JOAN MIRÓ I FERRÀ, SURREALISM & CATALAN PRIDE

What do Pompeu Fabra, Francesc Macià, Charles Chaplin and Joan Miró have in common?

All four were great personalities: linguist, politician (president of the Generalitat de Catalunya), actor and painter, and all four passed away on the same day, Christmas Day.

We are living in a very turbulent time where instead of moving forward as a society we are regressing in rights and freedoms and all in the name of a supposed progress that is nothing more than an involution orchestrated by a power that claims to serve the citizens when what it does is use them, nullify them and lead them to disappointment, contained anger and frustration.

It is not new. History is cyclical because humans always make the same mistakes and culture and art have always served as a catalyst for social change.

More than one hundred years ago, one of these catalysts was Joan Miró, the Catalan, sculptor, painter and ceramicist.

Joan Miró i Ferrà (20 April 1893-25 December 1983) was a Catalan sculptor, painter and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.

Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an assassination of painting in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.

Born into a family of a goldsmith and a watchmaker, Miró grew up in the Barri Gòtic neighbourhood of Barcelona. The Miró surname indicates Jewish roots, the terms marrano or converso describe Iberian Jews who converted to Christianity.

His father was Miquel Miró Adzerias and his mother was Dolors Ferrà. He began drawing classes at the age of seven at a private school at Carrer del Regomir 13, a medieval mansion. To the dismay of his father, he enrolled at the fine art academy at La Llotja in 1907.He studied at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc and he had his first solo show in 1918 at the Galeries Dalmau, where his work was ridiculed and defaced. Inspired by Fauve and Cubist exhibitions in Barcelona and abroad, Miró was drawn towards the arts community that was gathering in Montparnasse and in 1920 moved to Paris, but continued to spend his summers in Catalonia.

Miró initially went to business school as well as art school. He began his working career as a clerk when he was a teenager, although he abandoned the business world completely for art after suffering a nervous breakdown. His early art, like that of the similarly influenced Fauves and Cubists, was inspired by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne. The resemblance of Miró's work to that of the intermediate generation of the avant-garde has led scholars to dub this period his Catalan Fauvist period.

More information: Fundació Joan Miró

A few years after Miró’s 1918 Barcelona solo exhibition, he settled in Paris where he finished a number of paintings that he had begun on his parents’ summer home and farm in Mont-roig del Camp. One such painting, The Farm, showed a transition to a more individual style of painting and certain nationalistic qualities. Miró annually returned to Mont-roig and developed a symbolism and nationalism that would stick with him throughout his career. Two of Miró’s first works classified as Surrealist, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) and The Tilled Field, employ the symbolic language that was to dominate the art of the next decade.

In 1924, Miró joined the Surrealist group. The already symbolic and poetic nature of Miró’s work, as well as the dualities and contradictions inherent to it, fit well within the context of dream-like automatism espoused by the group.

Much of Miró’s work lost the cluttered chaotic lack of focus that had defined his work thus far, and he experimented with collage and the process of painting within his work so as to reject the framing that traditional painting provided.

This antagonistic attitude towards painting manifested itself when Miró referred to his work in 1924 ambiguously as x in a letter to poet friend Michel Leiris. The paintings that came out of this period were eventually dubbed Miró’s dream paintings.

Miró married Pilar Juncosa in Palma (Majorca) on 12 October 1929. Their daughter, María Dolores Miró, was born on 17 July 1930.

In 1931, Pierre Matisse opened an art gallery in New York City. The Pierre Matisse Gallery, which existed until Matisse's death in 1989, became an influential part of the Modern art movement in America. From the outset Matisse represented Joan Miró and introduced his work to the United States market by frequently exhibiting Miró's work in New York.

More information: Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró

Until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Miró habitually returned to Catalonia in the summers. Once the war began, he was unable to return home. Unlike many of his surrealist contemporaries, Miró had previously preferred to stay away from explicitly political commentary in his work. Though a sense of Catalan nationalism pervaded his earliest surreal landscapes and Head of a Catalan Peasant, it was not until Spain's Republican government commissioned him to paint the mural, The Reaper , for the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition, that Miró’s work took on a politically charged meaning.

In 1939, with Germany’s invasion of France looming, Miró relocated to Varengeville in Normandy, and on 20 May of the following year, as Germans invaded Paris, he narrowly fled to Spain, now controlled by Francisco Franco, for the duration of the Vichy Regime’s rule.

More information: The Art Story

In Varengeville, Palma, and Mont-roig, between 1940 and 1941, Miró created the twenty-three gouache series Constellations. Revolving around celestial symbolism, Constellations earned the artist praise from André Breton, who seventeen years later wrote a series of poems, named after and inspired by Miró's series. Features of this work revealed a shifting focus to the subjects of women, birds, and the moon, which would dominate his iconography for much of the rest of his career.

