Fundacio Joan Miro

The Fundacio's advantage over a general museum with a Miro room is depth across a single career rather than breadth across many: it holds work from the 1935 Wild Paintings through the 1940 Constellations to the reduced late canvases and bronzes of the 1960s and 1970s, plus objects, such as the Calder fountain and the Tapestry of the Fundacio, that were made for or given directly to the building rather than acquired on the market afterward.

The Fundacio Joan Miro exists because Miro himself decided it should, which sets it apart from most museums carrying a single artist's name. He worked out the idea in 1968 with his friend Joan Prats, a hatter and collector who had backed him since the 1920s, wanting a Barcelona institution that would study his own work and, just as much, give younger artists room to work with contemporary art rather than simply display a finished career under glass. The building opened on 10 June 1975, eight years before Miro died, built mainly from paintings, drawings and sculpture Miro gave from his own collection at the opening. His wife Pilar Juncosa added further pieces afterward, including one of the Constellations gouaches, and the Japanese collector Kazumasa Katsuta gave 32 more works in 2011, long after Miro's death, so the collection has kept growing under people who knew him rather than being fixed at his death and then managed as an estate.

That original-donor structure matters for how the place reads today. A museum assembled by curators after an artist's death chooses what to show against everyone else's account of the career; a foundation an artist builds and stocks himself chooses what to show against his own account of it, including work as raw as the Wild Paintings series, which is not the material a posthumous retrospective necessarily reaches for first. The foundation's own published figure for the whole collection, works on paper included, runs past 10,000 pieces by its own count and closer to 14,000 by an independent count that treats prints and sketches separately; the two figures have not been reconciled on the pages available, and this page states both rather than picking one.

Josep Lluis Sert designed the Fundacio, and the commission followed a long friendship rather than a competition: Miro had already hired him for his studio house on Mallorca, and the two had worked in overlapping circles since the 1930s. Sert built the museum between 1970 and 1975 on Montjuic, organizing it not as one continuous gallery run but as a sequence of small exhibition rooms strung along a route defined by courtyards, with a ramp carrying visitors up to the rooftop terrace rather than a single formal staircase. The lower building uses white exposed reinforced concrete under barrel-vault ceilings; the Contemporary Art Study Centre, holding the library and auditorium, sits in its own octagonal volume built on a two-directional portico frame.

The building's lighting is a Sert signature rather than something invented for Barcelona. He had already tested quarter-cylinder skylights at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France, and reused the same system here to diffuse daylight across the galleries while avoiding both hard shadows and direct sun on the paintings. The museum grew twice after Sert's death: in 1987 and again in 2001, both extensions directed by Jaume Freixa, who had worked as Sert's own collaborator, adding an auditorium and expanding the library to hold roughly 10,000 items connected to the foundation's own archive rather than to Miro's finished work.

The most-cited single object in the building did not start as a Miro commission at all. In May 1937 Sert, then working as one of the architects of the Spanish Republican government's pavilion for the Paris International Exposition, asked Alexander Calder to build a fountain for it, to sit alongside Picasso's Guernica and Miro's own mural-sized Le Faucheur as the pavilion's set of avant-garde centerpieces. Calder built it from sheet metal, rod, wire, pitch and mercury on a working pump and basin, and made the material choice itself the point: the mercury came from Almaden, in southern Spain, then supplying around 60 percent of the world's mercury, and the pavilion opened while Franco's forces were besieging the town. The fountain reads, and was read at the time, as a memorial to that siege standing beside Guernica's larger protest against the same war.

Calder gave the fountain to the Fundacio in 1973, two years before the building opened, and it was installed in June 1975 alongside the museum itself. It still runs on real mercury rather than a safer substitute, which is why it is shown behind a glass enclosure: the metal is toxic to breathe as vapor, so the fountain that visitors watch is protected as much for their sake as for the object's.

Two of the collection's central paintings were made in the years just before and during the Second World War and the Spanish Civil War, and both carry meanings Miro stated himself rather than meanings later attached by critics. Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement is a small oil on copper, painted over eight days in October 1935, one of twelve paintings from that year now grouped as the Wild Paintings for their distorted, enlarged figures and lurid color. Miro said directly that the picture was his attempt to represent the tragedy and torture he expected Spain was heading toward, and that its French title, chosen over Spanish, drew on a saying attributed to Rembrandt: that rubies and diamonds could be found in a dung heap. The work stayed with Pilar Juncosa before entering the foundation's own galleries, where it now hangs in the room named for her.

Constellation: Morning Star belongs to a later and calmer body of work made under worse conditions. Miro began the 23-painting Constellations series at Varengeville-sur-Mer, on the Normandy coast, in January 1940, painting on paper at a fixed small size using tempera, gouache, egg, oil and pastel. He finished Morning Star there in March 1940, two months before German forces invaded France and forced his family south through Spain to Mallorca. Pilar Juncosa kept this particular sheet and later gave it to the foundation; other paintings from the same series are now split across the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, so the series itself is not held in one place and the Fundacio's is one part of a set that was never meant to be reassembled under one roof.

The sculpture on the rooftop terrace and in the courtyards is where the foundation's collection gets least reverent about Miro's own reputation. The Caress of a Bird is a bronze, cast under Miro's own supervision by founders in Paris in the 1960s from an assemblage he had first built during the war at his workshop in Mont-roig del Camp: an outhouse seat and an ironing board forming a body and legs, toy footballs standing in for buttocks, a turtle shell for genitals, and a straw donkey's hat for a head. Miro controlled the bronze's texture and patina personally when the original wood-and-found-object piece deteriorated and needed recasting, which is the kind of late, hands-on decision that separates an artist-run foundation from one assembled after the fact by people guessing at intent.

The Gold of the Azure, from 1967, is a quieter late statement in the same building: a large canvas worked with grattage, paint scraped back off the surface rather than laid on, reducing the picture to one dark circle scored into a flat, saturated yellow field. Between the two, the building shows an artist in his seventies still willing to build a memorial sculpture from a toilet seat and, in the same decade, willing to strip a painting down to almost nothing on the canvas.

Visitors consistently single out the setting over the specific works: a quiet, uncrowded museum on Montjuic away from the crush of central Barcelona, where Sert's building and its courtyards and terraces are treated as being as much the exhibit as the art inside it. Calder's Mercury Fountain is repeatedly named as the single most memorable object, ahead of any individual Miro painting.