BARCELONA.- Over the years, Joan Miró preserved works, drawings and sketches that enabled him to maintain an emotional link with his work and which also served as a tool for him to look back over his career and his evolution as an artist. As Miró wove his life project and his human bonds, he extended this habit to his wife, Pilar Juncosa, and his daughter, Dolors Miró, carefully setting aside key works that he produced for them and transforming them in turn into collectors. Miró’s love and generosity towards these two women continued as time passed in his grandsons, David, Emili, Joan and Teo, to whom the artist also dedicated a number of notable paintings.

Miró. His Most Intimate Legacy reveals an aspect of Joan Miró that remains largely unknown, that of a collector of his own work, which translated into the creation of three family collections of outstanding magnitude: his own, that of his wife and that of his daughter. The exhibition considers the creation and evolution of this body of work while providing fresh insights into Miró’s more personal side. Curated by Marko Daniel, Director of the Fundació Joan Miró, together with Elena Escolar and Dolors Rodríguez Roig, historians in the foundation’s Collections Department, the exhibition reconstructs a timeline of Miró’s generosity, from his private gestures to his loved ones to his resolve to share his thinking and his legacy through the creation of the Fundació Joan Miró, a unique space and a unique collection that the artist donated to the city of Barcelona.

Around the time of the creation of the foundation in 1975, Miró allocated to it a considerable part of his private collection, selecting above all his newest and most transgressive art for preservation in the contemporary art studies centre that he had envisaged. Immediately afterwards, and in full support of her husband, Pilar Juncosa donated a large proportion of her personal collection, also furnishing the museum with work dating from before the 1970s. This commitment the couple made to the Fundació Joan Miró remains alive today thanks to their descendants, who have followed in their parents and grandparents’ footsteps and have continued to place work on deposit with the foundation, including the latest deposit this year, consisting of fifty-four additional works by Miró and another five by Alexander Calder, thereby significantly strengthening the institution’s collection. The exhibition brings all the family collections in the foundation into a dialogue, reconstructs the stories and history that run through them, and pays tribute to the Miró family, who, thanks to their generosity, have helped to build the most important public collection of Miró’s work in the world.

Miró. His Most Intimate Legacy presents approximately 180 objects, among them some eighty works by Miró spanning almost his entire career as an artist, from 1910 to 1976, as well as preparatory drawings, documents that have never been displayed in public before and family photographs. This body of works, structured into five different sections, invites us to imagine the links between the selected exhibits and the cultural and historical moments of the twentieth century that Miró, his wife, Pilar Juncosa, and their daughter, Dolors Miró, witnessed.

Miró. His Most Intimate Legacy opens with an exploration of the origins of Miró’s personal collection in a space given over to the oldest works in this selection, among them Bosc de Bellver (Bellver Forest, 1910), produced when the artist was just seventeen years old. Miró always demonstrated a deep belief in his vocation as an artist and in the meaning of his work. From a very young age, and in sharp contrast with the conventions and customs of the day, he kept sketches, documents and works that he produced, demonstrating an extraordinary vision of the value that this output would have in the evolution of art. The group of works presented in this first section allows the visitor to trace the artist’s pictorial evolution from the time of his training at the Llotja art school and the early European influences of Fauvism and Cubism before culminating in Surrealism, with the sole work that he dedicated to his parents, Pintura (L’ampolla de vi) (Painting [Wine Bottle]) dating from 1924.




When Miró met Pilar Juncosa, he extended his personal habit of preserving work to include his wife, in whom he found not just a companion for life but also the understanding and support he needed to devote himself to art. The crisis on the world stage was growing ever more acute, and against this backdrop Miró continued to flout artistic conventions and worked in series. The artist gave his wife one work from almost all of them, putting together for Pilar a collection of key pieces as a gesture of care and love. Notable among them is Painting (1936) – shown in this second section of the exhibition alongside pieces such as Grup de personatges al bosc (Group of People in Woodland, 1931), the first oil painting Miró set aside for Pilar – and L’estel matinal (The Morning Star, 1940), the only gouache from the series of Constellations that can be seen in Europe today and which Miró painted during the Second World War.

