{"id":394414,"date":"2026-03-20T04:47:22","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T04:47:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/394414\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T04:47:22","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T04:47:22","slug":"exhibition-explores-how-the-us-shaped-joan-miro-and-he-it-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/394414\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhibition explores how the US shaped Joan Mir\u00f3\u2014and he it – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI feel like diving into the turmoil of New York,\u201d Joan Mir\u00f3 said in 1947. The Barcelona-born artist (1893-1983) was enamoured by the US city, by the turbulence of the subway, the luminous skyscrapers. He resolved to visit, to be \u201cin direct, personal contact\u201d with the ideas stirring there. \u201cMy work will benefit from that shock,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The after-effects of his travel to the US will be on show in Mir\u00f3 and the United States at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. Paintings and sculpture, works on paper, and films by the Catalan will be shown alongside pieces by his US contemporaries, among them Jackson Pollock<\/a>, Lee Krasner<\/a>, Helen Frankenthaler<\/a>, Alexander Calder<\/a> and Barnett Newman<\/a>. The exhibition, which debuted last year at the Fundaci\u00f3 Joan Mir\u00f3<\/a> in Barcelona to mark its 50th anniversary, is the first in-depth study of Mir\u00f3\u2019s engagement with US artists. The show draws out those crosscurrents, the fervour of those \u201cfreeing themselves, pushing the boundaries\u201d of post-war art, says Elsa Smithgall, the chief curator at the Phillips Collection. \u201cThere\u2019s so much vitality in this moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

US artist Alexander Calder\u2019s Portrait of Joan Mir\u00f3 (1930) \u00a9 2026 Calder Foundation, New York; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York<\/p>\n

Mir\u00f3 seized on that moment, painting and sculpting restlessly. In his pictures, pencil-thin tendrils dip and whirl, jaundiced eyes float against grounds of ochre and powder blue. From his compositions, he sought poetry, a delicacy of touch, \u201ca world of real unreality\u201d. His vision caught on. By the 1940s, Mir\u00f3 was established on both sides of the Atlantic, with a retrospective at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art and commissions across the US.<\/p>\n

Changing the face of art<\/p>\n

Krasner said she was \u201cmad for Mir\u00f3\u201d, each painting \u201ca little miracle\u201d. Especially captivating for her and others was Mir\u00f3\u2019s gouache Constellations series (a print version will be in the show). Mir\u00f3 was a pioneer, Newman noted, whose compositions \u201cwill change the face of art for many years to come\u201d.<\/p>\n

Mir\u00f3 saw in the US a pulsating spirit, an energy he could inflect in his pictures. In 1952, he went to a show of Pollock\u2019s black-and-white paintings that \u201cshowed me a direction I wanted to take, but which up to then had remained at the stage of an unfulfilled desire\u201d. Pollock, in turn, admired Mir\u00f3 more than any other artist, save Picasso. \u201cThat\u2019s the beauty of art,\u201d Smithgall says, how one draws from and reimagines another\u2019s compositions, arriving at something new.<\/p>\n

Mir\u00f3 exchanged work with Frankenthaler, whose vermillion-stained Canyon (1965) is among the show\u2019s highlights, and with Calder, whose spidery portrait of Mir\u00f3, on view here, hints at a lifelong friendship. For US artists, Mir\u00f3 embodied \u201ca liberating way\u201d, Smithgall says, a means of \u201cexpressing those intangible feelings through line, through fields of colour\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Mir\u00f3 and the United States<\/a>, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, 21 March-5 July<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI feel like diving into the turmoil of New York,\u201d Joan Mir\u00f3 said in 1947. The Barcelona-born artist…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":394415,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[267],"tags":[365,362,363,364,1980,366,18,117,966,19,17,97257,179791,2709],"class_list":["post-394414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-dc","tag-design","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-exhibitions","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-joan-miro","tag-phillips-collection","tag-washington"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116259693720619242","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}