A sketch by Joan Miró travels to Washington for the exhibition “Miró and the United States”

The project Miró and the United States at The Phillips Collection will be directed by its chief curator Elsa Smithgall, as a follow-up to the exhibition Miró i els Estats Units presented at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona and curated by Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale and Dolors Rodríguez Roig as part of the institution’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations. The exhibition examines the fruitful artistic conversation between Joan Miró and North American artists: how New York artists measured themselves against Miró’s experimentation, and how Miró responded to his direct encounter with the work of the Abstract Expressionist generation, still unknown in Europe. The exhibition focuses on the decades of the 1940s and 1950s, around Miró’s retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art in 1941 and 1959, and Miró’s visits to the United States, especially the first and longest in 1947, during which the piece requested on loan is located.

The purpose of Miró’s trip to New York in 1947 was to create the mural for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, his first commission for a public space after the war. The preliminary study Sketch for the mural painting of the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, which is preserved in the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca, is a vital document as it can be seen in the background of the photographs taken by Arnold Newman in Carl Holty’s workshop, where the mural was painted. The sketch plays a prominent role in the exhibition discourse as it marks a crucial moment in Joan Miró’s career, where contact with young North American artists would have a strong impact and give impetus to new directions in his own practice.