Nearly-spring in Barcelona: Joan Miró, Picasso, raw silk, and tapas galore

Traversing 20,000 steps worth of textured tiles in Barcelona.

Mar 13, 2024

*This email may be truncated in your inbox. To make sure you are reading the entire post, please move yourself along to a web browser!

The first time I set foot in Barcelona, in spring of 2022, I was on a weekend trip with two of my wonderful friends and my fiancé. While visiting La Sagrada Familia (a place that had been on my architecture bucket list for longer than I can quantify), I realized that my camera was no longer firmly strapped to my body. Within ten minutes of being inside the church, I had either lost it in the security check, or someone had cut the strap while I was wearing it. This moment is on my greatest-mysteries-of-my-life list! Where the heck did that camera go? The next morning, a bird leaned its feathered body over a beautiful Barcelona balcony and sent its poop straight to the top of my head. I was fully swearing off Barcelona, deeming it as my unlucky place. (All of this aside, it was still a fantastic trip and I somehow didn’t let either incident get me down. It also helped that the camera was insured.)

I drove to Barcelona in December in an attempt to see a wedding dress in person, as a part of a very long saga related to intense indecision. “A dress” became *the dress.* So, we got two quick weekend trips to a city that is no longer A Place of Curses.

I thought I’d share a little about my trip this month, which included scootering around in the sunshine, eating a ton of tapas and creme-filled desserts, and visiting the Joan Miró museum for the last weekend of a monumental exhibition.

A quick note about Catalonian romanticism:

Three things on my life criteria list (besides eating delicious food, see below) are: admiring the built environment’s interesting textures, hopping around a new city via scooter, and collecting art objects. Barcelona has a heavy dose of all three of these things, which meant that I felt absolutely in my element. People like to talk about how invigorated they feel when they are in the mountains, admiring a scenic view. While that’s nice, I would much rather be surrounded by culture and concrete! Give me buildings! I want immensity!* Barcelona suddenly feels as romantic as Paris.

Foundation Joan Miró

Surrealist artist Joan Miró had the ambitious goal of establishing a cultural center for his art to be housed, cared for, and viewed by the public for future generations. He worked diligently with his architect friend, Josep Lluís Sert, to design the art campus. It nests idyllically on a high point overlooking the city of Barcelona. To have this close collaboration of two Barcelona-born creatives was/is a true gift to Catalan culture. The foundation opened in 1975 and has since continued exhibitions, research, and cultural programming related to Miró and his close contemporaries. The building feels like the perfect vessel for modern painting and sculpture. With barrel vaulted ceilings, board-formed concrete, and a centralized courtyard, it is a scaled-up version of art in its own right.

About the exhibition, from the Foundation Miró:

The Miró-Picasso exhibition is a joint and unique project of the Fundació Joan Miró and the Museu Picasso of Barcelona that will take place simultaneously at both institutions in 2024. Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, who maintained a close friendship for more than fifty years, chose Barcelona to bequeath their work in the form of monographic art centres.
The exhibition is organized around six major chronological and thematic axes and will bring together a set of more than 250 works from public and private collections from all around the world with the aim of exhibiting, one beside the other, two artists who transformed 20th century art with their own voice and an unprecedented plastic intensity. From the time they met in 1917 in Barcelona to their last monumental projects, including the episode of the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic in Paris in 1937 or the interest in the ancestral technique of ceramics, the visitor will also discover how these two artists and friends shared many transcendental moments of their careers.
Miró-Picasso forms part of the events of the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023, which includes a total of 50 exhibitions dedicated to Picasso that will take place around the world between the autumn of 2023 and the spring of 2024.

Barcelona as Food Paradise

I ate Hungarian food for the first time, from an absolutely divine restaurant (the only one in Spain that serves this nation’s cuisine) owned by a precious husband and wife. I became a permanent fan. We were squealing and nodding in approval during every bite, really.
The Mercat de la Concepció is heaven for local meats, cheeses, and creme bunyols.
TAPS Bar filled our table with delicious tapas.
We made an Argentinean stop at Restaurant Parrilla Alfonsina, paying homage to my sweet Nana—who was born and raised in Buenos Aires—via an empanada stamped with the initial of her first name. The timing felt ultra cosmic since it would have been her birthday week.

Related Notes:

Another hobby of mine is making sure I take home with me some sort of ephemera from each trip, usually resulting in purchasing at least one postcard and one book. From Foundation Miró, I picked up The Lives of the Surrealists, abstracted postcards, and a small print of one of my favorite artworks in the exhibition:

*Collage-drawing (Homage to Prats)*, Miró, 1934.

A NYT article from October 1949 poked fun at the recent overuse of organic shapes in modern art and design. “Modern art is how you see it—or perhaps that it is all done with Miros.”

Being in Spain is always a mind flip because I accidentally speak French to Spanish people with my American accent. Always having to stop myself mid-“merci” to slide into a “gracias.” It always comes out as a frantic “mer-gracias!” Finished with a grateful smile, of course.
Josep Lluís Sert, the architect of Foundation Miró, built a “mid-century Ibiza enclave” that’s simple, yet worth drooling over. He also designed his own home in Cambridge in 1957, keeping his walls starkly white in order to make room for his friends’ art (Picasso, Miró, Calder, Léger, etc.).

*I read this quote—I want immensity—in a New Yorker article once and it has stuck with me. I couldn’t tell you who took the time to write these precious three words, but I wish I could thank them for it. My friend Bridget started her Substack, I Want Immensity, in which she talks about existing abroad in the UK, love, loss, and life. A big part of her writing features her skills in cooking (and she generously sneaks in some recipes). She has a big spirit and is a tremendously soul-hugging writer. I think she’d love skipping through the streets of Barcelona.
Places I adored visiting in Catalonia’s capital: La Sagrada Familia, Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, La Bodegueta, and Casa Milá.