Joaquim Mir art center

Palau de Miravet

Once upon a time

a landscape painter
in love with Miravet

Palau de Miravet is the centre art of Joaquim Mir. An exhibition gallery in homage to the Catalan impressionist painter, where various copies of the artist vibrate and dialogue with the light and colors of the Ebro.

The Mir gallery

On the first floor there is the gallery with nine paintings by Joaquim Mir reproduced by Joaquim Marsal are exhibited.

“Fantasia del Ebro I” and “Fantasia del Ebro II” (at the Reina Sofía Museum) stand out, a work with which he won the Medal of Honor at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts (1930).

The frescoes

The fresco murals on the interior staircase are the work of Joaquim Marsal, who has also been in charge of the restoration and decoration of the Palau.

The frescoes represent the apotheosis of Joaquim Mir and highlight the portrait of the painter, by Ramón Casas, in a frame designed by Jujol.

Exhibition hall

On the ground floor there is a temporary exhibition hall and a permanent exhibition of the work of the Caravaggist photographer Aurelio Monge.

In the same room you can watch the filming of Miravet that Joaquim Mir recorded in 1930, restored by the Filmoteca de la Generalitat.

Joaquim Mir in Miravet

Joaquim Mir i Trinxet, Catalan landscape painter and impressionist master of color, found in Miravet a kind of arcadia and culminating inspiration of his career.

In 1929, his friend and painter Àngel Oliveras, who held a high position in the National Heritage service, recommended him to visit Miravet, “an operatic village” recognized for its castle, the hamlet on the river and the landscape.

Thus, between 1929 and 1930, Joaquim Mir carried out two intense and productive campaigns in Miravet. The result was fifty works, including canvases, sketches, notes and engravings, full of color and fantasy, which he exhibited at the Sala Parés in Barcelona collecting great success from public and critics.

Fantasia de l'Ebre II

With Miravetana’s work “Fantasia del Ebro II” he won the medal of honor at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid, the most important award of his career that he craved so much. A success celebrated by critics and the artistic community, in recognition of his work.

Fantasia de l'Ebre I

Before that he had painted for the exhibition “Fantasia de l’Ebre I“, a work that he sold at Sala Parés for 14,000 pesetas, being the most valued painter of the moment. Copies of both works can be admired in the Mir gallery of the Miravet Palau, among other exhibited works.

“Miravet’s paintings was really spectacular, both for the theme and for the explosion of color that Mir collected in his paintings: light effects, transparencies of water, typical figures of the region, castellated town…, all expressed with great fierceness, gave rise to a different exhibition of the painter, who appeared more extroverted… The audience left the room impressed, admired, by this new display of Joaquim Mir’s personality. Critics unanimously considered the exhibition astonishing and a well-deserved success.”

–Joan Anton Maragall–

Miravet's catalogue

The work of the landscape painter dedicated to Miravet is little known for its successful sales at the time and for being part of private private collections.

Francesc Miralles collects most of the catalogue in his book “Joaquim Mir al Camp de Tarragona“.

Mir exhibited during his lifetime in Paris, New York, Washington, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires and Venice. In Spain he was considered our great impressionist master, compared to Claude Monet in France. But the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship forgot it and it is not until the 70s that it begins to be rediscovered. Even so, he does not receive the recognition he had before.

His work can be found in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, the Museu de Montserrat, the Museo del Prado, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Museo Reina Sofía, among others.

Seduced by color

We must remember Joaquim Mir, that chromatic creator who helps us to perceive and discover better the beauty of the binomial color-light.

Beautiful things are necessary and, since they are necessary, they are true, Mir knew how to enjoy the sensitivity of the senses and the meaning of life. Mir was a gourmet of color. Color for Mir was the most genuine language: the delights of the softest, most contrasting, most intense tones are in Mir’s paintings, in the landscapes of Mir.

A whole range of delicate tastings of thousands of shades are present in his palette, and are transformed according to their arrangement in the space of the canvas, a wonderful work of art that the eye, the senses and the mind never tire of looking, and tasting, feeling, experimenting, since they transport us to new visions of landscapes lived and loved.

