In a 1957 letter addressed to Camilo José Cela, Joan Miró says: “The light of Mallorca is impregnated with pure poetry, it reminds me of the light of those oriental things that appear as seen through a veil, the light of those things meticulous that are drawn ... It is no coincidence, nothing free, that I have come to live and work here. It is the call of the land: Tarragona-Mallorca, or vice versa: Mallorca-Tarragona. Mont-roig-Palma. I feel it since I was two or three years old and they sent me to spend Christmas with my grandparents Josefa and Joan Ferrà. The Mediterranean. I could not live in a country from which the Mediterranean could not be seen ”.
Miró's maternal family (Barcelona, 1893-Palma, 1983) was from Mallorca, and his paternal, from Tarragona. Those two roots determined his work. Mont-roig is the land, and Mallorca, the light and the sea. His connection with Palma, therefore, comes from his childhood. Sometimes he traveled alone on the boat to meet his grandparents and, according to the photographer Català-Roca, on one of those visits the governess began to undress and Miró took his first mental photograph, hallucinated. As a child he drew the gothic fortification Castell de Bellver and the boats that he saw on its beaches.
Joan Miró and his wife, Pilar Juncosa, decided to settle for the first time in the capital of the Balearic island in 1940, after the exile in Varengeville-sur-Mer. As Josep Massot indicates in the definitive biography of the artist ( Miró, the boy who spoke with the trees ), “fear, humiliation of defeat, rage, impotence, pain for dead friends and knowing that the Nazi flag It flew victorious over most of Europe, they must have accentuated Miró's melancholic character. He needed to found in his inner world a kingdom of freedom, the only antidote to tyranny ”. They stayed in family homes, such as her parents', in Minyones 11. At that time he lived anonymously, afraid of being betrayed to the Francoist police, while he painted his Constellations . Two years later, after the danger, they returned to Barcelona, to return definitively to Palma in 1956. From then on he allowed himself to be seduced by the mystery of its popular festivals, the dances in Valldemossa and the dance of the demons of Algaida, and, of course, for its beaches, for art galleries with which he had a relationship, such as Ferran Cano's 4 Gats or Sala Pelaires, and its streets, from which he collected everything that caught his attention to the point that his wife repeated him : "One day they'll call you a ragman."
Palma still condenses the Miró universe and preserves iconic spaces through which the genius moved, as well as an extraordinary Foundation. This is an urban route through essential scenes of the artist.
1. The cathedral
Miró loved to walk alone, meditate, and wander into the old quarter. He used to go to listen to the organ, the songs and the prayers of the canons in that Gothic cathedral in which Gaudí intervened, enhancing an atmosphere of spiritual elevation. One afternoon of sunset light reflected in the stained glass windows, Miró began to draw. Pay attention to the chromatic games generated by the two rosettes, one with a larger diameter than the other. Following Massot, it is verified that "the sensation of transparency and the vividness of the colors generate an atmosphere of magic and mysticism". In an interview with Pere Serra, Miró confessed: "Those situations inspired me the painting Danseuse écoutant jouer de l'orgue dans une cathédrale gothique (Dancer listening to the organ in a Gothic cathedral) and a good part of the Constellations ".
2. A sweet corner
Still a popular meeting point for locals and tourists, at the Ca'n Joan de s'Aigo ice cream parlor at 10 Can Sanç street, Miró was awarded if he had worked well with an ensaimada with chocolate or with artisan ice cream. The place still retains a certain aura from the year it was founded (1700), matching furniture and a variety of sweets on the menu, among which the potato coca, the delicate rooms and, of course, the delicious ensaimadas stand out. It is worth making a stop at this place hidden in the streets of the busy center of Palma.
Nearby, to continue with a line according to Miró as an undoubted example of an artist in the process of becoming a child, awaits the Toy Museum (Carrer de la Campana, 7), with some 3,000 objects.
