Sert-Miró 2015
Sert-MiróAlfredo Puente
The friendship between Josep Lluís Sert and Joan Miró began in the nineteen thirties, when both were members of the Amics de l’Art Nou group of ‘friends of the new art’, and gave rise, among other creations, to Sert’s 1955 scheme for the painter’s studio in Palma de Mallorca, construction of which was completed by the end of 1956. The space designed by Sert, a great diaphanous bay, dominated his friend Miró for more than three years, the length of time it took the artist to produce his first work in the place: a mural for a wall in Sert’s house in Cambridge (Massachusetts).
The Miró studio was Sert’s first work in Spain, where he had been banned from working as an architect by the Franco dictatorship, since going into exile at the end of the Civil War. In fact, Pilar Juncosa, Joan Miró’s wife, was the real instigator of the commission, as she herself recalled: ‘When we came to live in Palma I wrote a letter to Sert, in secret, without Joan knowing, because he didn’t want to write to him; he said that he would surely be too busy in America.’
The materials of which the studio is formed – concrete, stone and clay – bring together some of the characteristic features of the modern movement and post-Corbusier architecture with clear signs of the maturity of Sert and his architectural language in a building deeply sensitive to its geographical context, to the Balearic architectural tradition and to the spirit of Joan Miró.
In 2018, the Fundació Miró invited Juan Baraja carry out a photographic project on this space, finally consecrated as the great creative workshop of Miró’s art until his death in 1983.
Alfredo Puente, FCAYC.