Joan Miró in the United States: from rejection to fascination

BarcelonaJoan Miró (1893-1983) never rested on his laurels. At every stage of his career, he strove to maintain his level of excellence and remain a relevant artist. The following generation of American artists played a key role, as can be seen at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona starting this Friday in the major exhibition. Joan Miró and the United States. Miró found creative inspiration in artists such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, Louise Bourgeois, and Louise Nevelson, and at the same time, he passed on his own strength to them. Pollock said in 1944 that the two artists he most admired were Miró and Picasso. 25 years later, Miró himself stated that what had truly inspired him was "American painting."

"This exhibition is a continuation of the exploration of the figure of Joan Miró in the artistic panorama of the 20th century that we did with previous exhibitions such as Paul Klee and the secrets of nature, Miró-Picasso and Miró Matisse. Beyond the images" says Marko Daniel, director of the Joan Miró Foundation and curator of the exhibition with Matthew Gale and Dolors Rodríguez Roig. The Phillips Collection in Washington is co-curator Elsa Smithgall.

"For Miró, the United States was a country and a cultural context that represented possibilities, freedom, democracy, and hope—values we need today more than ever," Daniel emphasizes. "The conversation was artistic, because Miró didn't learn English and the artists didn't speak Catalan or Spanish, so that conversation was even purer," says Gale. "But Miró's appreciation of the energy and vitality of American art wasn't limited to the periods of his visits, although it is on these foundations that we have focused," explains Gale. "He subscribed to the magazineLifeand in various art publications, includingArt News, the most important magazine of the time, to stay in touch with the New York art scene. And throughout the 1950s, American art regularly reached Europe, either through the Venice Biennale or through traveling exhibitions specially organized by MoMA, such asThe new American painting, which toured Europe between 1958 and 1959. We also know that Miró attended the opening of this version of the exhibition when he arrived in New York in 1959." in the United States, with whom he shared ideals, friendship, and an open, experimental vision of art." Thus, the exhibition "not only traces an artistic itinerary, but also a map of complicities and exchanges that helped to place Joan Miró's work in a truly global context." "When Miró goes to the United States and enters into dialogue with all these artists, .

An original art

The exhibition, one of the highlights of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Joan Miró Foundation, includes some 160 works by Miró and 49 American artists, 19 of whom are women. "We have chosen the artists based on Miró; he is the backbone," explains Rodríguez Roig. Figures such as Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Alexander Calder, and Alice Trumbull Mason stand out. In 1945, the artist Barnett Newman said of Miró that he marked the beginning of a new artistic movement and that he was "the creator of a new language, the pioneer of a new field that would change the face of art for many years to come." Two years later, critic Clemente Greenberg considered it "unacceptable" that "any new painting that advances the frontiers of art historically can be measured less by Miró than by Matisse and Picasso." Likewise, Sam Francis dedicated two lithographs to Miró, and Robert Motherwell stated that he liked "everything" about Miró. "Miró's art is so original that it immediately strikes us to our core," Motherwell concluded.

But the entry of Miró's art into the United States was not easy: when the first paintings were exhibited in the mid-1920s, the American public was not prepared for the radicalism forged in the Paris of the Surrealists. In fact, The fall, Paint and Painting (Fratellini), now on display in the exhibition's first room, were met with widespread rejection. "It left the public in a state of shock," Gale clarifies. But within a few years, things changed: MoMA began buying Miró's work in 1928, and in 1929 a New York critic called Miró "the latest sensation among the younger elements in Paris."

A few years later, the art dealer Pierre Matisse, son of Henri Matisse, organized Miró's first solo exhibition in New York. But Miró didn't travel to the United States until 1947, for the mural he created for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati. MoMA in New York had dedicated its first retrospective to him in 1941, simultaneously with another on Salvador Dalí, but Miró didn't attend. By then, Dalí and Miró were already like night and day: exiled in the United States, Dalí unleashed his full provocative and publicistic potential, while Miró remained loyal to his fellow surrealists from all over Europe who had gone into exile in the United States during World War II. In total, Miró made seven trips to the United States between 1947 and 1968.

The help of friends

The exhibition is organized chronologically into fifteen rooms. After initial explorations with the American public, the curators emphasize the importance of Alexander Calder and the architect Josep Lluís Sert in Miró's American adventure. Miró considered Calder a "brother" and with whom he often exchanged works, as is the case with Black polygons, by Calder.

The relationships between the three are fascinating. Sert commissioned Calder to Source of mercury for the Republic Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair, and Calder welcomed him when he went into exile. Miró and Calder had met in 1928 in Paris, and when Miró and Pilar Juncosa went to the United States, Calder went to meet them at the airport. Sert commissioned Miró to design two murals for Harvard University and a third for his home, and Miró commissioned Sert to design his Mallorcan studio and the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona.

As can be seen in the following two rooms, one of the key moments of Miró's presence in the United States was his time at the Atelier 17 printmaking studio in New York, where he worked for months on the Cincinnati mural surrounded by artists including Louise Bourgeois, whose innovative works can be seen Characters, and fellow sculptor Louise Nevelson. Miró and Bourgeois had met in Paris in 1937, and, according to Gale, Miró responded to the Characters de Bougeois with The Three Majesties.

The impact of the 'Constellations'

Another key moment of Joan Miró and the United States, which will be open until February 22, is the impact that the exhibition of the series of the Constellations in 1945, considered one of the first works from a war-torn Europe that could be seen in the United States. One of the key works in this room is Still life of the shoe, considered the Guernica by Joan Miró. He himself considered it his "key" piece, and it belonged to one of the artists on display, the painter Peter Miller. It now belongs to MoMA in New York, which has loaned it on an exceptional basis, and can be seen alongside a strikingly similar painting by Gorky from four years later. Garden in SochiAnother attraction of this area is that it exhibits reproductions of all the Constellations so that you can see, as Miró himself wanted, the inscriptions and drawings he made on the back of each of them.

On the other hand, Lee Krasner spoke of Miró's constellations as "small miracles" and now the constellation Woman and birds, can be seen between one of his paintings with "small images" and another by Pollock. But Krasner's breakthrough in the exhibition comes a little later with the large-format painting The seasons, which the Whitney in New York has loaned for the first time.

Later, the painting The red sun (1948), with characteristic drips of paint in the center, reveals how Miró was aware of what Jackson Pollock and other artists around him were doing. Thus, twenty years later, the painting May 1968 He reinvented the "between sign and background," as the curators say, in the vein of the color fields of artists like Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler. "It says I've influenced a younger generation of painters. Perhaps so, but it's also true that I've been greatly influenced by my own period," Miró himself had said in 1961.

Public Commissions

The projects for monuments open the final section of the exhibition, which is sponsored by the BBVA Foundation and in collaboration with the Institut Ramon Llull, Acción Cultural Española, Abertis, and Puig. In this area, the curators point out that the expansion work on the monumental sculpture Character and bird They lasted five years and in 1965 Miró traveled to Chicago to work on a commission of which only the bronze model remains. Moon, sun and a star in the North Patio of the Joan Miró Foundation.

Finally, you can see Miró's preparatory work for the World Trade Center, one of the artistic victims of the 9/11 attacks. After Barcelona, ​​the exhibition will be on view at The Phillips Collection in Washington from March 21 to July 5, 2026.