If hunger is no longer an idea, it is worth taking into account Celler Pagés (Felip Bauzà, 2), opened, by chance, in 1956. Knowing the popular tastes of the artist, it is likely that you visited it. It is a traditional restaurant, at whose tables they have enjoyed Mallorcan specialties, such as tumbet and fried Mallorcan, from Lola Flores to Chavela Vargas.
3. His art in the open air
Palma has urban work by Miró, such as sculptures and a large mosaic. As early as 1951 Miró affirmed: "A sculpture would have to be erected outdoors, in the middle of nature." At the entrance to the gardens of S'Hort del Rei is his sculpture of a bar of soap, worn by the passage of time, and entitled Monument to women . Next to it, the mobile sculpture Nancy , of a great friend of his: Calder. At the foot of the cathedral, in the Parc del Mar, a mosaic inspired by the canvas that he dedicated in 1983 to his first grandson, David. Another sculpture appears on Avenida Jaime III, in front of the Successió Miró entity. It is the renowned Turkey , based on the popular figure of the Mallorcan nativity scene. There are also other works of his exhibited in the Es Baluard museums (Plaça Porta de Santa Catalina, 10) and in the Fundació Juan March (Sant Miquel, 11).
4. The Marivent Gardens
But to immerse yourself in a universe that unites sculpture and nature, it is essential to visit the gardens of the Marivent palace, built by the Egyptian painter and collector of Greek origin Juan de Saridakis between 1923 and 1925. Currently they belong to one of the official residences of the Spanish Royal House. In the 9,000 square meters of gardens open to the public for free, 40 plant species and 12 bronze sculptures by Miró coexist, created between 1969 and 1981 and which were donated by the artist's family.
5. One foundation, three spaces
Due to its location, on top of a mound, and despite the fact that the urban development of the 1970s massacred magic by populating its surroundings with meaningless buildings, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró (miromallorca.com) has something sacred. It is divided into three spaces that deserve a leisurely visit to discover the creative process of the painter in the place where he lived and worked for almost 30 years.
When Pilar and Joan moved to the Son Abrines estate, Miró's big dream was to have a studio. Nobody like his friend Josep Lluís Sert to carry it out. However, it was not him (perhaps because of his shyness) but Juncosa who approached the architect via Moncha (Sert's wife). After two years of exchanges of letters, sketches and sketches, in 1957 the workshop was born. His impression was so great when he entered that he did not paint for two years until he managed to make the space his own, with his painting instruments and his peculiar collection of objects, which included everything from a bat skeleton to a stone found on the beach.
Josep Lluís Sert is a crucial architect to understand the flowering of rationalism, the new language imposed by the Bauhaus and by the teachings of Le Corbusier. He is the greatest of a generation of young architects, cosmopolitan, progressive-minded and integrated into the creative adventure of the Second Republic. He was the most visible figure of the Grup d'Arquitectes i Tècnics Catalans per al Progrés de l'Arquitectura Contemporània, the GATCPAC. As soon as he finished his degree, he went to work in Le Corbusier's studio in Paris. The forced exile allowed him to overcome and project decisive works at Harvard (Boston) or on Long Island (New York). But even though Sert emigrated to the United States, and had been banned from practicing in Spain for 20 years, he maintained his ties with Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. The Mediterranean world continued to be a source of inspiration. As William Curtis points out in Modern architecture since 1900 , “Miró's study is made up of Catalan-style vaults interwoven by highly textured masonry walls, a whitewashed concrete structure and deeply perforated lattices to protect from the intense southern sun. It is a cheerful and simple building that manages to assimilate something of the playful spirit of the painter himself, exalting a similar interest in the freshness of popular forms and the surrealism of peasant motifs. These concerns are filtered by a solid vocabulary indebted both to Le Corbusier and to the curved figures of the Miró or Léger sculptures of that time ”. For María del Mar Arnús, author of Ser (t) architect, he created “for his close friend a space where architecture, sculpture and painting come together, a container for creation”. In an interview for TVE, Moncha said: "Miró had adoration for my husband, and he kept saying: 'Puñeta!"
