Fundació Joan Miró

Museum · Parc de Montjuïc (Sants-Montjuïc)Barcelona,Spain

Fourteen thousand works Miró gave away, in a low white building on Montjuïc he helped plan, lit from the roof around three courtyards.

The Fundació Joan Miró holds about fourteen thousand works the painter gave away, in a building he helped plan to keep them in. He chose the site on Montjuïc, worked on the drawings with Josep Lluís Sert, an old friend who had spent the Franco years teaching architecture in the United States, and asked for somewhere without any pretension to monumentality. What Sert built is white concrete, low, and organised as a loop of rooms of different sizes, none of them ranked above the others. The rooms wrap around three open courtyards, with an olive tree in one, and they are laid out so that you can leave at almost any point, cross a courtyard and come back somewhere else. The light arrives from the roof rather than the walls, never lands directly on a canvas, and changes with the weather and the season, so the same room is not the same twice. On the roof terrace, sculptures stand against the city and the sea. It opened in June 1975, five months before Franco died.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come on a bright day if you can — The galleries are lit from above, so an overcast sky flattens the rooms and drains the depth the building was shaped to give.
Ask about the roof terrace when you arrive — it closes in wind and rain and sometimes before the galleries do, and people regularly leave the sculptures for last and find the door shut.
The hill is part of the visit — the building sits in parkland well above the city, so arrive with time to walk the terraces around it rather than treating it as an indoor stop.

Things to do

1
Watch the ceiling instead of the walls
Pick a room with a roof scoop above it and look at the ceiling rather than the walls for a minute. You will see where the light lands, how it spreads, and why no painting in the room has a bright patch on it. Then look back at the canvases and the colour will read differently.
2
Take the roof terrace slowly
The terrace holds sculpture out in the open with Barcelona spread out below and the sea beyond it. Walk the whole surface rather than stopping at the first piece: the white walls, the ceramic floor and the pine tops around the building are as much the work as anything standing on them.
3
Sit under the olive tree in the courtyard
The central patio is open to the sky with an olive tree in the middle and benches around it. Sit for a few minutes between rooms. The noise drops, the light is direct rather than reflected, and you can hear the pines on the hillside, which is exactly the break the plan was built to give you.