The Joan Miro Foundation And Its Collections

The most important aspect of the Joan Miró Foundation’s collections is without doubt its valuable stock of works consisting in over 14,000 items. Most of this collection was donated to the Foundation by Joan Miró himself. Other pieces have come from the collections owned by Pilar Juncosa,the artist’s wife,and Joan Prats,his close friend and the driving force behind the idea of setting up the Foundation. The Foundation has a large collection of paintings from all the different periods of Miró’s life.The works exhibited show the development of his art from his training in Barcelona and first contacts with the avant-gardes in the early twentieth century,the time spent in Paris and his links with the Surrealists. Miró’s art in the last years of his life was mainly expressed in large-format paintings and denotes a deeper interest in pure colour and in gesture,but without abandoning his lyricism and compositional rigour.It is precisely this period that is most widely represented here,since he donated to the Foundation the works that were in his studio when it was set up. This guidebook is the main tool to achieve to the highlights of the Foundation’s collections.

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.

Published as a tribute to Miro on his eightieth birthday, 140p. 64 illustrations (22 in color). 71 reference illustrations. 2 foldouts. Illustrates the most important and comprehensive public collection of Miro"s work in the world. Each of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, and objects in the MOMAs collection is illustrated and discussed.

"In a career spanning over six decades, the New York art dealer Pierre Matisse (1900-1989) contributed substantially to the advancement of modern art. At his eponymous gallery on East Fifty-seventh Street, he showed several now legendary artists for the first time outside Europe. The collection--paintings, sculpture, and drawings by Balthus, Bonnard, Chagall, Derain, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Magritte, and the dealer's own father, Henri Matisse, among others--was donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004 by the foundation established by his widow. These extraordinary artworks are presented with informative entries addressing the circumstances of each work's creation and the dealer's relationship to the artist. In the introduction, the story of Pierre Matisse's early struggles in New York is told for the first time and illustrated with previously unpublished archival photographs."--Provided by publisher.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Fundaciâo Joan Mirâo, February 15-may 19, 2019.