CARRIED AWAY BY ART

I have to admit I’ve never been a huge fan of art gal­leries. Not that I’m some boor­ish philis­tine; I love a bit of po­etry, I’ll hap­pily spend an evening in a posh con­cert hall, and there was a time when you couldn’t keep me out of the cin­ema. Art gal­leries, though, have never re­ally been my thing. There’s a lot of stand­ing around and after 20 min­utes or so of look­ing at one paint­ing after an­other they all start to blur into one. Also, the way peo­ple talk about art can be re­ally an­noy­ing, as they tend to go over­board and gush in flow­ery lan­guage that often doesn’t com­mu­ni­cate very much of sub­stance at all.

Hav­ing said all of that, last week I found my­self not in one art gallery but two, and both on the same day. No one had dragged me along against my will; I went vol­un­tar­ily in a pro­fes­sional ca­pac­ity. The two art gal­leries I vis­ited were the Pi­casso Mu­seum and the Joan Miró Foun­da­tion in Barcelona, and I was there to cover the open­ing of the new Miró-Pi­casso ex­hi­bi­tion for a news agency. And let me say straight off, I found this si­mul­ta­ne­ous ex­hi­bi­tion that com­mem­o­rates the 50th an­niver­sary of Pi­casso’s death to be ab­solutely fan­tas­tic.

We have a re­view of the Miró-Pi­casso ex­hi­bi­tion in this issue of the mag­a­zine, and you can see the two great artists to­gether on the front cover. As the ar­ti­cle ex­plains, this dual ex­hi­bi­tion is unique in that not only is it the first time that the two cul­tural in­sti­tu­tions that bear the artists’ names have worked to­gether on a pro­ject like this, but the cu­ra­tors have man­aged to bring to­gether over 300 art­works by both men and it is highly un­likely that this will be re­peated for many decades. In other words, it is worth going to the dual ex­hi­bi­tion not least to see paint­ings such as Miró’s The Farm or Pi­casso’s The Three Dancers that you would nor­mally have to get on a plane and cross an ocean to see.

After my visit, I began to won­der where my sud­den en­thu­si­asm for art had come from, and I came up with a the­ory. There is no doubt that Pi­casso and Miró fully de­serve their rep­u­ta­tions as two of the most im­por­tant artists of the 20th cen­tury. The qual­ity of their work stands out and see­ing them dis­played side by side as they are in this ex­hi­bi­tion, it can even be a lit­tle over­whelm­ing. And that’s just it: when what you are see­ing is artistry of ex­cep­tional qual­ity, you can’t help but ap­pre­ci­ate it, even if what you are look­ing at is not nor­mally some­thing you would get ex­cited about. You might not be a big foot­ball fan but you can’t look away when watch­ing Messi per­form at his best. You might not par­tic­u­larly like opera but tears come un­bid­den to your eye when you hear Pavarotti at full blast. This is what I think hap­pened to me at the Miró-Pi­casso ex­hi­bi­tion: I got car­ried away by the sheer ex­cel­lence of the art. For me at least, that is a rare feel­ing but one I am eager to re­peat.

Who knows, I might even go visit an­other art gallery this week­end?

Opin­ion