In 1974, Miró created a tapestry for the World Trade Center in New York City together with the Catalan artist Josep Royo. He had initially refused to do a tapestry, then he learned the craft from Royo and the two artists produced several works together. His World Trade Center Tapestry was displayed at the buildingand was one of the most expensive works of art lost during the September 11 attacks.

In 1977, Miró and Royo finished a tapestry to be exhibited in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

In 1981, Miró's The Sun, the Moon and One Star -later renamed Miró's Chicago- was unveiled. This large, mixed media sculpture is situated outdoors in the downtown Loop area of Chicago, across the street from another large public sculpture, the Chicago Picasso. Miró had created a bronze model of The Sun, the Moon and One Star in 1967. The maquette now resides in the Milwaukee Art Museum.

In 1979 Miró received a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Barcelona. The artist, who suffered from heart failure, died in his home in Palma (Majorca) on 25 December 1983. He was later interred in the Montjuïc Cemetery in Barcelona.

More information: Artsy

His early modernist works include Portrait of Vincent Nubiola (1917), Siurana (the path), Nord-Sud (1917) and Painting of Toledo. These works show the influence of Cézanne, and fill the canvas with a colorful surface and a more painterly treatment than the hard-edge style of most of his later works. In Nord-Sud, the literary newspaper of that name appears in the still life, a compositional device common in cubist compositions, but also a reference to the literary and avant-garde interests of the painter.

Starting in 1920, Miró developed a very precise style, picking out every element in isolation and detail and arranging them in deliberate composition. These works, including House with Palm Tree (1918), Nude with a Mirror (1919), Horse, Pipe and Red Flower (1920), and The Table-Still Life with Rabbit (1920), show the clear influence of Cubism, although in a restrained way, being applied to only a portion of the subject. For example, The Farmer's Wife (1922–23), is realistic, but some sections are stylized or deformed, such as the treatment of the woman's feet, which are enlarged and flattened.

The culmination of this style was The Farm (1921–22). The rural Catalan scene it depicts is augmented by an avant-garde French newspaper in the center, showing Miró sees this work transformed by the Modernist theories he had been exposed to in Paris.

The concentration on each element as equally important was a key step towards generating a pictorial sign for each element. The background is rendered in flat or patterned in simple areas, highlighting the separation of figure and ground, which would become important in his mature style.

Miró made many attempts to promote this work, but his surrealist colleagues found it too realistic and apparently conventional, and so he soon turned to a more explicitly surrealist approach.

In 1922, Miró explored abstracted, strongly coloured surrealism in at least one painting.  From the summer of 1923 in Mont-roig, Miró began a key set of paintings where abstracted pictorial signs, rather than the realistic representations used in The Farm, are predominant. In The Tilled Field, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) and Pastoral (1923–24), these flat shapes and lines, mostly black or strongly coloured, suggest the subjects, sometimes quite cryptically. For Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), Miró represents the hunter with a combination of signs: a triangle for the head, curved lines for the moustache, angular lines for the body. So encoded is this work that at a later time Miró provided a precise explanation of the signs used.

More information: Fem Turisme

Through the mid-1920s Miró developed the pictorial sign language which would be central throughout the rest of his career.

In Paris, under the influence of poets and writers, he developed his unique style: organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. Generally thought of as a Surrealist because of his interest in automatism and the use of sexual symbols , for example, ovoids with wavy lines emanating from them, Miró's style was influenced in varying degrees by Surrealism and Dada, yet he rejected membership in any artistic movement in the interwar European years. André Breton described him as the most Surrealist of us all.

Miró's surrealist origins evolved out of repression much like all surrealist and magic realist work, especially because of his Catalan ethnicity, which was subject to special persecution by the Franco regime. Also, Joan Miró was well aware of Haitian Voodoo art and Cuban Santería religion through his travels before going into exile. This led to his signature style of art making.

In the final decades of his life Miró accelerated his work in different media, producing hundreds of ceramics, including the Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun at the UNESCO building in Paris. He also made temporary window paintings, on glass, for an exhibit. In the last years of his life Miró wrote his most radical and least known ideas, exploring the possibilities of gas sculpture and four-dimensional painting.

More information: The Guardian

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul

but executed with clinical coolness.

Joan Miró

YVAN GOLL, BETWEEN EXPRESSIONISM & SURREALISM

Yvan Goll and his wife Claire Goll

Today, The Grandma has been reading one of her favourite poets Yvan Goll, the Alsasian poet who was born on a day like today in 1891.

The Grandma loves poetry and Yvan Goll is one of the best poets of the last century, a great master who knew Joan Miró and was influenced by Surrealism and Expressionism. 

She has advised The Watsons to read a lot of poetry, especially French authors, to get inspiration to write a beautiful song that helps Rennette Watson to win the European Song Contest. Rennete has also read Goll's poems.

Yvan Goll (29 March 1891-27 February 1950) was a French-German poet who was bilingual and wrote in both French and German. He had close ties to both German Expressionism and to French Surrealism.

