Now Miró approaches Matisse. After the success of the shared exhibition between Miró and Picasso, placing the two artists side by side and even changing locations, the Joan Miró Foundation has begun to investigate a new relationship, friendship, and influence of its artist, this time, looking at the quintessential French painter of Fauvism, a name rarely exhibited in Barcelona but also not very common in the rest of Spain, with few opportunities to see so many of his works together, for which one has to go back to the retrospective dedicated to him by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in 2009.
"It's been a long time since I've seen something so special in Barcelona. It will be an absolutely unique opportunity," explains the director of the Joan Miró Foundation, Marko Daniel, accompanied by an almost tailor-made curator, Rémi Labrusse, a specialist, precisely, in Miró and Matisse. "Both are, without a doubt, two of the greatest artists of the 20th century and their relationship had never been explored in such depth. It has been necessary to discover how they revolutionized art and broke patterns of the past to introduce new ways of being artists. All of us, without being artists, see the world in a different way thanks to what they did," Daniel remarked.
After more than four years of work, some 160 works make up the exhibition, including paintings, letters, and publications, with a distribution of about 50 pieces from each and with loans from MoMA, the Reina Sofía, the Musée de Grenoble, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, and The Saint Louis Art Museum, as well as contributions from the painters' families. One of the jewels by Matisse that has traveled to the Catalan capital is The Pumpkins (1915-1916), from MoMA.
Although it is the same project that could be seen until the end of September at the Musée Matisse Nice, Labrusse emphasizes that it is different both because the loans depend a lot on the agenda and, above all, because the space has nothing to do with it. If in Nice, it was done in a 17th-century house that allowed more pieces to be included but did not make the message so clear; in Barcelona, the setting defined by the architect Sert makes it more frank and direct. "An exhibition is also the space, it is what gives meaning and energy to the journey," defends the curator.
The starting point of the exhibition, which can be visited until early February 2025, is found in Matisse's son, Pierre Matisse, who was Miró's dealer in New York and brought the Catalan painter's works to his father, as evidenced in the letters his son sent him. For Matisse, approaching Miró was helpful when he was immersed in a depression after World War I and with an artistic block that lasted a year. "Miró becomes a source of inspiration. In the midst of a crisis, Matisse finds in him the stimulus to restart his painting," says assistant curator Véronique Dupas. After even getting lost painting odalisques, a trap he felt he had fallen into, Matisse sees Miró's Collage-peinture (1934) and is inspired by it, but also, in the midst of the Civil War, by his Téte or Peinture.
One cannot forget Miró's prior admiration for Fauvism, born in that almost sister French municipality, Collioure, Machado's last stop. Thanks to painters like Joaquim Sunyer, Miró was interested in its groundbreaking use of color and its simplification of forms, a transgression he took to his own terrain, with his decomposition of color and form until reducing them to their most basic elements, culminating his murder of painting. They also shared an admiration for the Mediterranean and for everyday reality. "When they didn't even know each other yet, they already understood each other," Labrusse points out.
This time it is not like with the Miró and Picasso exhibition; there are no paintings that look like twins, albeit with different styles, but the exhibition shows how Miró and Matisse questioned tradition and fed off each other, from complicity and respect, despite belonging to different generations, with a 23-year age difference. Both cross paths and look at each other, as when Matisse makes a Grande tête (1951) with an ink that Miró soon after uses in Graphisme concret (1951). They exchange gifts, with Miró giving paintings to Matisse's daughter, and the other doing the same with a face dedicated to Miró and his wife, Pilar Miró, for their 50th anniversary. And then, of course, there are the coincidences, with both making stained-glass proposals, Matisse for the Rosary Chapel in Vence and Miró for the royal chapel of Saint-Frambourg.
When you reach the end, two paintings, each by their father, are invaded by the color blue. There are Miró's El guant blanc (1925) and Matisse's Vista de Notre-Dame (1914). "You can't imagine two blues so different but that dialogue so well," Marko summarizes. "They are like couples, they resemble each other even when they had no remote idea what the other was doing. It's a miracle," Labrusse remarks. A last room where they can be confronted with very different works, but which, yes, coincide.