That is why we must remember the great power of Mir’s painting, not so much as a landscape painter, who has it, but as a colorist, as the creator of a new chromatic language using the colorful richness of the landscape and nature to speak to us of the goodness and flattering magic of color.

This magic is extracted from the multitude of corners presented by the different landscapes that make up our territory.

If we analyze Joaquim Mir’s way of painting throughout his pictorial creation, we observe a fact that is repeated regularly in each of his works: the use of the language of color in its most primitive state.

Looking at the sky and grasp the blue, translating it into the blue of the palette, looking the tree and see in it the thousand shades of the trunk, of the leaves, looking for the purest most natural color; Looking at the water and be enchanted by the reflections and lights of the light sliding over the surface.

The color in Mir’s palette is of a bold depth in which the relationship of the different tonalities is balanced in a natural, almost imperceptible, but constant way. The ratio of colors balances the space, as in a garden.

Mir, who has a privileged retina in which the chromatic spectrum expands and becomes the synesthetic sense that translates everything into color in a prodigious way until reaching a poetics of color, simply great.

– Joaquim Campamà –

http://www.bonart.cat/actual/seduits-pel-color-75-anys-sense-joaquim-mir/

Visit the Palau

We open our doors to art and landscape

Guided tour

The Miravet Experience guided tour will take you to discover the history of the Palau, the work of Joaquim Mir as well as the Cap de la Vila by professionals with passion and experience.

We arrange private and personalized visits to the Joaquim Mir art center, the exhibition hall and the monument-house Palau del Comanador (Ca Costa).

Also walks along the Mir route discovering the places where he painted the best known works.

656 266 398

Aurelio Monge

A little history

Joaquim Mir

Miravet’s influencer

Joaquim Mir and Miravet

Joaquim Mir was very impressed by Miravet and his people. He recorded a unique film of great documentary value, restored by the Filmoteca de la Generalitat de Catalunya and which can be viewed in the exhibition hall at Palau de Miravet.

The name Miravet was famous for its pitchers and jugs, and Joaquim Mir, with his work, made the landscape of Miravet known to a Catalan bourgeoisie who, at that time, traveled and summered at the spa of Cardó. Curious people visited “the village Mir painted”, as tourists are now attracted by Miravet’s picturesque image.

Mir in Miravet

In the words of Fina Anglès i Soronellas, promoter of the route “a walk through the senses, from nature to art” (Mir i Manent): “There are spaces in the territory that have become symbolic along the paths of art. AN AUTHOR, A CREATOR – thus capitalized – can convert, thanks to his creative work, a local landscape into universal heritage; He can endow a place with an intangible supraidentity with his gaze as an artist and fix it, with his own language, in his work, which will remain unchanged until forever”.

Places and places intellectually interpreted by artists and authors, creators and creatives, who recreate and humanize them through their respective works.

This is the case of Joaquim Mir in Miravet, who fixed his gaze on his pictorial image and almost idyllic and impossible scenery; the same one that has attracted and attracts many other anonymous artists and visitors – and not so much, as Dalí – who have passed by and left their mark on their works.

Mir’s work has given Miravet the category of symbolic and universal place, recognized everywhere and generously represented in an extensive collection that includes more than 38 paintings and illustrations.

However, Miravet gave Mir the recognition he so longed for with the award of the Medal of Honor of the Academy of Fine Arts of Madrid (1930) with his dedicated work: “Fantasia del Ebro II”.

Mir at Palau

Thanks to the collaboration of the Palau with the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, today we can enjoy a copy of the painting at the Joaquim Mir Art Centre in Miravet within the permanent collection of the Miravet Palace, with the works and copies of the local artist Joaquim Marsal, graduate in Fine Arts and professor of Art History, promoter of the Mir project in Miravet.

People of Miravet can thus feel proud of the honour of having among us one of the best painters of all time, whose painting crossed the borders of Catalonia and who, little by little, has been recognized worldwide.

Mir was a simple and close man, a painter from here, from our home, the Mediterranean and a lover of his country and its landscapes. With his canvases, brushes and pigments he became a genius of color and light. He became masterfully great!

A giant of painting.