An art institution ‘for the people of tomorrow’: the Fundació Joan Miró at 50

‘Never again Barcelona.’ With those few words, Joan Miró expressed his dismay at the response — both commercial and critical — to his debut solo exhibition. The year was 1918, and the show had been held at Galeries Dalmau, an art space in Barcelona run by the eminent dealer Josep Dalmau. Not a single work sold, and the reviewer for La Publicidad newspaper called Miró’s use of colour ‘detestable’.

The artist, then approaching his 25th birthday, resolved to leave his home city and never exhibit there again, on grounds of its deemed conservatism. He moved to Paris, where he would thrive in avant-garde circles, most famously that of the Surrealists. ‘A new world is opening up in my brain,’ he said of life in the French capital.

True to his word, Miró went decades without showing another body of work in Barcelona — only to have a radical and remarkable change of heart in old age. In June 1975, when in his early eighties, he oversaw the opening of the Fundació Joan Miró on Montjuïc, a hill overlooking the city.

The museum’s mission was to show a range of works by Miró, plus art by figures from his own and subsequent eras. ’I want the foundation to be like [a] notebook,’ the artist said. ‘I will write the first page, and others the next pages.’

Today, it is one of the most popular cultural institutions in Barcelona, attracting more than 300,000 visitors each year — testament to the enduring power of Miró’s art and vision.

In the summer of 2025, there began a year’s worth of celebrations marking the foundation’s 50th anniversary. Among the highlights is Miró and the United States, an exhibition exploring the Catalan’s connections with the US in the second half of his life, including his links with Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko and a host of other artists. It features 130 works, drawn from collections on both sides of the Atlantic, including that of the Fundació Joan Miró itself.

‘The feelings that Miró had for Barcelona were complex,’ says Marko Daniel, the foundation’s director. ‘However, he ended up giving it the gift of the Fundació Joan Miró.

‘His idea was never to construct a mausoleum in his honour. He wanted a place that kept itself fresh and relevant — living up to its full name [Fundació Joan Miró: Centre for Contemporary Art Studies]. It’s our responsibility at the foundation today to try and fulfil his wishes.’

The son of a watchmaker, Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893. After a dispiriting stint as an accounts clerk, he set his heart on becoming an artist. In Paris, he participated in the first exhibition of Surrealist art, which took place at Galerie Pierre in 1925. However, despite producing imagery for most of his career which seemed to owe more to his unfettered imagination than to the perceptible world, Miró always rejected the label of Surrealist, seeing his artistic path as idiosyncratically personal.

He typically split his time between Paris in winter, and the Catalan village of Mont-roig del Camp in summer. His parents owned a farmhouse in the latter, located two hours south-west of Barcelona.

Such a routine, however, wasn’t to last beyond the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. One year later, Miró painted a now-lost mural, The Reaper, for the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris, in support of his country’s government. (This was also where Picasso exhibited Guernica for the first time.)

Sadly for Miró, the Nationalist forces of General Franco won the civil war in 1939, giving rise to a longstanding dictatorship. The artist duly relocated for most of the rest of his life to Mallorca, the native island of his wife Pilar.

As revealed in Miró and the United States, it was in such a context that he looked increasingly to the US, taking repeated trips there, producing large-scale public sculptures for cities such as Chicago and Houston, and receiving two retrospectives at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in 1941 and 1959.

‘The US represented to Miró — coming from a land crushed by dictatorship — a place of freedom, hope and endless possibility,’ says Daniel. (The exhibition also examines the artist’s influence on the Abstract Expressionist movement.)

Occupying 15 rooms, Miró and the United States is unusually large. Most temporary shows at the foundation — though not this one — leave space elsewhere for works by Miró from the permanent collection to be displayed at the same time.

The collection includes 217 paintings, 178 sculptures and 8,000 drawings, thanks to donations across a number of years from the artist himself, his family and friends. Each decade of his career is represented, with standout works including Morning Star (1940), from the acclaimed ‘Constellations’ series of paintings, Miró’s vision of an idealised world of celestial beings.

The foundation’s collection is the largest holding of his art anywhere in the world — and in the spring, after Miró and the United States closes, it will undergo a rehang.

