BARCELONA.- Joan Miró and Antoni Gaudí both attended the drawing classes held at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc in Barcelona around the 1910s, when Miró was just beginning his art studies and Gaudí was already a renowned architect. Although they never met personally, they have many features in common. The Miró-Gaudí-Gomis exhibition maps these affinities through the gaze of Joaquim Gomis, a personal friend of Miró’s and an avid promoter of Gaudí's work. His photographs captured the precursory character of both artists and provided a new interpretation of their work that highlighted the significant coincidences between the two.

I think of Gaudí,
who turned a stone into a field of stars,
with a chrysanthemum in the middle. --Joan Miró

Miró was particularly drawn to the rhythm and structure of Gaudí's architecture, and also shared his urge to push the boundaries of existing procedures and materials. Both viewed nature as the generating force behind their creations. Gaudí sought inspiration in nature to produce ornaments as well as structural elements. Some of his projects appear to have emerged from the striking contours of Montserrat, the mountain so deeply embedded in the Catalan imagination for its magical qualities. For Miró, nature was an essential element in his visual and poetic conception. In an interview with Rosamond Bernier in 1956, Miró said of Mont-roig, the small village in the Camp de Tarragona where he had a farm house, “It is a powerful, rocky landscape. The shapes of the mountains remind me of the ones in Montserrat, which have always captivated me; they have the same vinegar-red hue as the ones in Montroig. Before I started working with ceramics, I painted directly on huge boulders in order to merge into the elements in this landscape by leaving my mark on them.”

Following Gaudí’s example, Miró cast objects from his everyday surroundings and from nature, working them into his sculptures. Through their assemblage, he turned them into fantastic creatures, as we can see in the selection of eight sculptures featured in the show. He was also drawn to trencadís, a folk craft involving repurposed tile shards which he used in his monumental and public pieces and evoked in the Gaudí Series, a collection of 21 prints that he produced as a tribute to the architect in 1979 and a selection of which is included in the exhibition.

It would be fascinating to speculate
about new local materials and inlaid materials,
as Gaudí did. It would all be determined
by the architecture and the landscape.
We could go a long way with these speculations. --Letter from Miró to Sert, 18/09/1960

When Miró and the ceramist Josep Llorens Artigas were asked to design the murals for UNESCO in Paris, they sought inspiration in prehistoric art, in the Romanesque, and in Gaudí’s architecture. A visit to the Park Güell in Barcelona provided Miró with the strength and the atmosphere he needed to carry out the project: “[...] my imagination was struck there by an immense disk hollowed out in a wall and uncovering the bare rock below, which was very similar to what I was planning to engrave and paint on the big wall. I took this encounter as a confirmation, a sign of encouragement…”

In the same spirit, in the Labyrinth at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Miró and Artigas brought to life an imaginative world inhabited by creatures and characters that was strongly reminiscent of the Park Güell. Miró also echoed Gaudí in his choice of procedures and materials for monumental and public projects such as the Pla de l’Os Mosaic (1976) on the Ramblas and the statue in the Parc de l’Escorxador titled Woman and Bird (1981-1982), both in Barcelona; and Moon, Sun and a Star (Miss Chicago) (1981) at Brunswick Building Plaza in Chicago, featured in the exhibition using documentary material.

In Miró-Gaudí-Gomis, the series of photographs that Gomis took of Gaudí’s architecture interact directly with Miró’s sculptures. Gomis, a renowned photographer, a personal friend of Miró’s and the first president of the Fundació Joan Miró, was also a key figure in the effort to reappraise Gaudí and his work: as an example, in 1952 he founded the Amics de Gaudí association, of which he was also the first president. In 1956, the association held the Gaudí exhibition at the Saló del Tinell in Barcelona, displaying large-format photographs of the architect’s work that Gomis had taken in the 1940s. Part of these photographs were included in the exhibition that MoMA devoted to Antoni Gaudí in 1957.

The Fundació recently explored the relationship between Gaudí, Gomis and another artist – in this case, Lina Bo Bardi – in a small-scale exhibition held in the photography gallery located in the foyer. Thanks to an agreement between the heirs of Joaquim Gomis and the Catalan Government, the Fundació Joan Miró will be in charge of managing the Gomis Archive, seeking to draw broader attention to the collection and promote research of its content.

Some of the photographs on display at the Miró-Gaudí-Gomis exhibition were published in what Gomis referred to as his fotoscops, a collection of photo books published in the 1950s with the aim of supporting and raising awareness of Gaudí’s work at a time when the prevalence of the so-called International Style led many to view Gaudí’s architecture as an aberration of sorts. Sponsored by Joan Prats and also featuring other artists such as Miró, these publications steer away from a strictly intellectual approach to art, revealing its more human dimension. In a seemingly intuitive way, Gomis succeeded in capturing the beauty and poetry in the work of these artists, both of whom, drawn to the mysterious power of nature, imbued their works with a magical quality which is brought to the fore in this exhibition.