The first inkling that Joan Miró’s mother had about Henri Matisse’s influence on her son was when her eggs started to go missing.
“To the great annoyance of my mother, who complains about the cost of food, I have changed my method of preparing my canvases,” Miró wrote in 1918. “I prepare them with egg yolks in line with a recipe … of Matisse.”
More than a decade later, the Catalan Spanish painter, and Matisse, who was 23 years older, forged an enduring but little-known friendship that was based on a seemingly unlikely mutual admiration between the Fauvist and the surrealist.
Matisse’s great friendship and rivalry with another Spaniard, Pablo Picasso, is well known, but now an exhibition in Barcelona suggests that he drew key inspiration from Miró at a time when the elder painter was stuck in an artistic crisis.
The exhibition, MiróMatisse, más allá de las imágenes (Beyond the images), which runs until February 9 in the Fundació Joan Miró, is showing 160 works highlighting the relationship between the two artists, including paintings and documents that have never been exhibited.
“We see in the letters that Matisse wrote to his son Pierre that he had a special interest in Miró,” said Véronique Dupas, the assistant curator, explaining that Pierre Matisse became Miró’s dealer in the US in 1934.
“When Matisse had a crisis the following year, he asked his son to send him two Miró works to have them to study. The works helped him overcome his struggles as they served as a source of inspiration to return to his own painting.”
Miró studied Matisse with equal fervor, noting in his sketchpad used in Barcelona between 1934 and 1936 and again in 1941 and 1942: “These canvases should be ‘Fauve’ in spirit, but in a poetic way. They should to some extent be reminiscent of Matisse’s good paintings, but surpass them and be more furiously ‘Fauve’.”
The exhibition underscores unexpected similarities in their interests and sympathies, such as their approach to drawings. In the 1930s Matisse said “my hand is led, and it seems as easy as in a dream to render it as I see it”. At around the same time, Miró produced a series of paintings on Ingres paper, later, at the end of his life, he recalled: “I was doing exactly what Matisse said, and in a more profound way than the surrealists: allowing my hand to guide me.”
Asked who were the best painters apart from himself and Picasso, Matisse replied: “Miró … yes, Miró … because he may well put any old thing on his canvas … but if he has placed a red mark in a particular spot, you can be certain that it had to be there and nowhere else … take it away, and the painting will fall apart.”
MiróMatisse. Beyond the Images is at the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, until February 9
Isambard Wilkinson is the Spain correspondent for The Times of London