Yvan Goll was born at Sankt Didel, today Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, in Alsace-Lorraine. His father was a cloth merchant from a Jewish family from Rappoltsweiler in Alsace. After his father's death when he was six years old, his mother joined relatives in Metz, then a major town of Lorraine in the 1871 German Empire after 1918 the area was claimed by France.

In this predominantly Lorraine/French-speaking western part of Alsace-Lorraine, high school education inevitably involved German. Later he went to Strasbourg and studied law at the university there, as well as in Freiburg and Munich, where he graduated in 1912.

In 1913, Goll participated in the expressionist movement in Berlin. His first published poem of note, Der Panamakanal, contrasts a tragic view of human civilization destroying nature, with an optimistic ending which evokes human brotherhood and the heroic construction of the canal. However, a later version of the poem from 1918 ends more pessimistically.

More information: Asymptote

At the outbreak of World War I he escaped to Switzerland to avoid conscription, and became friends with the dadaists of Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, in particular Hans Arp, but also Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia. He wrote many war poems, the most famous being 1916's Requiem for the Dead of Europe, as well as several plays, including The Immortal One (1918).

It was in 1917, while in Switzerland that Goll met German writer and journalist Klara Aischmann, better known as Claire Goll. They settled in Paris in 1919 and married in 1921.

In his essays, such as Die drei guten Geister Frankreichs, Goll promoted a better understanding between the peoples of France and Germany, even though he was personally more attracted to France by the greater liveliness of the artistic scene there.

Yvan Goll's poems with Joan Miró's drawings

It was in Paris that his Expressionist style began to develop towards Surrealism, as witnessed in drama and film scenarios he wrote there, such as Die Chapliniade and Mathusalem. 

These works blend fantasy, reality, and the absurd, continuing and extending the Expressionist program of arousing audience response by means of shock effects. They also reveal the autobiographical nature of much of Goll's writing, but also his tendency to appear in the guise of a persona rather than in the first person. 

While in Paris he also worked as a translator into German and into French for Théâtre de l'Œuvre. He formed many friendships with artists and his collection The New Orpheus was illustrated by Georg Grosz, Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger. Marc Chagall illustrated a collection of love poems by both Golls, and Pablo Picasso illustrated Yvan's Élégie d'Ihpetonga suivi des masques de cendre.
 

Goll also published anthologies of other French and German poets, as well as translations. In 1924 he founded the magazine Surréalisme, publishing the first Manifeste du surréalisme and quarreled with André Breton and friends.

In 1927, he wrote the libretto for a surrealist opera, Royal Palace, set to music by composer Kurt Weill. He also wrote the scenario for Der Neue Orpheus, a cantata set by Weill, and the opera Mélusine, set by Marcel Mihalovici in 1920 and again, this time in German, by Aribert Reimann in 1971.

More information: Brooklyn Rail

As Nazi persecution grew in Germany during the 1930s, the theme of the wandering Jew became central to Goll's poetry. In 1936, he published an epic poem entitled La chanson de Jean Sans Terre with illustrations contributed by Marc Chagall.

Jean Sans Terre was the youngest son of Henry II of England; following the battle of Bouvines, John lost the duchy of Normandy to King Philip II of France, which resulted in the collapse of most of the Angevin Empire and contributed to the subsequent growth in power of the Capetian dynasty during the 13th century. The central figure, who wanders the earth in 69 smaller poems, belongs everywhere and nowhere. He looks for love and identity and yet the absence of these things also acts as a kind of freedom.

Yvan Goll's poems

From 1939–1947 the Golls were exiles in New York, where friends included Richard Wright, Stefan Zweig, Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, Piet Mondrian, and William Carlos Williams who translated some of Yvan's poems. Between 1943 and 1946, Goll edited the French-American poetry magazine Hémispheres with works by Saint-John Perse, Césaire, Breton... and young American poets.

In 1945, the year he was diagnosed with leukemia, he wrote Atom Elegy and other death-haunted poems collected in the English language volume Fruit From Saturn (1946).

This poetic language of this final phase in Goll's work is rich in chthonic forces and imagery, the disintegration of matter -inspired by the atomic bomb- alchemy, and the Kabbalah, which Goll was reading at the time. Love Poems, written with his wife Claire, appeared in 1947.

These poems, written in a pure and lucid style, speak of the poets' love and their need of each other, but also of jealousy, fear of betrayal, and a clash of temperaments. Goll's final works were written in German rather than French, and were collected by the poet under the title Traumkraut, a neologism -meaning something like Dream Weed.

Here, in his poetic testament, Goll mastered the synthesis of Expressionism and Surrealism that his work had hinted at most of his life; it was for this reason that he asked his wife to destroy all his previous work. These were eventually edited and brought to publishing by Claire.

Goll died aged 58, at Neuilly-sur-Seine, and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery opposite the grave of Frédéric Chopin.

In 1953 Claire confronted the poet's friend, Paul Celan with the accusation of plagiarism, unjustly claiming that Celan had copied from Yvan Goll's Traumkraut; Celan committed suicide in 1970.

