In November 1917, Miró was shocked to attend the premiere of Parade, the Ballets Russes show with music by Satie and staging by Jean Cocteau, for which Picasso had designed the scenery and costumes, from the Liceu chicken coop. Picasso was 36 years old, and Miró, 24. The first was extroverted and boastful, cubist and neoclassical at the same time; Miró was shy and silent, he was starting to be. It was the first time that their paths crossed, although they did not meet until two years later in Paris, when they began a friendship of more than half a century that remained firm, despite the many differences, both human and artistic, that separated them. They recognized each other in the creative freedom, the transgressive impulse and the ability to open new paths. On the shelf of the fireplace in the Mont-roig workshop, Miró placed a portrait of Picasso, and he was accompanied by others in Son Boter de Palma and in the Sert workshop. Miró looked at Picasso. But did Picasso look at Miró? The answer floats in the air at the fascinating Miró-Picasso exhibition, which this Friday opens to the public simultaneously at the Miró Foundation and the Picasso Museum, the museums that the two artists wanted to create in Barcelona and that in a titanic effort they have gathered 300 works from all over the world, some of which have never been seen in Barcelona.
From his world, Picasso looks everywhere and Miró was no exception. He always kept the Self-Portrait, from 1919, and the Portrait of a Spanish Ballerina, from 1921, and after a visit from Malaga to the studio on Rue Blomet, Miró explained what he had said: “After from me, you open a new door”. The magnificent Self-Portrait can now be seen in the Picasso Museum, while The Spanish Dancer (both from the Picasso in Paris) hangs in the first room of the Miró Foundation, with Harlequin, a portrait of Massine that Miró discovered when through the mediation of his mother, a friend of Picasso’s mother, visited the family home on Carrer de la Mercè. It is one of the works that Picasso had left behind when he left for Paris and that he later donated for the creation of the museum. The fireworks begin. In the background, radiating the entire space, The horse, the pipe and the red flower, from 1920, Miró’s response to the cubism he had just met on his first trip to the French capital and the first tribute to the “master”. A still life in which he places on a chest of drawers the book Le coq et l’arlequin, by Cocteau, opened by a page on which a drawing by Picasso appears.
If separately Picasso and Miró are always an event, together they are much more than that. Miró-Picasso, the exhibition, has been designed by Margarida Cortadella and Elena Llorens on behalf of the Picasso Museum, and Teresa Montaner and Sònia Villegas on behalf of the Mironian entity. Rather than a story in two chronological or thematic chapters, the curators build a single, complex and exciting story, for the two venues, exchanging emblematic works from each (Picasso’s Little Girls and Harlequin, the first work that don the artist in Barcelona, ??they have moved to la Miró, while from the center of Montjuïc they have gone down to Carrer Montcada Flama en l’espai i dona nua or L’estel matinal).
Loans of works that had not traveled to Barcelona until now have been added to the own collections, such as Les tres ballarines (The Dance), Picasso’s violent and suffocating work from 1925 in which he distorts forms until -la dolorosa a la vista vistositor, or La masia, Miró’s emblematic painting from 1921-1922 which was owned by Ernest Hemingway and which, as the artist himself confessed in La Publicitat, concentrated his whole life on rural area. “From the tall tree to the small snail, I wanted to place everything I liked in the painting. For nine months I was painting seven or eight hours a day. I suffered terribly, horribly, just like a condemned man.”
Important works have been left along the way, such as Picasso’s Workshop Window and Miró’s Spanish Ballerina, both from the Israel Museum, which the outbreak of the war in Gaza has prevented from leaving. The years of the Civil War, which both live with anguish, despite the distance, and their commitment to the Republic, to which cause they supported with artistic and humanitarian actions, including the engravings Dreams and lies of Franco de Picasso or Miró’s poster Aid Spain, is one of the central chapters. Both participated in the Pavilion of the Republic in the Paris Exhibition of 1937 with two monumental works (Picasso, el Gernika, and Miró, El segador. Catalan peasant in rebellion, painted directly on the panels and then disappeared).
Both reflect the oppressive and dramatic climate in which they have to live. Cow skulls, crying women, monstrous beings or that bull’s head made from the seat of a bicycle by a Picasso who, with the Second World War invading everything, decided never to return to his country while Franco lived. In Miró, who decided to return to protect his family, the blackness and the crossfire started by the Nazis caught him in Varengeville, where he tried to escape from reality by creating his own sign language. It was then that he began to paint Constellations, a joyful explosion of life and poetry in those dark days: Spain was under Franco’s dictatorship and his friends, poets and painters, were persecuted. It was his way of showing his rejection of the tragedy. “There is no longer an ivory tower. Withdrawal and estrangement are no longer permitted”, he declared in 1939 in Cahiers d’art, when he was asked to what extent he resented the creative act of events.
Miró, a friend of poets and himself a poet – perhaps this is the essential characteristic of all his work – began to represent words in paintings, although it was not until 1936 when, the curators of the exhibition suggest, encouraged by Picasso’s experience, he began to write long texts. He did it in French. Picasso, in Spanish and French, had begun a year earlier, at the age of 54, when, plunged into a personal and creative crisis, he “gave up painting and began to write to free himself from private torments”, as Pichot testified. In the museum on Carrer Montcada there is a room dedicated to Alfred Jarry, a preamble to the future exhibition that will show the fascination they both felt for the character of Ubú.
Picasso looked at the world while Miró extracted enigmatic forms from the depths of his mind, but both invented their own revolutionary way of painting. They shared friends, irony and eroticism, more fleshy and truculent in Picasso, but absolutely present in the lascivious Miró of, for example, La Ballerina española from 1928, in which he directs his gaze towards the triangular pubis, where he incorporates a label in which reads “trou ici” (hole here) and which, according to the curators, has a lot to do with Picasso’s 1913 collage Au bon marché, a still life on a table that collapses on a naked woman, the orifice of the which he indicates with a “trou ici”.
In one of the most exciting chapters of the exhibition we see the artists of recent years. Picasso, 90, presented 400 pieces, all made recently, in two exhibitions at the Palau dels Papes in Avinyó. Miró, 81, also wanted to spend the last hour in the retrospective that the Grand Palais dedicated to him in 1974. Picasso appeared vigorous and energetic, embarking on a fierce race against time: perhaps to exorcise panic in the face of the inexorable, given body and soul to creation, between naked women and couples of lovers. Miró, revolutionary, wanted to show that the dream of his youth to kill painting still lived in him.
Ceramics, the monumental public projects in which they participated (Paris, Chicago, Barcelona), the way in which they followed similar strategies to ensure immortality through donations to museums they believed relevant or by creating their own in Barcelona are other aspects that gradually declined through a route whose simple existence, thanks to the complicity of the two directors, Emmanuel Guigon and Marko Daniel, should be cause for celebration. The exhibition, which has had the sponsorship of Telefónica and the BBVA Foundation (the latter in the Miró part), can be visited until February 25 and deserves to be queued up. One last surprise: the Homage to Picasso with which Miró had illustrated the cover of La Vanguardia on the occasion of the 90th birthday of the Malaga artist is being exhibited in public for the first time. The image of a playboy with a disorbiting eye on which Miró superimposed the calligraphy of both as a symbol of friendship. And he is not the only one. There is also Dona, ocell, estel (Homage to Pablo Picasso), which Miró began in 1966 and finished on the day he died, in 1973.