Fundació Joan Miró
Why is it significant?
Look at the white walls, the rounded skylights curling up from the roof like ears listening for the sun, and the terraces stepping down into the pines. After the pomp of 1929, this building feels like taking a deep breath of clean air.
Key Facts
| Place | Fundació Joan Miró |
|---|---|
| Address | Parc de Montjuïc s/n, 08038 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.36860, 2.16010 |
| Part of Walk | Montjuïc, the Hill of Big Dreams: Barcelona's 1929 Expo, Olympic Ring & Castle |
| Generated | Generated |
Look at the white walls, the rounded skylights curling up from the roof like ears listening for the sun, and the terraces stepping down into the pines. After the pomp of 1929, this building feels like taking a deep breath of clean air.
The Fundació Joan Miró opened in 1975, and it was designed by Josep Lluís Sert, a Barcelona architect and an old friend of the painter. Sert had left Spain after the Civil War, made his career in the United States and became dean of the design school at Harvard. He came home to build this, and he also designed Miró's studio in Mallorca. Miró himself was born in Barcelona in 1893, in the old town below this hill, and he wanted a place where young artists could experiment, not just a shrine.
Inside, the light falls from above, and the red, yellow, blue and black of Miró's world, stars, birds, women, moons, sit on white walls like notes on a page. The building and the paintings were made for each other, and you can feel it.
But the surprise is in a glass case. It is a fountain by the American sculptor Alexander Calder, and the liquid flowing in it is not water. It is mercury. Calder made it for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Paris World's Fair of 1937, the same pavilion, designed by Sert, where Picasso first showed Guernica, and where Miró painted a huge mural of a Catalan peasant, The Reaper, that was later lost. The mercury came from the mines of Almadén, the Republic's way of showing the world its besieged wealth. Today it sits behind glass, because mercury, as we now know, is beautiful and poisonous at once.
So one room on Montjuïc quietly holds the memory of the most famous exhibition of the Civil War. From here, follow the road east along the slope, past the pines, towards gardens of water and bulbs, with the castle walls appearing above you.