Claire Goll died in 1977, and bequeathed to the town of Saint-Die-des-Vosges several French manuscripts, the couple's library, their works of art and furniture. The set -including a reconstruction of his Parisian apartment - is now on display at the Museum Pierre-Noël.

Download Prism International (1969)

Breathe slowly you sick ones
At the wounded wall
Birds from ashes settle themselves on your hands
On your fragile fingers
The last day crumbles.
 

 Yvan Goll

MARIA DEL MAR BONET IN THE EYES OF TONI CATANY

The Grandma arrives to Palau Robert exposition

Today, Claire Fontaine and The Grandma have gone to Palau Robert in Barcelona to visit an unforgettable and wonderful exposition Maria del Mar Bonet als ulls de Toni Catany / Maria del Mar Bonet in the eyes of Toni Catany.

This expo talks about the friendship between Maria del Mar Bonet, the greatest singer in Catalan language and Toni Catany the prestigious and well-known photographer. Both of them were born in Mallorca Island and they travelled to Barcelona to follow their studies and start their professional paths. Lives of Bonet and Catany are connected as friends but also as professionals and this exposition is a good look over their lives, their connections and the great influence of these artists between them and over the Catalan and the world cultures.

The Grandma and Claire Fontaine love Bonet's music and as a good photographer and designer, Claire also admires Catany's works deeply. This exposition has been a good chance to discover more things about these magnificent artists and friends. It is a must that you have to visit.

Before going to the exposition, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

17. Dynamic Tables (I) (Spanish Version)

Palau Robert is a building on Barcelona's Passeig de Gràcia 107, the former private residence of Robert Robert i Surís, an influential aristocrat, politician and businessman at the turn of the 20th century. It's now a government-run institution that hosts an exhibition centre with three halls, a concert hall, and gardens as well as the Information Centre for Catalonia, including the city's tourism bureau.

In the 1936-1939 period, it was the site of the Generalitat de Catalunya's Ministry of Culture. After the Spanish Civil War, Robert's family regained the Palau, until its second purchase by the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Catalan government, in 1981, when it became a public building.

An example of late neoclassical style, made of stone from Montgrí, the Palau Robert was finished in 1903 under the direction of architects Henry Grandpierre and Joan Martorell i Montells. The garden was designed by Ramon Oliva, who also designed Plaça Catalunya. Its palm trees were brought during the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition.

More information: Palau Robert (Catalan Version)

Toni Catany (Llucmajor, August 15, 1942-Barcelona, ​​October 14, 2013) was a Mallorcan photographer with self-taught training.

Toni Catany resided in Barcelona since 1960, a city where he studied chemistry. Self-taught photographer, he began his profession as a free-lance (self-employed) in 1966, conducting travel reports.

In 1968, he published his first reports on Israel-Palestine and Egypt in the magazine Destino and on the Balearic Islands in La Vanguardia. But he would soon opt for lands other than those of press photography.

Toni Catany & Maria del Mar Bonet

In 1972, the Aixelà Gallery in Barcelona hosted its first exhibition. In 1980, he began a series of dead natures that sought recognition worldwide. 

Dead natures of study, landscapes and Mediterranean architecture, with a special interest in crossbreeding, portraits and male knots treated with singular poetry are some of the great issues that Catany addressed in his work. A work that, technically, began with the imitation of ancient techniques, such as daguerreotype and calotype, and more recently in transported polaroids. Always with the combination of procedures of the past, tradition and experimentation, with great influence on painting, and with alternation of black and white and color, although it also incorporated as a means of expression digital photography in its latest years. He is the author of a monograph about Mallorcan photographer Tomàs Monserrat (1873-1944).

He exhibited in Spain, France, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Italy, United States, Tunisia, Germany and Japan, among other countries. His work is located at the National Library of Paris, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, at the Niepce Museum (Chalons-sur-Saone, France), at the University of Parma (Italy), at the International Polaroid Collection (USA ), and at the Museum of Mallorca.

He was also a great traveler, very interested in Mexico and Venezuela, as well as Iran, India and Bangladesh, where he shared many places with the writer and traveler Ana María Briongos.

More information: Fotografia a Catalunya

The Fundació Toni Catany is a private cultural foundation, created on July 10, 2014 in Llucmajor, Mallorca, which has the following aims:

-Catalogate, preserve, study, defend, reward and disseminate the artistic and photographic legacy of Toni Catany.

-Colaborate with the public institutions in the creation and management of an international photography center, based in Llucmajor, with the aim of becoming an active organization with a local and global projection for the promotion of photographic culture and for the knowledge and dissemination of the work of Toni Catany.

-Customize the general public the work of Toni Catany, for which the Foundation manages the copyright generated by the work of Toni Catany, and makes available copies of this work that is susceptible of marketing.

