The more than 45,000 attendees at the friendly match held in Tokyo a few days ago between Barça and Real Madrid veterans received a brochure for a major retrospective on Joan Miró that will take place in the Japanese capital. The exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum will be one of the major events for the Miró Foundation in 2025, the year it will celebrate its 50th anniversary, an anniversary with which it aims to reclaim the artist's legacy and make it reach beyond Montjuïc, to distant countries that marked his career. France is the first reference that would occur to many regarding the influences he had, but the foundation wants to broaden the focus and look at other places that are also key to understanding him, such as Japan and the United States.
Japan was a clear source of inspiration for Miró's work, who spent decades wanting to visit the country. It was in 1966 when the national museums of modern art in Tokyo and Kyoto dedicated a first exhibition to him and he was able to travel there. "He is one of the most beloved artists in the country," remarks the foundation's director, Marko Daniel, so much so that he can rub shoulders with El Clásico fans and steal some of their attention. He also returned to Japan for the Osaka World Expo in 1970, for which he created a mural, in the same year that he had also made one for Barcelona Airport. Coincidence or not, this 2025 a new world exhibition is planned in Osaka, and work is underway to ensure Miró is present again. "We want to give back to Japan everything it contributed to Miró," says Ester Ramos, head of international projects at the foundation.
A hundred works will travel to Japan to nourish the exhibition that will be organized in Tokyo, scheduled between March and July 2025. The foundation will be the main lender, with about fifty works, but the Reina Sofía, the Picasso Museum in Paris or the MoMA in New York will also contribute, as well as Japanese institutions such as the Ohara Museum of Art in Okayama or the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone. Miró's entire artistic career will be covered, from his beginnings in Barcelona to the end of his life, passing through his stay in avant-garde Paris and the learnings he obtained on his trips to Japan. Composition avec personnages dans la fôret incendiée (1931) will return to Japan, where it was already seen in 1932, and Personnage devant le soleil (1968) will also travel, allowing it to leave the foundation for the first time in 40 years due to its connection with oriental culture.
After being in Japan, the foundation will explore the dialogue Miró had with the United States, an essential country for the consolidation of his international projection, with a prominent role played by his dealer, Pierre Matisse. The exhibition will study the relationships the Catalan painter developed with American artists and how they mutually enriched each other, delimited in time by the two retrospectives he had in New York, in 1941 and 1959, as well as the seven times he visited the United States, between 1947 and 1968. About 160 works will be displayed at the foundation between October 2025 and February 2026, to then travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington in March 2026. It will also be an opportunity to highlight those contemporary artists who did not receive enough attention at the time, such as Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner or Alice Trumbull Mason. Their works will be included, as well as those of male counterparts who garnered more attention, such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
But not everything will be traveling to distant destinations. The very history of the foundation, born in 1975, will be the protagonist of an exhibition that will kick off the celebration of the 50th anniversary, which will officially open in June 2025. A multifaceted narrative will review everything that has happened since the foundation's inception, also known as the Center for Contemporary Art Studies (CEAC), focusing on key episodes to understand it, such as the Civil War and Francoism, as well as the construction of the building designed by architect Josep Lluís Sert, Miró's death in 1983, or the impact of Olympic Barcelona. There will be talk of Joan Prats, a necessary figure for the foundation of the CEAC, originated in the clandestine refuge for art that his hat shop on Rambla Catalunya represented. Prats will also be honored in a photographic exhibition organized between May and November 2025 in the foundation's lobby, a space dedicated to amateur photography for years.
An anniversary gift that will remain in Barcelona beyond the Miró Foundation's 50th anniversary will be the ten new works it has incorporated into its collection, made up of thousands of pieces although only about 70 are permanently exhibited. According to the head of the collection, Teresa Montaner, some of the new additions can already be seen inside, such as a Matisse painting that is part of the exhibition tracing the mutual admiration between both artists and one of Miró's few surviving object paintings. The rest will be gradually revealed. The deposits have been from two anonymous lenders from outside Spain.