The visit to the workshop is an overwhelming experience. In the studio, as he imagines Miró trying to represent the birdsong plastically, melodies from Messiaen, Stockhausen and Satie resound. Says the biographer Josep Massot: “Without being a musician —unlike Klee, who played the violin, or Kandinsky, who played the cello—, Miró coupled music to his canvases, melody and rhythm by means of arabesques and zigzag lines, Bach's fugue with the contrast between curvilinear and rectilinear elements, characters that seem to be pursuing each other ... and intuitively incorporated polyphonic structures, simultaneous melodies, color gradations ... ”. The visitor is worth stopping to inspect the objects he collected for inspiration, being faithful to what he said to his dealer Pierre Matisse in 1936: “I am drawn by a magnetic force towards an object, without the slightest premeditation, to then I feel attracted to another object that joins the first one and that in contact with it causes a poetic shock that makes poetry moving and without which it would not be effective ”. The simplest things gave him ideas, the beauty of a shell, a manger figure, a bone inspired him, revealing his interest in the popular. In an interview that Georges Raillard did with him in 1977 he would confess: "I never dream at night, but in the workshop I am full of sleep." Then he would add: “When I work, I suffer. It is the permanent revolution ”.
The 'possessió' Son BoterSon Boter is the name of the 18th century farmhouse located above the garden of Miró's house, another of the Foundation's open spaces and its oldest building. It is another workshop, empty of furniture, with great documentary and human value. Here Miró used the walls themselves to paint sketches that are preserved intact, evidence of what would later become great sculptures such as Personnage et oiseau . He also placed objects of popular art, copper plates, fabrics pending to be finished and a room painted red with a collection of dolls (a gift from Antonio Saura), portraits of his parents and his daughter and, of course, a photograph of Picasso, which gives the measure of the importance it had in his life. Miró commented to Raillard: “Picasso told me one day that pure creation is a small graffiti, a small gesture on a wall. That is the true creation. That is why the first stage is so important to me. It is the birth that interests me the most ”.
The Moneo BuildingThe studios had become too small to show the collection of works, and the donation of land by Juncosa made possible the creation of the Edifio Moneo (inaugurated on December 19, 1992), a living center in line with the wishes of Miró de donate part of your legacy. They say that the architect Rafael Moneo was dismayed by the urban disaster of the environment, hence the building, from the entrance, tries to dissuade the visitor from the vision of the surrounding buildings and create a haven of spirituality in accordance with the impulse of I look.
The museum winks at the water and provides a broken condition of the architecture so that the diffuse light that envelops the gallery has something marine and wet about it. “If that were the case,” Moneo wrote in 2005, “in the secluded gallery enclosure, as if it were the seabed that Miró loved so much, there would now be her paintings, her sculptures, her ceramics, the objects that she collected. Water animates the texture of the walls on which his works rest, making the reds, yellows and blues vibrate that enjoy, in continuous change, that vividness that the painter was looking for in his colors ”. When the sun bathes the building, the interior becomes an overhead resonance box of reflected lights. Low windows allow you to see the ponds and gardens. In them, in addition to the wonderful cafeteria, there is a mural inspired by a work by Miró, made by the ceramist Maria Antònia Carrió. The gardens recover, in part, the lost natural environment and allow the fusion between art and nature, for which Miró had always advocated. In fact, the murals were a constant in his work. They tempt him because they require anonymity, because they reach the social mass directly and because they play a role in architecture.
Everything invites, therefore, to the delight of a quiet music that frees the imagination, and among the birds, the stars or the women of Miró's plastic work, the atmosphere acquires the density of a poem, like that of Santa Teresa that was so loved to the protagonist of this story: "Raise the thought, / go up to heaven, / don't worry about anything, / don't worry about anything."
Use Lahoz is the author of the novel 'Jauja' (Destiny).
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