-Colaborate with public institutions and private entities to promote the photographic culture and to promote the Balearic Islands as a meeting place for any artistic or cultural expression.

More information: Fundació Toni Catany (Catalan Version)

The Palau Robert adds to the 50th anniversary of Maria del Mar Bonet's musical career with an exhibition that brings together the best photos that Toni Catany, the National Plastic Arts Award and the National Photography Prize made to him, and gives him know the friendship and the creative evolution of the two artists.

An exhibition dedicated to two friends, to the fecund creative exchange of two cultural references of the Catalan identity that grew together as artists and that reflects the decisive role of the Mallorcan photographer in the shaping of the public image of Maria del Mar Bonet.

The Grandma visits the exposition, Palau Robert

The exhibition Maria del Mar Bonet in the eyes of Toni Catany, curated by Antoni Garau and Pep Dengra, is being organized by the Direcció General de Difusió de la Generalitat de Catalunya and the Fundació Toni Catany, which produced it with the support of the Ajuntament de Llucmajor.

From the photographs of Toni Catany, the exhibition explains the struggle of two committed people, of extraordinary creativity, both advocates of identity, language and the Mediterranean and shows a common trajectory, which began when the singer started his musical career at the Setze Jutges in Barcelona. Together they dive in the cultural Barcelona of the 70, in different fields but always maintaining close collaboration. Literature, especially poetry, music and art, united the two friends, who exchanged suggestions, preferences and readings.

The discography of Maria del Mart Bonet is the conductor of the show that presents 180 works (discs, posters, photographs). Catany was the author of more than 60% of the covers of his albums, posters and photographs. The exhibition is structured in the following areas: A look in love, In the eyes of the friend, Salmaia, Portraits and overseas, 2017.

Miquel Bezares, President of the Fundació Toni Catany says about this exposition:

In the 1960s Toni Catany arrived in Barcelona and settled down there to start an extraordinary photographic work. He soon became a privileged witness of many cultural events and historical events. Between these events, there was also the start of an artistic career, which was also exceptional, the career of Maria del Mar Bonet, with whom our photographer started a close friendship, which, like many friendships, had to go through all the colours of affection, from the first and uncertain love to the intensely fraternal bond.

Since the start of this unconditional bond, there is a Maria del Mar Bonet that was created by the eyes of Toni Catany. It exists because he looked at her and taught her how to look at herself. To see herself through the eyes of a friend. Because if we usually say 'the camera loves you' to point out that someone is photogenic, in the case of Bonet we have the certainty that it was not just the device that the photographer was holding in his hands what loved her, but, and above all -above her strict beauty and the mechanical fidelity of the lens- that it was the friend himself, who put all his love into it. His loving look.

In 2017 it has been 50 years since the beginning of Maria del Mar's career, and so, the Fundació Toni Catany wanted to join the commemoration by organizing this exhibition dedicated to the two friends and their creative exchanges. We owed it to Catany and we owed it to Bonet.

More information: Maria del Mar Bonet

Una mirada enamorada / A look full of love

Barcelona. Last years of the 60's. They are young. Very young. They are just finding out what they want to be. And the first look of Catany, no doubt fascinated by the beauty of Bonet, was a clear and loving look.

Maria del Mar Bonet

The unconditional approach that started in those first meetings, conditioned by the intense light that only a hectic heart can have, had to become the best basis for the construction of a friendship that was long lasting and, from an artistic point of view, very fruitful.

Maria del Mar Bonet said about Toni Catany:  

One day he came to my house, in Palma, and took a picture of me. I had my hair on a braid and had a kitten. We started talking and I told him that I wanted to go study pottery in Barcelona, and he was already there because he was studying a specialisation course. He did that to make his family happy, he did not like it at all, while he slowly started taking photographs, shaping his vocation. He suggested that I contacted him when I arrived in Barcelona, and I did it. When I first started singing, I took him towards the world of the song.

Als ulls de l'amic / In the eyes of a friend

It would be fair to say that the professional and artistic image of Maria del Mar Bonet was created by Toni Catany. Bonet answers to the eyes of her friend with a look that is as loving as his and that becomes, over time, the singular process means to learn to see herself, to discover and recognise herself physically, guided by the advice and suggestions of Catany, or oriented by his aesthetic opinions.

Catany also takes part in the graphic design of the albums and promotional posters of Bonet. Whether the album has a portrait made by the photographer or another design, the look and the opinion of the friend operate in the construction of the image. Or it is the product of the always fertile joint work and artistic exchange between both of them.

Si véns prest, 1969

Barcelona is the setting of the beginning of a long-lasting and artistically fruitful friendship. The young Catany and Bonet share their days in the city and also on the island. She poses for the camera for him, and some of the photographs are included in the private and personal archive of the photographer, witness of a time of discoveries, smiles and complicity. Some of these photographs are kept hidden from her, his friend, in the same way that one would hide a feeling or a treasure.

