A Dialogue Between Miró and the American Artists
Fundació Joan Miró on Montjuïc opens the exhibition Miró and the United States, featuring works by the artist himself and by many others.
Joan Miró (pictured above, in front of the mural painting for the Terrace Plaza Hotel restaurant in Cincinnati, 1947. © Arnold Newman / Getty Images) shares the spotlight with a wide range of American artists, from Louise Bourgeois to Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, in Miró and the United States — a new exhibition that highlights how Miró and many artists across the Atlantic enriched each other through mutual influence. You can visit it from October 10 to February 22.
This is one of the major exhibitions of the season, curated by Marko Daniel, director of the Fundació Joan Miró, together with Matthew Gale and Dolors Rodríguez Roig from the foundation, and in collaboration with Elsa Smithgall of The Phillips Collection in Washington, where the exhibition will also be shown from March to July next year.
The show includes, of course, many of Miró’s own creations, but it also reveals how 20th-century art evolved as a whole through dialogue — bringing together works by American artists from different periods, including pieces by the aforementioned Louise Bourgeois, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, as well as Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Arshile Gorky, and Alice Trumbull Mason, among others. You may also discover women artists whose names are less familiar, as the exhibition gives well-deserved attention to the decisive role of women in the development of modern art.
Focusing on the two retrospectives that Miró held in New York, in 1941 and 1959, and on his seven later visits to the United States between 1947 and 1968, the exhibition traces a shift in his artistic gaze — a movement of perspective from Paris toward the United States.
If you want to dive deeper into the exhibition, you can join a guided tour (available in Catalan, Spanish, and English). These visits explore in detail the dialogue between Joan Miró and the American artists who helped transform 20th-century art — explaining how and when Miró connected with figures like Pollock, Bourgeois, or Frankenthaler, and why the U.S. became such a vital space in his creative life.
Want to understand 20th-century art from a new angle? Then make sure to visit Miró and the United States at the Fundació Joan Miró — and check the foundation’s website for full details before your visit.