Page 307 - The Secret Museum

THERE IS A CELESTIAL WORK of art inside the Guggenheim Museum in New York that

is always there, hanging on the wall of the gallery just at the beginning of the spiral
that runs up through the museum. Although it is a permanent feature of the collection,
very few people know it is there, and even fewer people have been lucky enough to
see it.

Alicia is a large, painted tile mural created by the Spanish surrealist artist Joan
Miró with the help of his friend the ceramicist Josep Lloréns Artigas and his son. It is
made out of 190 ceramic tiles, and is fairly large: taller than you, and far wider – it is
over 2.5 metres high and nearly 6 metres wide.

So, if it is so big, and adorns the wall at the entrance to the museum, how is it

possible that so few people know of its existence? Well, it lives hidden behind a
white wall, where the curators of the museum keep an eye on it through a secret
window, to make sure that it is okay.

Why have a beautiful artwork if it can rarely be seen? It wasn’t always hidden:
when the piece was first created, it was seen all the time.

Its life began with Harry F. Guggenheim, then the president of the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum. (Solomon was the uncle of both Peggy Guggenheim and Harry
F. Guggenheim).

In 1963, Harry F. Guggenheim decided to commission a brilliant memorial to his
wife, Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, who had died that year at the age of 56. He asked
the museum’s director, Thomas M. Messer, to ask Miró whether he would create

something that would reflect Alicia’s spirit.
The museum owned a lot of the artist’s work, including The Tilled Field (1923–
24). Miró was excited by the idea, and began to discuss ideas with Artigas. The two

artists were lifelong friends and collaborators. They had met in 1912 when Miró was
an art student in Barcelona and began working together in 1944. At first Miró painted
on Artigas’s vases, then Miró began to make his own sculptures; Artigas would then
translate Miró’s sculptures into clay.

Thomas M. Messer, Miró and Miro’s dealer, Mr Pierre Matisse, exchanged
letters as the Alicia project progressed. Today, these letters are in the archive of the
museum. Reading them gave me a fascinating insight into the creation of the work.
Miró was excited about creating the piece, and in 1964 he visited New York with his

wife, Pilar, to see the space the mural would fill. The couple had supper with Harry
Guggenheim. Then there was a lull. It seems that 1964 was a bad year for Miró, but
in May 1965 he wrote expressing his wish that the year to come would ‘bring us a
big smile’. It seems that, as he had hoped, things picked up.

In the summer of 1966, Miró wrote to Messer, ‘I am delighted to tell you that the
great mural has already been started. I am very hopeful about the results of this first
stage. Let’s hope that our great friend Fire will also bring us his richness and his
beauty for the next steps.’ He left it to the elements to add the finishing touches to his