Salmaia

The water of the fountain has become salmaia when it becomes salty. The adjective was nominalised by Maria del Mar Bonet to give name to the album of the same title, published in 1995, which she defined as a mixture of fresh water and salt water, or the mixture of Italian, Greek and Turkish songs that were in the album. In the same way, salmaia could be understood as the meeting point of the river and the sea that were, for many years, the photographer and the singer. A space for artistic exchange in which music, words, the scenes, the themes, and the looks blend, suddenly come together, or result in subtle correspondences. Some expressions of this fertile exchange are shown in this exhibition as the central theme.

Maria del Mar Bonet (Miró), 1974

The singer came in contact with the poetry of Bartomeu Rosselló-Porcel through Salvador Espriu and Toni Catany and he sang some poems that have become essential issues in the Maria del Mar discography.

Maria del Mar Bonet & Mercè Verdaguer, her mother

We know that Maria del Mar Bonet discovered the poetry of Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel at the house of the photographer. She had to make the music for some of his poems, which have become famous songs.

Salvador Espriu, who was companion of the late Mallorcan poet, received in his home the two friends on February 22, 1968. Bonet went there to sing some of her songs to him (Catany, who went with her, wrote in his diary that the poet especially appreciated Què volen aquesta gent?, El majoral and Sa núvia d'Aljandar). Literature, especially poetry, music and art connect from the beginning the two friends, who exchange discoveries, preferences and readings.

Salvador Espriu said about Bonet in 1974:

Maria del Mar Bonet has interpreted like no one else the poetic world of Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel. Because she understands and loves it, she interprets it like no one else and gets to its core, to its penetrating ardour. [...] Toni Catany and the other collaborators, the names of which I do not know, have also executed their respective duties with a diligent success.

A l' Olympia, 1975

Unveil photos of the recital of Bonet, who shared the stage with Toti Soler and Ovidi Montllor, in the Olympia concert hall in Paris. The Valencian poet Vicent Andrés Estellés attended the concert. The concert was recorded and published as an album in November of the same year.

Saba de terrer, 1979

From Paris to Llucmajor. At the Olympia. Maria del Mar had sung Mallorcan folk songs among other kinds of songs. In the expression of popular culture and art of the Catalan Countries there is another connection between the photographer and the singer, who share the idea of national building based on the local things, and who enjoy to go through and to recognise the accents and the colours of the Mediterraneanism.

From Llucmajor to the world. The poetry of Maria Antònia Salvà, the photographs of Tomàs Montserrat or a florera become, then, essential elements of the incessant and enriching exchange that the friends have from the common passion.

Cançons de la Mediterrània, 1982

The photographer and the singer opt for the culture and art of the Catalan Countries, for the idea of ​​national construction from what is local and are recognized in the accents and colors of mediterranean origin.

Jardí tancat, 1981

For the pictures of this album, dedicated to poets and poems of the Mallorcan school such as Maria Antònia Salvà, Toni Catany photographed his friend in a highly symbolic place that both of them particularly appreciated: Raixa. It was there where he took one of the most emblematic and iconic photographs of our artist. 

Bon viatge faci la cadernera

The world of stories is very present in Bonet i Catany since its infancy. These popular stories have been used for songs by Maria del Mar and for a photographic series like the one presented in the exhibition.

Claire Fontaine visits the exposition, Palau Robert

Salmaia, 1995

The Mediterranean, Raixa, the sanctuary of Gràcia, Cadaqués and Cap de Creus, another of the legendary scenarios for our artists. The places of meeting and return. The places of the salmaia.

Cavall de foc, 1999

We have seen that the artistic will is intense, both in Catany and Bonet, and sometimes it leads them to explore other ways of excange to try out various kinds of expression that are not strictly their own. The synergies can be, at times, surprising or certainly wonderful. Bonet shows his pictorial facet on the cover of this disc and sometimes approaches the language of the photographer friend, discovering new forms of expression beyond the song.

Portraits and overseas, 2017

Selection of twenty-two portraits of the singer of great beauty, unpublished and other best known, made with different techniques such as calotypes, transported polaroids and colored originals.

The exhibition tour ends at the Ultramar scope, 2017. This is Bonet's latest recording so far. Catany contributed to the search for Cuban music and tones. Unfortunately, he left us before the album came out.

There is, finally, the music, that connects the two friends. The exchange of musical discoveries and recommendations was constant. Listening to songs next to each other became, over the years, a daily and stimulating ritual. They had talked about the album Ultramar, the last one of Bonet up until now, but Catany did not get to hear it. The text of the song Amorosa Guajira, which the singer found by chance in the songbook of Pare Ginard and that ended up being a posthumous tribute to her friend from Llucmajor, became one of those magical coincidences that only the power of art and the force of an unconditional friendship can cause.

