After being exhibited for four months at the Miró Foundation in Barcelona, this innovative exhibition arrives at The Phillips Collection of Washington to show a little-known but decisive period of the exchange between Joan Miró and various American artists, and reveals how the United States influenced the artistic development of the Catalan painter and post-war art on both sides of the Atlantic.
Coming from a Spain under the Franco dictatorship, the United States represented for Miró not only a creative frontier, but also a landscape of hope, democracy, innovation and possibilities. In the 1940s, and already a consolidated international figure, the Barcelona painter found new ideas, large-scale projects, public commissions and an influential network of American artists, institutions and collectors.
The exhibition is an intergenerational dialogue between Joan Miró and artists like Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Arshile Gorky, Alice Trumbull Mason, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder or Mark Rothkoamong others, where you can see how their creative practices enriched each other during the 20th century. In this way, it brings together approximately 75 works by Miró—paintings, sculptures, works on paper, films and archival material—from American and European collections, and works by more than 30 American artists, such as those mentioned.
Some of the works come from the Fundació Joan Miró itself and highlight the period between the two retrospectives that the internationally known Catalan painter exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1941 and 1959) and his seven visits to the United States between 1947 and 1968.
Organized jointly by the Miró Foundation and The Phillips Collection, the exhibition revisits, in addition to Miró’s legacy, the relevance of many women artists of the time who were essential in the redefinition of contemporary art and references for other artists. Curated by Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale, Dolors Rodríguez Roig i Elsa Smithgallhas the support of the Ramon Llull Institute.
