When Joan Miró landed in the United States, having taken off from El Prat airport (which today should bear his name), he had in fact already landed there years before: his reputation was more than established among artists and gallerists, and already in 1941 he had had a retrospective at MoMA. In fact, the first room of the exhibition allows for a joint viewing of Miró's first two works seen in the United States during the 1920s: Le renversement and Pintura, which were exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum. In the same room, one can also perceive the influence that Miró's Constel·lacions had on other artists.
It must be said that back then, the United States was a prosperous country, full of opportunities, having just emerged victorious from a war: perhaps that is why both Miró and Dalí began to turn their gaze from Paris, which had brought them so much fame, towards America. The current exhibition at the Fundació Miró until February 22 shows the exchanges between Miró and all those artists from North America who observed him closely: Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Arshile Gorky, Alice Trumbull Mason, Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko (more than 130 works exhibited, by 49 artists, from American and European collections, and also from the foundation's own collection). Jackson Pollock already placed Miró on par with Picasso, "the two artists I admire most," and Miró himself stated that "it was really North American painting that inspired me."
As we said, the paradigm is no longer Paris, but New York or other cities like Cincinnati, Houston, Chicago or Washington D.C. In the same, almost mimetic, way that Miró met Louise Bourgeois in Paris in 1937 but collaborated more closely with her ten years later, when they re-encountered in what Trump calls "the Western Hemisphere" (Bourgeois's totems or Personajes from that era are, in fact, some of the most outstanding pieces in the exhibition, especially for their almost twin dialogue with Miró's Les tres majestats, also present).
The exhibition unfolds a rich, complex, and moving story of how Joan Miró found in the United States not only admiration but a creative impulse that transformed his place within 20th-century art. Already in the first screens and video projections, we are explained how these creative exchanges were not unidirectional but mutually fed each other. But it is upon entering the rooms that the contrast between post-war Europe (still marked by violence and political fissures) and what the United States represented for Miró is highlighted: a space of freedom, new possibilities, and experimentation. From large gestural or sculptural formats to small intimate pieces, the order of the works reflects that tension between Mediterranean roots and American expansion, between traumatic introspection and triumphant, uninhibited expression.
Until seeing this exhibition, for me, Miró's relationship with the United States was already sufficiently explained by Duke Ellington's Blues for Joan Miró or by the famous painting La Masia, which is currently in the National Gallery of Art in Washington and arrived in the United States with its buyer in Paris, Ernest Hemingway. But it is now that, learning from Miró's neighborhood with Alice Trumbull Mason while he was creating an enormous mural for the city of Cincinnati, or seeing how the surrealist Peter Miller (or rather, Henrietta Myers) had in his art collection the psychedelic and Miró-esque Natura morta del sabatot, also exhibited (and, according to the artist, "a capital piece of my work"). Or the sculptural ensembles in room 12, by the artist Jeanne Reynal (deeply Mediterranean, colorful, Miró-esque, and almost Gaudian) or by John Chamberlain (automotive sheet metal transformed into art). But also the relationship with the architect Sert, in turn linked to the artist Alexander Calder (a large sculpture of his also exhibited), and who as Dean of Architecture at Harvard University was a vital contact for Miró in the United States. The works in the exhibition reflect these friendships, which culminated in Sert's design of the Fundació building itself.
In an unprecedented way, we will also see the mural painting (in the form of a colorful rectangular constellation) that Miró created in gratitude to Sert for the workshop he built for him in Palma (from the Harvard museums), or The Seasons by Lee Krasner, expressive, hieroglyphic and at the same time of extreme naturalness. Or Number 14, a black and white work by Pollock that impressed Miró at an exhibition in Paris in 1952, as well as a work by Baziotes, Night Mirror, one of the American abstract expressionist artists who most surprised Joan Miró. The feeling is that of traversing, more than an art exhibition, a human adventure rich in friendships and intimate mutual admirations.
Miró's American dream is not naive, but a radical commitment to freedom. That is why it deserves an airport name, and that is why it seems to be Miró who then teaches Americans to be free, and not the other way around. Miró is the American dream, the Catalan dream, the European dream. Only transformed into tangible, Mediterranean and, above all, eternal realities. Don't miss it.