Maria del Mar Bonet says about Toni Catany:

The photographs were taken at the house of the designer Francesc Guitart and Montserrat Xicola, in Barcelona.That was the first time that Toni made me pose like that, sitting. Francesc Guitart and he had the idea of the photographs, one above the other. It was a cover that had a lot of impact. That image was not common at all, it was something else, with that green tone... he took some more pictures of me that ended up in his exhibitions, including one in which I had my hair in a bun. For many years I did not like the portraits that other photographers made me. Only his.

The exhibition presents the audiovisual of Eva Vilamala Toni Catany in voice of Maria del Mar Bonet that gathers the influences between the two artists, the shared tastes and sensibilities that will give fruit in the work of both.

More information: @mmarbonet

I have no secret or magic formula to take my photos.

Toni Catany

JOAN MIRÓ, URBAN SURREALIST PICTORIAL LANGUAGE

Jordi & The Grandma in Can Mercader, Cornellà

Yesterday, The Grandma celebrated Christmas Day on her own. She is not a believer although she enjoys this day in a cultural way.

In the morning, she went to homage her past relatives and friends in a quiet and large place in the most popular Jewish mountain of the city. In the same place, she also could homage other people who died on a day like yesterday, like Francesc Macià and Joan Miró.

After this emotive visit, The Grandma went to The Miró Foundation where she had a private visit to enjoy on a closed day for the public but open for her and her closer friends.

Christmas is a time where you receive news from people who you remember but one day you lost his/her clue until they appear again in your life. The Grandma received some news from Jordi, an excellent writer interested in environment, who shared some wonderful moments with The Grandma and other unforgettable friends, learning English under some amazing palm trees in the city of Cornelianus.

In the afternoon, The Grandma studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 53).

More information: Pronouns 1 I & II

Joan Miró i Ferrà (20 April 1893-25 December 1983) was a Catalan, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.

Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an assassination of painting in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.

Joan Miró

Born into a family of a goldsmith and a watchmaker, Miró grew up in the Barri Gòtic neighbourhood of Barcelona. The Miró surname indicates Jewish roots, the terms marrano or converso describe Iberian Jews who converted to Christianity.

His father was Miquel Miró Adzerias and his mother was Dolors Ferrà. He began drawing classes at the age of seven at a private school at Carrer del Regomir 13, a medieval mansion. To the dismay of his father, he enrolled at the fine art academy at La Llotja in 1907.He studied at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc and he had his first solo show in 1918 at the Galeries Dalmau, where his work was ridiculed and defaced. Inspired by Fauve and Cubist exhibitions in Barcelona and abroad, Miró was drawn towards the arts community that was gathering in Montparnasse and in 1920 moved to Paris, but continued to spend his summers in Catalonia.

Miró initially went to business school as well as art school. He began his working career as a clerk when he was a teenager, although he abandoned the business world completely for art after suffering a nervous breakdown. His early art, like that of the similarly influenced Fauves and Cubists, was inspired by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne. The resemblance of Miró's work to that of the intermediate generation of the avant-garde has led scholars to dub this period his Catalan Fauvist period.

More information: Fundació Joan Miró

A few years after Miró’s 1918 Barcelona solo exhibition, he settled in Paris where he finished a number of paintings that he had begun on his parents’ summer home and farm in Mont-roig del Camp. One such painting, The Farm, showed a transition to a more individual style of painting and certain nationalistic qualities. Miró annually returned to Mont-roig and developed a symbolism and nationalism that would stick with him throughout his career. Two of Miró’s first works classified as Surrealist, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) and The Tilled Field, employ the symbolic language that was to dominate the art of the next decade.

In 1924, Miró joined the Surrealist group. The already symbolic and poetic nature of Miró’s work, as well as the dualities and contradictions inherent to it, fit well within the context of dream-like automatism espoused by the group.

Joan Miró

Much of Miró’s work lost the cluttered chaotic lack of focus that had defined his work thus far, and he experimented with collage and the process of painting within his work so as to reject the framing that traditional painting provided.

This antagonistic attitude towards painting manifested itself when Miró referred to his work in 1924 ambiguously as x in a letter to poet friend Michel Leiris. The paintings that came out of this period were eventually dubbed Miró’s dream paintings.

Miró married Pilar Juncosa in Palma (Majorca) on 12 October 1929. Their daughter, María Dolores Miró, was born on 17 July 1930.

In 1931, Pierre Matisse opened an art gallery in New York City. The Pierre Matisse Gallery, which existed until Matisse's death in 1989, became an influential part of the Modern art movement in America. From the outset Matisse represented Joan Miró and introduced his work to the United States market by frequently exhibiting Miró's work in New York.

More information: Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró

Until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Miró habitually returned to Catalonia in the summers. Once the war began, he was unable to return home. Unlike many of his surrealist contemporaries, Miró had previously preferred to stay away from explicitly political commentary in his work. Though a sense of Catalan nationalism pervaded his earliest surreal landscapes and Head of a Catalan Peasant, it was not until Spain's Republican government commissioned him to paint the mural, The Reaper , for the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition, that Miró’s work took on a politically charged meaning.

