Picasso and Miró, face to face

The hits

The ex­hi­bi­tion boasts over 300 of the artists’ best work, drawn from some of the world’s largest gal­leries. Some have never be­fore been dis­played in Barcelona, or even Spain. Other works come from the re­spec­tive col­lec­tions of the two Barcelona mu­se­ums, al­though the cu­ra­tors have been ad­ven­tur­ous in their plan­ning. At the Miró Foun­da­tion, for ex­am­ple, Pi­casso’s mas­ter­pieces Las Meni­nas (1957) and Har­le­quin (1917) are on dis­play, the lat­ter being the first Pi­casso to enter a pub­lic gallery when the artist gave it as a gift to the city of Barcelona. What’s more, it was one of the first works that Miró saw when he went to his friend’s par­ents’ house, on Car­rer de la Mercè, and rum­maged through the trunk that the artist had left con­tain­ing art­works he had done in his youth in Barcelona. Mean­while, the Pi­casso Mu­seum has on dis­play such Miró mas­ter­pieces as Flame in Space and Fe­male Nude (1932) and The Morn­ing Star (1940).

Pi­casso con­ceived Har­le­quin dur­ing his last major stay in Barcelona, be­tween June and No­vem­ber 1917, on the oc­ca­sion of the pre­miere at the Liceu of the bal­let Pa­rade by Ser­guei Di­aguilev’s Bal­lets Russes, for which he made the sets, the cos­tumes and the cur­tain. Miró at­tended the func­tion but it is not known if they met in per­son. For their first con­firmed meet­ing we have to go back to the anec­dote of the pas­try in 1922, when Miró made his first trip to Paris with the hope of putting on an ex­hi­bi­tion and es­cap­ing the de­pres­sion that had dogged him at home.

Pi­casso was key in dis­pelling his bad mood straight away. “After me, you will open a new door,” he told him, re­called Miró, who would be­come the main voice in this story of friend­ship be­cause Pi­casso makes few ref­er­ences to it. Yet other ev­i­dence of Pi­casso’s af­fec­tion for Miró ex­ists, such as the three Miró paint­ings that had pride of place in his per­sonal art col­lec­tion. One was Self-por­trait (1919) given to him as a gift by gallery owner Josep Dal­mau, and which had been part of Miró’s first ex­hi­bi­tion in Paris, and an­other was Por­trait of a Span­ish Dancer (1921), which he had bought from the art dealer Pierre Loeb. Both paint­ings, owned by the Pi­casso Mu­seum in Paris, have made the trip to Barcelona. The third Miró work Pi­casso owned is a piece that the Cata­lan artist cre­ated ex­pressly for his friend’s 90th birth­day. The paint­ing was lost for years be­fore it turned up in a pri­vate col­lec­tion out­side Spain, and has now made a reap­pear­ance in the ex­hi­bi­tion at the Miró Foun­da­tion.

Other pleas­ant sur­prises in the Miró-Pi­casso ex­hi­bi­tion in­clude The Three Dancers, lent by the Tate Gallery in Lon­don, which has never be­fore been in ei­ther Cat­alo­nia or Spain. Pi­casso pro­duced this ground­break­ing can­vas in 1925 fol­low­ing the death of his artist friend Ramon Pi­chot and while the painful mem­ory of the sui­cide of an­other Cata­lan artist friend, Car­les Casage­mas, who had ac­com­pa­nied him on his first trip to Paris a quar­ter of a cen­tury ear­lier, was still fresh.

Sim­i­lar but dif­fer­ent

That macabre dance that emerged from Pi­casso’s brush fas­ci­nated the new gen­er­a­tion of sur­re­al­ist artists, in­clud­ing a Miró who took it as a ref­er­ence but “never to copy”. This is the the­sis of the team of cu­ra­tors (Mar­garida Cor­tadella, Elena Llorens, Teresa Mon­taner and Sònia Vil­le­gas, all four from the two Barcelona mu­se­ums): “Pi­casso in­fused Miró with cre­ative free­dom and a trans­gres­sive im­pulse.”

Pi­casso also looked at Miró with ad­mi­ra­tion and re­spect. Friend­ship is stronger than ego and Pi­casso ex­presses his feel­ings in the ded­i­ca­tions he wrote in his il­lus­trated books (the only Pi­cas­sos that Miró kept in his per­sonal col­lec­tion). “Your old friend”, he never tired of call­ing him­self. So dif­fer­ent in char­ac­ter (Pi­casso was vol­canic; Miró was calm) the two men were close in po­lit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy and had a com­plete com­mit­ment to the Re­pub­li­can cause. Both also cre­ated a great art­work for the Span­ish pavil­ion at the 1937 Paris Ex­po­si­tion, but with the dif­fer­ence that Pi­casso’s Guer­nica con­tin­ues to con­vey its mes­sage about the hor­ror of fas­cism while the mes­sage of Miró’s El Segador, also known as The Cata­lan Peas­ant in Re­bel­lion, has re­mained silent since it was lost.

Such ab­sences are com­pen­sated for by the works that fill the rooms with emo­tion in the Pi­casso and the Miró mu­se­ums, both founded in Barcelona as the artists wished, rather than Paris or Madrid. In the Pi­casso Mu­seum, Miró’s fa­mous paint­ing The Farm ra­di­ates light. Owned by Wash­ing­ton’s Na­tional Gallery of Art, it had not breathed the air of Barcelona for over 10 years. Yet the paint­ing is still ca­pa­ble of rais­ing goose­bumps on the skin of even those who saw it last time it was in Cata­lan lands. Given the scale of putting on such an ex­hi­bi­tion, it will be a long time until it, and many of the other art­works on dis­play, will re­turn home again.