Picasso visits Miró and Miró visits Picasso. The great exhibition of the year in Barcelona, ??Miró-Picasso, began to warm up engines yesterday with a private visit by King Felipe VI in the morning and the institutional opening in the afternoon, prior to the most popular one that will take place today and on the day of open doors on Friday, in which everyone is invited prior registration and with a shuttle bus that will connect the two headquarters. Because, although perfectly independent, these are not two exhibitions, but one in two spaces, the Picasso Museum and the Miró Foundation, both created by the artists’ desire to create their own museum for Barcelona.
Miró-Picasso celebrates the friendship that the two artists maintained, the moments when their lives crossed, the artistic affinities, the compromise during the Civil War and how they reacted to the horror of the World War, the relationship with the poets… and, above all, the spirit of freedom and transgression they shared and admired in each other. It is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the Celebración Picasso 1973-2023 and the expectation is justified: it hosts more than 250 works from all over the world, some of which have never been seen in the city, such as The Three Ballerinas (The Dance), a 1925 piece by Picasso that has arrived from the Tate Modern, or rarely seen in Barcelona, ??such as La masia, Miró’s great work from 1921-1922 that was owned by Ernest Hemingway.
The Monarch’s visit to the two Barcelona museums, his first as King (in 2011 he inaugurated L’escala de l’evasió, in La Miró, with the then Princess Letícia), took place during the meeting he held at the September with Mayor Jaume Collboni at Palauet Albéniz. The mayor received him yesterday in the Picasso courtyard with the Minister of Culture and Sport, Miquel Iceta; the director of the Museum, Emmanuel Guigon; the delegate of the Government in Catalonia, Carlos Prieto; the curator of the year Picasso, Carlos Alberdi, and Trinidad Jiménez, Director of Global Strategy of Public Affairs of Telefónica (sponsor of the exhibition). Also present was Rafael Pardo, director of the BBVA Foundation, which sponsors the Miró exhibition. The curators Margarida Cortadella and Elena Lloren, as Teresa Montaner and Sònia Villegas later did at the Miró, showed him some of the works that demonstrate this crossroads, such as the large set curtain that Picasso made for the Mercure ballet in Satie, with choreography by Massine, and whose performance, at the Théâtre de la Cigale, in June 1924, was attended by Joan Miró.
A la Miró, with the president of the board of trustees, Sara Puig; the director, Marko Daniel, and the grandson of the artist, Joan Punyet Miró, as cicerones, were able to observe some of the examples that speak of the nature of the relationship that united Miró and Picasso. On the one hand, Portrait of a Spanish Dancer (1921), a work by Miró that the Malaga resident kept in his collection all his life, and, on the other, the still life from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The horse, pipe and red flower (1920), also by Miró, painted in Mont-roig after his first stay in Paris, in which he places the book Le coq et l’arlequin, by Cocteau, opened by a page showing one of Picasso’s illustrations.
The exhibition will be open until February 25.