In 1939, with Germany’s invasion of France looming, Miró relocated to Varengeville in Normandy, and on 20 May of the following year, as Germans invaded Paris, he narrowly fled to Spain, now controlled by Francisco Franco, for the duration of the Vichy Regime’s rule.

More information: The Art Story

In Varengeville, Palma, and Mont-roig, between 1940 and 1941, Miró created the twenty-three gouache series Constellations. Revolving around celestial symbolism, Constellations earned the artist praise from André Breton, who seventeen years later wrote a series of poems, named after and inspired by Miró's series. Features of this work revealed a shifting focus to the subjects of women, birds, and the moon, which would dominate his iconography for much of the rest of his career.

Joan Miró

In 1974, Miró created a tapestry for the World Trade Center in New York City together with the Catalan artist Josep Royo. He had initially refused to do a tapestry, then he learned the craft from Royo and the two artists produced several works together. His World Trade Center Tapestry was displayed at the buildingand was one of the most expensive works of art lost during the September 11 attacks.

In 1977, Miró and Royo finished a tapestry to be exhibited in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

In 1981, Miró's The Sun, the Moon and One Star -later renamed Miró's Chicago- was unveiled. This large, mixed media sculpture is situated outdoors in the downtown Loop area of Chicago, across the street from another large public sculpture, the Chicago Picasso. Miró had created a bronze model of The Sun, the Moon and One Star in 1967. The maquette now resides in the Milwaukee Art Museum.

In 1979 Miró received a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Barcelona. The artist, who suffered from heart failure, died in his home in Palma (Majorca) on 25 December 1983. He was later interred in the Montjuïc Cemetery in Barcelona.

More information: Artsy

His early modernist works include Portrait of Vincent Nubiola (1917), Siurana (the path), Nord-Sud (1917) and Painting of Toledo. These works show the influence of Cézanne, and fill the canvas with a colorful surface and a more painterly treatment than the hard-edge style of most of his later works. In Nord-Sud, the literary newspaper of that name appears in the still life, a compositional device common in cubist compositions, but also a reference to the literary and avant-garde interests of the painter.

Starting in 1920, Miró developed a very precise style, picking out every element in isolation and detail and arranging them in deliberate composition. These works, including House with Palm Tree (1918), Nude with a Mirror (1919), Horse, Pipe and Red Flower (1920), and The Table-Still Life with Rabbit (1920), show the clear influence of Cubism, although in a restrained way, being applied to only a portion of the subject. For example, The Farmer's Wife (1922–23), is realistic, but some sections are stylized or deformed, such as the treatment of the woman's feet, which are enlarged and flattened.

Maria del Mar Bonet & Joan Miró

The culmination of this style was The Farm (1921–22). The rural Catalan scene it depicts is augmented by an avant-garde French newspaper in the center, showing Miró sees this work transformed by the Modernist theories he had been exposed to in Paris.

The concentration on each element as equally important was a key step towards generating a pictorial sign for each element. The background is rendered in flat or patterned in simple areas, highlighting the separation of figure and ground, which would become important in his mature style.

Miró made many attempts to promote this work, but his surrealist colleagues found it too realistic and apparently conventional, and so he soon turned to a more explicitly surrealist approach.

In 1922, Miró explored abstracted, strongly coloured surrealism in at least one painting.  From the summer of 1923 in Mont-roig, Miró began a key set of paintings where abstracted pictorial signs, rather than the realistic representations used in The Farm, are predominant. In The Tilled Field, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) and Pastoral (1923–24), these flat shapes and lines, mostly black or strongly coloured, suggest the subjects, sometimes quite cryptically. For Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), Miró represents the hunter with a combination of signs: a triangle for the head, curved lines for the moustache, angular lines for the body. So encoded is this work that at a later time Miró provided a precise explanation of the signs used.

More information: Fem Turisme

Through the mid-1920s Miró developed the pictorial sign language which would be central throughout the rest of his career.

In Paris, under the influence of poets and writers, he developed his unique style: organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. Generally thought of as a Surrealist because of his interest in automatism and the use of sexual symbols , for example, ovoids with wavy lines emanating from them, Miró's style was influenced in varying degrees by Surrealism and Dada, yet he rejected membership in any artistic movement in the interwar European years. André Breton described him as the most Surrealist of us all.

Miró's surrealist origins evolved out of repression much like all surrealist and magic realist work, especially because of his Catalan ethnicity, which was subject to special persecution by the Franco regime. Also, Joan Miró was well aware of Haitian Voodoo art and Cuban Santería religion through his travels before going into exile. This led to his signature style of art making.

In the final decades of his life Miró accelerated his work in different media, producing hundreds of ceramics, including the Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun at the UNESCO building in Paris. He also made temporary window paintings, on glass, for an exhibit. In the last years of his life Miró wrote his most radical and least known ideas, exploring the possibilities of gas sculpture and four-dimensional painting.

More information: The Guardian

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul

but executed with clinical coolness.

Joan Miro