Miró and the United States

A short field guide to Miró and the United States at Fundació Joan Miró. What to look for, how to move through the exhibition, and how to focus your attention in 30 to 45 minutes.

Back to Barcelona briefs

You can see this exhibition in 30 to 45 minutes if you know where to place your attention. The focus here is exchange, not chronology.

This is not a tour. It is a way of looking.

Two minute context

The exhibition is built around movement rather than influence.

Miró arrives in the United States as a fully formed artist. What he encounters is scale, freedom, and a different relationship to gesture and risk. What American artists find in Miró is permission: playfulness, symbolic thinking, and seriousness without rigidity.

The result is a continuous back and forth. Ideas and gestures cross the Atlantic, return transformed, and appear again in new forms.

Think of the show as a conversation unfolding over time.

How to look

Scale as a decision
Follow how Miró's work expands. Large formats are not decorative. They alter how the body engages with the painting. Compare this with the American works nearby.

Gesture and control
Some works feel immediate, others carefully balanced. Notice where control is held and where it is released. That tension runs through the exhibition.

Abstraction with meaning
These paintings avoid literal representation, but they are not empty. Symbols, rhythms, and repeated forms carry memory and emotion. Watch what remains stable as figuration disappears.

If you only have 30 minutes

Begin with the rooms where Miró is shown alongside American artists. Read those pairings slowly.

Then choose one large Miró work and one American painting and spend time with both. Comparison matters more here than completeness.