Fundacio Pilar i Joan Miro,

Palma, Mallorca

 

For Barcelona-born Catalan artist Joan Miro, Mallorca was the land of his maternal grandmother, of his wife, and from 1956, his adoptive home.  It was also a refuge and his connection with it was fundamental to his work and anyone else’s ability to understand it.

“I have withdrawn to Mallorca because it isolates and, above all, because I have the sensation of being sheltered in my mother’s womb,” he wrote to journalist Lluis Permanyer.

To art dealer Pierre Matisse, son of the painter Henri, he wrote: “For me, direct contact with the place where a work was conceived is crucial to its understanding.”

For the visitor to the eyrie, looking down to the Mediterranean on the outskirts of Palma, where Miro spent the last part of his life, it’s a place to make the connection between profoundly blue skies and the clarity of the island light and the deceptive simplicity of Miro’s bold black lines and use of intense colour.  On another level, we also learn of the importance of buildings in shaping Miro’s output.

Initially, he worked in the Sert Studio designed for him by Catalan architect Josep Lluis Sert.

It’s a magnificent, airy space with elongated windows that look up to the sky, and a viewing gallery that looks down to the works in progress and the paint splashes on the earthenware tiles.

But Miro’s interest in huge public works and experimentation in various media left him feeling the need to expand.

In 1959, he bought the neighbouring property Son Boter with the proceeds of the Guggenheim International Award that he received for his ceramic murals at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

Dating from the 18th-century, the traditional Son Boter stands in contrast to the reds, blues and yellows of the Sert Studio’s façade that echo Miro’s work.

Within Son Boter, Miro’s preliminary charcoal sketches graffiti the walls, while some of the eclectic objects he gathered remind us of how he relied on found objects and primitive art for inspiration.

“The truth is here, in Son Boter,” he told composer and writer Georges Raillard.

Miro’s legacy at the Palma foundation, established through bequests to the city by the artist and his wife, is ensured by a third building on the site designed by architect Rafael Moneo, which opened to the public in 1992.

Despite the joy of the Mediterranean and mountain views and carob and lemon trees, Moneo was dismayed by the urban sprawl.

The Moneo Building is therefore meant to be a fortress and within is a calm, flowing meditative space that allows us to appreciate the artistic frenzy of Miro’s final years.

Exhibits under the title 1983, a reference to the year of his death, on Christmas Day, aged 90, draw on the profusion of work, much unfinished, in a variety of media.

Recurrent themes are birds, women and figures, referred to as “personages” and “living monsters”, or sculptures assembled from found objects, which Miro rescued from anonymity by casting them in bronze and giving them tall, solid personalities.

Miro’s wit and humour is at play for instance in “Femme dans la Rue “ (1973), where the woman’s strength and energy is complemented by Miro’s black handprints, which he added to many of his final works.  For some critics, the practice recalls cave paintings.  There are other similarities, notably Miro’s reliance on the evocative power of a single flowing line.  A major difference for visitors to the Palma foundation is that Miro worked in glorious natural light.

Barbara Lewis © 2024.