Josep Lluis Sert Joan Miro

The Joan Miró Foundation was the first public institution set up in Barcelona to focus entirely on contemporary art. Joan Miró and Josep Lluís Sert the building’s designer and a founder member of GATCPAC (a leading group in the introduction of modern architecture in Catalonia) first met in 1932 and became close friends while working on the Spanish (Republican) Pavilion at the ParisWorld Fair in 1937. After the first big retrospective of Miró’s work (1968), the artist had decided to set up a building to make his work accessible to the public on a permanent basis. Sert was commissioned and created an open-plan structure in which the interior space communicated with the exterior, producing a perfect balance between architecture and landscape. Since then, the Foundation has been expanded on two occasions. The architect commissioned to carry out this task was Jaume Freixa, a pupil of Sert's who had worked with him for eleven years at Harvard and had played an active part in the creation of the Foundation.

This series was the winner of the American Institute of Architects' prestigious "Award for Excellence in International Book Publishing". Each volume in this series is introduced with an essay on the architect, and a chronological or stylistic presentation of their most outstanding buildings and projects. No other series provides such a complete and concise summary of the world's leading architects' works. The volumes are fully illustrated in black-and-white with photos and project renderings.

Correspondence between Joan Miró and Josep Lluís Sert from 1937-1980.

Following the wishes of the Catalan artist himself, the aim of the Joan Miro Foundation of Barcelona is to spread knowledge of contemporary art, presents the most important corpus of works by Joan Miro, including over ten thousand pieces, featuring paintings, sculpture, textiles, the entire graphic work, drawings, sketches and notes that exhaustively document the evolution of the great masters's pictorial language. Besides works by Miro, the Foundation also features an interesting collection of contemporary art, with works by Balthus, Duchamp, Ernst, Gonzales, Matisse, Moore, Tanguy and Rauschenberg. The richly illustrated book edited by Rosa Maria Malet is a useful guide to the Joan Miro Foundation, documenting the history of the institution and the building as well as the important periods of the Catalan artist's career, covering the early works, the Parisian period and the works of his later years.

From his childhood on, Mallorca was to be a second home for Joan Miro. His mother hailed from the island, as did his wife Pilar Juncosa. It became his permanent place of abode from the mid-fifties onwards, after he acquired a plot of land upon which he commissioned his friend Josep Lluris to build a large studio. He died there on the 25th of December 1983 at the age of 90. This study concerns itself primarily with the varied themes and techniques of the artist's later works painting, sculpture, prints and ceramics - which were all created, with the exception of the latter, in the four workshops of his residence Son Abrines. It was the clear light of Mallorca which especially fascinated Miro - the poetic blues of the sky and sea. In his sculpture, he was especially inspired by the artistic creativity of the island inhabitants, not to mention the agriculture and precipitous cliffs which give the landscape of Mallorca its unique quality. "A pitchfork, a fork that has been carefully made by peasants - that's very important to me", he once commented. From his youth on he was to collect objects typical of island life: ceramics, woven baskets and simple household pottery. Above all, he loved the rustic style of the old Mallorcan house with its characteristic furniture. Such things were to influence his art more than any fluctuating fashions. "Folk art always moves me ... In this art their are no tricks ... it is so rich with possibilities." Barbara Catoir is the author of "Conversations with Antoni Tapies". Miro was born in Barcelona in 1893 and studied there at the Lonja School of Fine Arts from 1912 onwards, and in the private school of Francesc Gall. Miro lived on and off in Paris from 1920 to the outbreak of World War II; there he became friends with poets and artists within Surrealist and Dadaist circles. He exhibited alongside Picasso, Gonzales and Alexander Calder in the Spanish Pavilion of the World Exhibition in Paris during 1937. With the first major exhibition of his oeuvre at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941, Miro was to see the blossoming of a fruitful relationship with the American art scene, which was to last until his death. Numerous works of his are to be found in American museums and private collections.