Page 308 - The Secret Museum

surrealist work, and may have enjoyed the element of surprise.

Once it was finished, he and Artigas signed the mural on the bottom right.

Artigas’s son travelled to New York with the tiles and hung them in the gallery,
where they have been ever since. The mural delighted everyone. Messer immediately
sent a telegram to Miró, who was in Mallorca, saying, ‘Overwhelmed by the beauty
of your mural stop hope very much that you may be present at its unvailing [sic] May
18th.’

A party was thrown on 18 May 1967 to celebrate the mural, which was officially
unveiled at 9.30 p.m. Miró was there. Harry F. Guggenheim paid tribute to his wife
and said how instrumental she had been in shaping the growth of the museum when it

first opened. Thomas Messer observed, ‘Besides enriching the collection, the mural,
through its permanent place on the first wall encountered in ascending the museum’s
spiral ramp, will ever remain a dramatic visual accent.’ A former colleague of
Alicia’s wrote an article in the magazine Newsday that Miró’s colours and shapes
brought ‘a light-hearted, gay sort of innocence to his highly sophisticated work. In
short, I can’t think of any artist better suited to do a mural dedicated to “Miss P”.’

After the ceremony, Messer wrote to Miró, ‘to confirm once again how proud and
happy we are to count the Alicia mural among the museum’s treasures.’ To Artigas,

he wrote how ‘moving’ and ‘satisfactory’ the unveiling occasion had been and how
well the mural worked in the museum: ‘The somber monumental surface glows from
the white walls of the building, creating a strong and completely resolved unit of its
own.’

For many years, the mural was the first thing visitors to the museum would see.
Anyone who knew that Alicia was a tribute to Alicia Patterson Guggenheim may have
wondered why Miró had woven the name Alice into his abstract creation of shapes
and colours, rather than Alicia. Miró was quite mysterious about this.

I read letters that discussed the decision to include Alicia’s name in the mural, as
Guggenheim had suggested. Messer had nervously asked, by letter, ‘whether the “A”

of Alicia’s name might be allowed to enter your thoughts to perhaps find its way into
the surface of the world in ever so discreet, indirect and elliptical a manner’. To his
relief, Miró replied right away, ‘I myself feel that inscribing the name Alice on this
fresco offers me new possibilities and new means of expression … we will soon
begin the work.’

Messer did later suggest to Miró in a letter that he had misspelt Alicia’s name:
‘Before it is too late, could you allow me to bring again to your attention that the
desired name is Alicia. I am sure that this will make little difference to your

compositional and formal explorations, and of course matters a great deal to us.’
Miró didn’t reply, but clearly wasn’t up for changing anything. When Messer once
asked him about it in person, ‘He merely returned a puckish smile accompanied by an
indefinable grunt.’ In the end, it did not matter: everyone loved the mural.