In 1930, the couple’s only daughter, Dolors Miró, was born. Becoming a father increased the artist’s sense of responsibility in relation to caring for his loved ones and ensuring their future wellbeing. The third chapter of the exhibition features a selection of important works that Miró deliberately saved for his daughter, such as the piece with which he began her collection, one of the twenty-seven Paintings on Masonite (1936), the series he started around the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Dolors, who knew nothing of the tragic events taking place, devoted herself to her pastime of drawing in the company of her father, who would date her pieces and carefully note down his daughter’s explanations. Some of those drawings from Dolors’ childhood, with an iconography very similar to the one that Miró was using in his works of the time, are also displayed in this section.

The three personal collections – Miró’s, Pilar’s and Dolors’ – gradually increased to the extent that they grew into an archive of prime importance for understanding the course and evolution of the artist’s career. As the family grew, so Miró continued this gesture of love for the following generations, creating works and dedicating them with affection to his grandsons. Dolors had two sons by her first husband, David and Emili, and another two, Joan and Teo, by her second husband. In this fourth section of the exhibition, it will be possible to view together for the first time two pairs of works that Miró dedicated and gave to them: Painting (For Emili Fernández Miró), dating from 1963, and Painting (For David Fernández Miró), dating from 1965; and Personatge davant la lluna (Figure in front of the Moon, dedicated ‘To Joan Punyet Miró’) and Personatge davant el sol (Figure in front of the Sun, dedicated ‘To Teodor Punyet Miró’), both dating from 1976. The first two brothers, who lost their father early on, were present during many of the key moments of their grandfather’s career. Through letters, David and Emili eagerly followed one of the most important times in this period of Miró’s art: the trips to Japan during which the artist reaffirmed his taste for Oriental art, poetry and philosophy. The documentation in this section of the exhibition includes some of the correspondence between the boys and their grandfather.

With generosity as his main driving force, in the mid-1960s Miró conceived of four major projects to culturally enrich the city of Barcelona: the Mural at Barcelona Airport, the Monument in the Parc de Cervantes, the Mosaic on Pla de l’Os, and the Fundació Joan Miró, designed by the architect Josep Lluís Sert in close dialogue with the artist. Miró’s wish was for his legacy to pass from the private realm into the public sphere, and with this intention he donated to the foundation not only a considerable number of his most recent works, such as his Burnt Canvases series, four of which are presented in this final section, but also work created expressly for the new centre. His descendants have remained faithful to his commitment and have continued to add to the string of generous donations that have made the foundation the foremost international centre for Miró’s work.

While Miró. His Most Intimate Legacy is open, almost all the exhibition spaces in the Fundació Joan Miró will be devoted to the artist. Some works usually displayed in the permanent collection rooms will be shown in the temporary exhibition rooms and others will once again be seen in the permanent collection, among them Flama en l’espai i dona nua (Flame in space and nude woman, 1932), the group of works Painting I, II, III and IV (1940-1973) and the Series Barcelona (1944), a fundamental series consisting of fifty black and white lithographs in which Miró channelled the tension and greyness of Barcelona during the post-war years in a universal iconography of tremendous expressive force in which the human figure is the protagonist. Today the Fundació Joan Miró holds a collection of work by the artist consisting of 249 paintings, 178 sculptures, two objects, four ceramic pieces, nine textile pieces, and some 8,000 preparatory sketches for almost all of his works, and virtually the entirety of his graphic and lithographic oeuvre. Thanks to another long-term loan from the Miró family, the foundation also has the artist’s personal library among its collections. In all, this is a collection without parallel around the world that offers multiple possibilities for investigating and raising awareness of Miró’s artistic career and which is essential to any study or research regarding his work.

With the support of the Fundació Banc Sabadell, the exhibition is accompanied by a publication that features all the works and documentation in the show, as well as an essay by the team of curators that presents the central theses of the display, as well as hitherto unpublished material from the artist’s personal fonds. The volume also includes a conversation between Marko Daniel and Joan Punyet, Miró’s grandson, which paints a rare portrait of Miró the collector and gives us insights into the artist’s more personal side.

The public and education programme that accompanies the exhibition Miró. His Most Intimate Legacy will encompass a series of in-person and online events suitable for everyone (tours, activities, workshops, etc.) run by Julia Pelletier, Dario Zeruto, Mon Mas, Ignasi Blanch, blanca arias and Miquel del Pozo, among others. The activities will focus on two central concepts: firstly, Miró’s facet as a collector; and secondly, the continuing relevance of his pictorial approaches. Objects and practices that are both everyday and universal such as toys, books and postcards – all closely connected with Miró’s personal milieu – will form the basis of the proposals in the participative space associated with the exhibition, entitled From Home to the World.