ago. He sees more clearly. The aesthetics would also have to change. They have wasted the opportunity.
Tell us about the strangeness of being Protestant in Barcelona.
In Spain in the 50s, in religion class, I was a rare bird. Everyone was supposed to be Catholic, I wasn't, but I liked religion class because I had a good biblical education, as a Christian minority, and I got very good grades. I had to explain that I was not a Jew or a Jehovah's Witness or a Rosicrucian, that I was a non-Roman Christian, it was hard to be one in the 50s but in the 60s, with the Second Vatican Council, the others were accepted and a time of ecumenism and willingness to agree. I have never been dogmatic or proselytizing. Today we also look down on those we consider others, but all religions talk about welcoming and loving; This is not what is happening now in Israel and Palestine. Therefore, sometimes religions are hypocritical.
Criticizes the elimination of savings banks…
The much money that the savings banks, well or poorly managed - and there was everything - dedicated to literature, popular festivals, music, prizes... all this money the banks of Spain have not given back to the culture. I don't know if the boxes were the best procedure, they were a mechanism invented by the people to save their money. Luckily, La Caixa, with its leaders, is the one that dedicates the most, it is salvageable, but it is scary that globally a great capital for culture has been lost. That money that was dedicated now is simply not there.
He speaks very well of Tàpies as an artist but not so much about how he exercised his power.
He had superior moral and intellectual strength and radically defended his position. He was so great that he occupied the space of many, especially the young people, with whom he had controversies. There are many who are somewhat jealous of him.
He had a special relationship with Joan Brossa…
When we took his exhibitions around Catalonia, he always came and I bought a game of cards because he liked to do magic acts at the presentations. And, even though they took him to the best restaurants, he always ordered potato omelette. What genius he had!
His time in La Pedrera...
There he studied Gaudí in depth. And he participated in the restoration of the building. With the architect Fernando Marzá we made the Espai Gaudí in the attic, with manual models. This space is, for me, the Gaudí museum, the place where you have to go to understand it.
He also suffered a little when he put 3,000 people on the roof...
It was a Vang Night by La Vanguardia, a joint initiative with his newspaper to open museums at night at a time when this was not done. Don't hide it now, because I remember I was there: you put me on the precipice. The CEO called me the next day and said 'what have you done! The whole thing could have sunk!’ They didn't fire me because I was new. You are to blame!