Today, the Fundació Joan Miró is one of numerous museums and centres in Barcelona dedicated to contemporary art. Counterparts such as MACBA, La Capella and the CCCB, however, all opened as part of the city’s stunning regeneration around the time of the Olympic Games, held there in 1992.

Two decades before that, Barcelona had been ‘grey’ — to use Miró’s own description — and he saw the foundation as a way of changing this. It was to be the first contemporary art museum in the city, and the artist himself footed the bill for most of the construction.

As part of the anniversary programme, a small exhibition called Poetry has just begun. 50 years of the Miró is currently open in the galleries upstairs, exploring the history of the foundation.

Perhaps owing to a combination of nostalgia and the loosening of a senescent Franco’s grip over the Spanish state, Miró increasingly reconnected with his home city from the late 1960s onwards. A retrospective of his work was staged at the Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu, for example. He also created a mural for Terminal 2 of Barcelona airport; a large pavement mosaic on the city’s most famous street, La Rambla; and, of course, the Fundació Joan Miró.

‘This museum must be a living place, without pretensions to monumentality: human, with a great variety of spaces,’ Miró stated. His friend, the architect Josep Lluis Sert, designed a building that is Rationalist in style but Mediterranean in vibe.

Made of white concrete, it features a succession of spacious galleries and rooms, which manage to be simultaneously light-filled and protected from the sun’s glare. Visitors can also take five in an al fresco café in a courtyard dominated by an old carob tree, and wander among playful sculptures such as The Caress of a Bird (1967) on a rooftop terrace. (Other features include a library aimed at supporting research into Miró’s life and work.)

The foundation’s debut exhibition, on the subject of tantric art, opened on 20 November 1975. Franco died early that same morning, but the inauguration went ahead regardless. ‘Miró didn’t shed any tears,’ Daniel says.

More recent exhibitions have been devoted to the artist’s relationships with Picasso and Henri Matisse, the former a two-site collaboration with Barcelona’s Museu Picasso.

‘As an institution, we’re proud to represent the values that Miró held dear as a man,’ says Daniel. ‘Namely, openness, generosity, freedom and curiosity. As he aged, he enjoyed interacting with a younger generation of artists [such as Antoni Tàpies, Eduardo Chillida and Antonio Saura]. He always welcomed new ideas.’

Most shows at the foundation do not feature works by Miró. A joint exhibition last year, for example, was dedicated to the video art of Taiwan’s Musquiqui Chihying and Indonesia’s Timoteus Anggawan Kusno. Since 2007, the foundation has also awarded a biennial Joan Miró Prize to an artist ‘at a breakthrough stage in his/her career’ (its first three winners were Olafur Eliasson, Pipilotti Rist and Mona Hatoum).

The Fundació Joan Miró is a private institution governed by a board of trustees — drawn from the great and the good of Catalan society — to whom Daniel reports. The foundation raises around 80 per cent of its own budget, the rest coming from public sources. Daniel, who joined as director in 2018, thus spends much of his time engaged with potential patrons, sponsors and commercial partners, not to mention tracking ticket sales.

It’s worth noting that two other foundations exist to which the artist’s name is attached: the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró (in Mallorca) and the Fundació Mas Miró (on his family’s old farm in Mont-roig del Camp), both established after his death. Though separate entities, the three venues are sometimes collectively referred to as the ‘Miró Triangle’.

Along with the rehang, the foundation in Barcelona will later this year stage a survey show of work by 2025’s Joan Miró Prize winner, the Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga, and inaugurate a large garden filled with cypress trees to the building’s west. The garden, intended for a mix of artistic and recreational use, was part of Sert’s original plan for the museum, but never opened to the public.

‘With the anniversary programme, we’ve been keen to look forward as well as back,’ says Daniel. ‘Miró himself said that the foundation was intended “for the people of tomorrow”, and 50 years on from its launch, we still operate by that motto.’

Miró and the United States runs until 22 February 2026, before transferring to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., from 21 March to 5 July

Poetry has just begun. 50 years of the Miró runs until 6 April 2026

The newly rehung collection of the Fundació Joan Miró will be on view from 13 March 2026