The Joan Miró Foundation presents "Il était une petite pie"

The Joan Miró Foundation presents, until October 29, the exhibition Il était une petite pie. This is the second exhibition of the cycle Open the archive , through which the Fundació Joan Miró wants to share the richness of its collection of drawings, as well as the documentary heritage it preserves and researches.

Il était une petite pie. 7 chansons et 3 chansons pour Hyacinthe, by Lise Hirtz, is Joan Miró's first artist book. Hirtz, a writer linked to the surrealist circle, brings together in this collection of poems a series of simple rhyming compositions conceived as children's songs. Miró illustrates them with eight pochoirs, a printing technique that consists of generating, from a specific drawing, several openwork templates that allow the pigments to be successively applied and to obtain short prints with results close to those of a manual treatment. The book was published by Éditions Jeanne Bucher in Paris in 1928, and the printing of the text, typography and pochoirs were done by Saudé. A year later, the composer Georges Auric, to whom the collection is dedicated, set five of these poems to music.

The commission to illustrate this book came to Miró through André Breton and Paul Eluard, who sent him the poetry collection hand-copied by the former. With this collaborative experience, Miró, who since the mid-1920s yearned to go beyond the limits of painting to reach poetry, continues to experiment with the combination of image and word.

In the 1930s and 1940s, when Miró began to write long poems and the musical sense became more and more important in his work, this book appeared to him again as a source of inspiration. "May my work - declared Miró at the time - be like a poem set to music by a painter".

The exhibition Il était une petite pie in the Foundation's archive resonates with the exhibition Imaginary Friends, the project that the museum presents this spring in its temporary rooms and which wants to introduce audiences of all ages, especially children, to the imaginative and creative possibilities of contemporary art. The Joan Miró Foundation's aim is to deepen the research and dissemination of the unique fund it preserves, which is the core of all its activity. To make this centrality visible, the Joan Miró Foundation's archive of drawings, documentation and graphic and lithographic work has been located in the octagonal tower of the building, in a space integrated into the visit to the Collection. The archive's current location has an exhibition space to delve deeper into the artist's creative process and projects through the presentation of materials from the Foundation's documentary collection.