The man who built it also built the pavilion that held Guernica, and one of its exhibits is upstairs

There is a low white building on the shoulder of Montjuïc that most visitors file as the Miró museum, which it is, and walk out of thinking about the paintings, which is fair.

The building is the more unlikely object, and the Fundació publishes the whole chain that produced it. It runs from a temporary pavilion in Paris in 1937 to a hill in Barcelona in 1975, by way of Harvard.

Paris, 1937

In 1937, in the middle of the Civil War, the Spanish Republic put up a pavilion at the World Fair in Paris. It was designed by Josep Lluís Sert with Luis Lacasa.

Here is the Fundació’s own sentence about what was inside it:

its exhibits included Picasso’s Guernica, Miró’s The Reaper (Catalan Peasant in Revolt) and Calder’s Mercury Fountain, which is now on display at the Fundació Joan Miró.

Read the end of that again. One of the exhibits from that pavilion is in this building. Alexander Calder’s Mercury Fountain, made for a Republic that was losing a war, in a pavilion designed by the man who would design this museum.

Miró’s contribution to the same pavilion has not survived. Picasso’s went on to become the most famous painting of the twentieth century. Calder’s went, eventually, up a hill in Barcelona.

How it got here we cannot tell you. The Fundació’s catalogue record for the fountain is behind a protection layer we could not get through, and none of its open pages explains the route. So: it is there, the Fundació says where it came from, and the middle of the story is a gap we are declaring rather than filling.

Exile, and Gropius

Two years after the pavilion, the Republic was gone.

In late June 1939 he went into exile in the United States, thanks to the efforts of Walter Gropius, who invited him to give a series of lectures.

Gropius — the founder of the Bauhaus, himself a refugee from another fascism, by then at Harvard. Some years later, the Fundació notes, Sert succeeded Gropius as dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, from 1953 to 1969.

And from that office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he designed two buildings for the friends he had left behind: Miró’s studio in Palma de Mallorca, in 1955, and the Fondation Maeght, from 1959 to 1964.

So by the time anybody proposed a Miró museum in Barcelona, Sert had already built Miró a workshop and built the model for the museum, from the wrong side of an ocean.

The building, and the brief Miró gave him

In 1972 the Fundació was legally constituted in Barcelona and Sert was commissioned. The building opened to the public on 10 June 1975.

The Fundació prints the client’s brief, and it is the best single sentence for standing in the courtyard with:

This museum must be a living place, without any pretensions to monumentality, human, with a great variety of spaces.

Which tells you what to look for: no grand staircase, no axis, no room that announces itself. Instead a sequence of differently proportioned spaces, a lot of them lit from above by those quarter-cylinder lanterns, and courtyards that keep letting the hill back in.

It has been enlarged twice — in 1988 and 2000 — both times by Jaume Freixa, whom the Fundació describes as a student and collaborator of Sert’s who kept the original aesthetic. Most accounts mention one extension. There were two.

One date to be careful with: the Fundació’s headline pages say opened to the public on 10 June 1975, while its own timeline calls 1976 the official opening. We use 1975 and tell you the other exists.

What the collection is, and what we will not tell you about it

The Fundació says the institution was personally set up by Joan Miró, and that its initial holdings consisted mainly of his private collection — assembled with the aim of a living Miró space in Barcelona, open to the world and linked to young artists.

It publishes no number of works. Every figure you will read for the size of this collection came from somewhere that also did not know, so we are leaving the space blank.

The three Mirós you can see for nothing

The Fundació’s own biography timeline names them, and between them they are a small tour of the city.

• 1970 — a monumental ceramic mural for Barcelona Airport, made in conjunction with Artigas. Not a solo Miró: Josep Llorens Artigas was the ceramist, and this is the one everybody arriving in Barcelona walks past.
• 1976 — the ceramic paving at Pla de l’Os, on La Rambla, which is the one under your feet in the middle of the crowd.
• 1982 — Woman and Bird, in the Parc de Joan Miró, on the former site of the city slaughterhouse. Note the year: 1982, not the 1983 that circulates.

And a fourth, from 1983, in the courtyard of the city hall on Plaça de Sant Jaume, which you walk across on any route through the Gothic Quarter.

What we could not find out

• Why the building is on Montjuïc. Nothing on the Fundació’s site explains the choice of site. It is an obvious question and we have no answer for it.
• The founding year of Espai 13, the space for young artists. The Fundació confirms the Espai 10 to Espai 13 lineage and an anniversary, but publishes no start year we could open.
• How the Mercury Fountain arrived. As above.

Three gaps in one page is more than we like. It is also what the sources support, and the alternative is the version where somebody makes up a nice reason for the site.

Fitting it into an afternoon

Blunt about the trade, because this hill is full of them.

The Fundació is a half-day building if you take it seriously, and it is a hundred metres from the top of the funicular. So is the national museum, which is another half day. So is the castle.

An afternoon on Montjuïc holds one of those, plus the walking. Choosing the Fundació means not doing the castle, and it is worth doing deliberately rather than discovering at four o’clock — see is Montjuïc worth it.

If your interest is architecture more than painting, there is an argument for going in anyway: this and the German pavilion are the two twentieth-century buildings on the hill that people travel to see, and they are fifteen minutes apart.

We are not printing admission arrangements or hours. They change; the Fundació publishes them.

Where our walk goes

Our Montjuïc walking tour passes the Fundació and does not go in — two and a half hours is the fairground, the castle and the quarry behind it, and that sequence is the argument the walk exists to make.

But it stops outside long enough for the thing this page is about, because it belongs to the same afternoon. A hill that held a world’s fair in 1929, shot the president of the Catalan government in 1940, and in 1975 received a museum built by the man who had designed the Republic’s pavilion in Paris, is not a collection of separate attractions. It is one story with the same people walking through it.

Getting up here: how to get to Montjuïc. What else is on it: the gardens.

The other architect-designed pavilion on this hill, and the one that gets confused with this story, is the German pavilion of 1929 — which the Generalitat protects as a new building rather than a reconstruction.