2023-12-25 18:50:31
The genius of the artist Joan Miró It went out on Christmas Day forty years ago.an event that will not have the impact of the Picasso Year but that She will be remembered indirectly in 2025 when she turns 50 of the creation of the Miró Foundation in Barcelona.
Born in 1893 in the Catalan capital, his heart stopped beating at 3 p.m. on Christmas Day 1983 in Palmasurrounded by his wife, Pilar Juncosa, their daughter, Dolors, her husband Teodoro Punyet, and three of the four grandchildren of the painter, who was finally buried in the Montjuïc cemetery, in Barcelona.
By belong to the avant-garde generation -Picasso had died a decade earlier-, the impact of Miró’s death had an international reach, especially in the press in France and the United States.
The masthead of Le Monde was dyed with Mirón’s colors, The New York Times presented it as an artist with imaginative spontaneity and The Washington Post spoke of the death of “a master of modern art.”
Art historian and New York University professor Robert Lubar, who began studying his work shortly before he died, noted of the author of ‘La Masía’: “He was a contradictory character. The pure painter and at the same time the anti-painter, pioneer of recycling”.
“His collages,” he added, “are the least known creations. Many people only see the most abstract, the most lyrical Miró, the painter of signs, but there is also a high content of violence, of aggression, in his work. Furthermore, we must highlight his role as a public painter, committed to his community.
For Lubar, Miró was the “inventor of a completely new language for modern paintinga language in which signs are freely distributed over the surface of the pictorial plane and which represented a decisive revision of both traditional figuration and the cubist conception of space.”
Regarding his legacy, the specialist added that Miró made it possible for artists of future generations “to go beyond the traditional limits of painting and understand the pictorial plane as a unified surface,” because Miró, dressed in the shirt of “aesthetic assassin “, dealt a mortal blow to the last phases of the Modern Movement and, in the process, “opened new paths for the aesthetic practice of the 20th century”.
The Barcelona park that today bears his name and in which stands one of his most iconic public works, “Woman and Bird”, a 22-meter-high sculpture located on the land that occupied a former slaughterhouse, has returned Miró to news in recent weeks, after the Generalitat decided to occupy part of the surface for the extension works of the Generalitat Railways (FGC) to the Gràcia neighborhood.
His greatest legacy to his hometown was the creation in June 1975 of a foundation that bears his name when in Spain it was a rarity, an initiative that led it to become the first contemporary art museum in Spain.
The Fundació Miró was installed in a rationalist building designed by his friend Josep Lluis Sert, who did not want it to be a pantheon of his work, but rather to be dedicated to the dissemination of global contemporary art.
The Barcelona Mironian center will not specifically remember those 40 years of his death, which also coincide with the start of the Tàpies Year, which will take place throughout 2024 to commemorate the centenary of the painter’s birth, and prefers to concentrate its efforts on 2025, when The 50th anniversary of the foundation’s creation will be commemorated.
Joan Miró wrote in his will that he wanted to be buried in Barcelona, which The religious service would be celebrated by “intelligent priests and my friends,” that the obituaries in the newspapers would appear in Catalan or Mallorcan, “without mentioning any honors or titles he may have had in life” and that the funeral should be celebrated “with total simplicity, absolutely suppressing any official character.”
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