Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893, and though his work had already earned an international audience when he settled in Palma in the mid-1950s, few here, it seemed, had heard of him. Miró embraced this anonymity, setting up his studios well outside the city where he would create some of his most important works, including the triptych “Bleu I, II, III” (1961), which was, according to the German art critic Barbara Catoir, a paean to the color of Majorca’ s sky and the sea that surrounds the island.
Like the Catalan landscape of his childhood, the white plaster walls of the fisherman’s cottages, the gourd-like urns often found in Majorcan courtyards and the brightly painted folk-art figures in the tourist shops all found their way into Miró’s paintings. So, too, did the crescent-shaped vestiges of the Moors and the rhythms of the Santa Catalina market, with its fishmongers and rough-handed fishermen drinking coffee out of tiny glass tumblers.
“I invent nothing, it’s all here! That is why I have to live here!” Miró told Walter Erben, a German writer who visited him at his studio outside Palma in 1956.
To read more of this article from the New York Times:
A version of this article appeared in print on July 17, 2011, on page TR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Miró’s Majorca.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/travel/in-spain-miros-majorca.html?scp=1&sq=Joan%20Miro%20Majorca&st=cse
