Their paths crossed first in the Barcelona of their youth, where both attended the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc and studied under Francesc Galí. They founded the Agrupació Courbet together, sharing the rebellious energy of young artists determined to escape family expectations. Artigas, born in 1892, and Miró, following a year later in 1893, both chose art against the current of familial will, choosing the studio over the counting house, the kiln over respectability.
Between their youth and their maturity lay decades of separate journeys. Artigas travelled to Paris, where he established his studio on rue Blomet in 1924, where he moved among Marquet, Picasso, Buñuel, and Braque, where his research at the Sorbonne into Egyptian pottery and blue glazes would shape everything that followed. The Spanish Civil War forced his return to Barcelona in 1936, and there he taught ceramics at the Escuela Massana while the world burned around him.
Miró's path traced a different arc through those same decades. In 1920, he made his first journey to Paris, meeting Picasso, taking a studio at 45 rue Blomet, the same building where André Masson worked, the same address where their futures would intertwine. Throughout the 1920s, he alternated winters in Paris with summers at his family's farm in Montroig, Tarragona, where his symbolic language deepened. The Farm, finished in 1921, captured everything one felt about Spain,n whether present or absent—Ernest Hemingway would later say this, purchasing the painting for himself. By 192,4 Miró had joined the Surrealists, though he maintained his individual creative freedom, developing what he called peinture-poésie, painting-poetry, where biomorphic forms and words floated above blue expanses.
The 1930s brought darkness. As tensions mounted in Catalonia, as fascism and communism drew new battle lines over old royalist and socialist divisions, Miró's paintings grew nightmarish. Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement from 1935 presaged the civil war to come. When war arrived in 1936, Miró created The Reaper for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Exhibition, his first public mural, a distorted face, an unravelled figure representing suffering. In 1939, with Franco's victory sealed and World War II beginning, Miró fled Paris with his wife, Pilar and daughter, moving to Varengeville in Normandy. There, in January 1940, he began the Constellations, twenty-three gouaches completed in Mallorca and Montroig by September 1941, playful images of stars and circles created as an escape from fascism, war, and intolerance, as spiritual resistance when the outcome remained uncertain.
The collaboration began in 1944 from what Artigas considered waste. An unsuccessful firing in 1941 had produced pieces he thought ruined. Miró saw them and recognised the possibility where the potter saw only failure. Here begins the true story: one artist's refusal becomes another's genesis. From those rejected ceramics emerged the first period of their work together, lasting from 1944 to 1947. Artigas built a kiln specifically for Miró's studio in May 1945, though previously they had used one owned by a certain Mr Reguant. These years established the foundation for a partnership that would span four decades.
What distinguished their work was their insistence on true collaboration. Both artists emphasised that their pieces represented organic synthesis, single artworks where one could discern neither where the potter ended nor where the painter began. Artigas would shape vessels and plates, allowing them to dry for up to a month before selecting those worthy of continuation. Miró would then survey the studio, quickly identifying which forms called for his attention. The double signature became their mark, Artigas, dating his initial firing, Miró adding his name when he selected and painted a piece, sometimes years later. These temporal gaps between the two dates revealed the patient's contemplative nature in their process.
Their technical methods honoured ancient traditions while serving contemporary vision. Artigas employed wood-fired kilns, reproducing the slow firing processes of primaeval Greek pottery. The firing demanded two full days, the kilns fed continuously with pinewood. The Artigas family named their three kilns after legendary ceramists of the past, acknowledging the lineage they served. Fire, smoke, and earthen clay preserved what Artigas called the elemental integrity of ceramics, born from the union of the four elements of nature. He confessed to his friend, art critic Joan Teixidor, that his craft transformed him into a philosopher, ceramics becoming for him the purest and most abstract of all arts.
In 1953, the collaboration renewed with fresh intensity when Miró and Artigas began working together in Gallifa, where Artigas had moved his family in 1951 to establish El Raco. Artigas's son, Joan Gardy, joined them in this work. Over the next two years, they produced more than two hundred ceramic pieces. During this period, Miró's attention shifted decisively toward ceramics and sculpture, with painting temporarily receding from his primary concerns. The family kiln-building became a family endeavour. Joan Gardy remembers the moment when, still a young man, he watched his father and Miró argue about glaze temperatures with the intensity of scientists discovering new elements.
April 1956 brought photographer Sabine Weiss to Gallifa, her camera capturing the concentrated intimacy of the two artists at work. That December, the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York opened "Terres de Grand Feu," their exhibition that marked a pinnacle of recognition. The catalogue itself became an artwork, its cover and four-panel centrefold insert bearing original lithographs by Miró, printed by Mourlot Frères in France.
Then came 1957 and the UNESCO commission. Before beginning the monumental Wall of the Sun and Wall of the Moon, Miró, Artigas, and Joan Gardy made a pilgrimage together, visiting the Altamira caves, studying Catalan Romanesque painting, and examining Gaudí's architectural mosaics. Standing before those prehistoric paintings in Altamira, Miró reaffirmed his conception of ceramics in primordial terms. The ancient marks humans had pressed into stone and bone, the lines they had traced on irregular cave walls, these became his touchstones. Photographer Català-Roca, friend to both artists, would later capture Miró at Gallifa scratching surfaces with a xiz, passing brushes over pebbles and slates that nature had deposited near the studio, seeking that same elemental connection.
The UNESCO murals comprised 585 ceramic plates created in Gallifa using four tons of clay, twenty-five tons of wood, and thirty kilograms of colouring. Miró painted using a brush made of palm fronds. The knowledge of the potter proved essential, since all the colours appeared as gray-black powder before firing; only fire would reveal their true colours. The first uniformly sized square tiles failed, prompting adjustments, but afterwards, everything flowed. Miró worked on the floor, transferring his designs onto tiles spread across the studio. Then came the moment Artigas would later recall with vivid clarity: "Artigas held his breath when he saw how I held the brush and began to draw the five to six-meter-long design, at the risk of destroying work that had taken months." The final firing took place on May 29, 1958. Thirty-four firings had preceded it. Until then, they had seen the work only in pieces spread across the floor. When the murals were finally assembled at the UNESCO building in Paris, with Miró practically living on the construction site and Artigas supervising their integration into the facade, they could step back and observe their creation as a whole. For this achievement, Miró received the Guggenheim International Award in 1958.
The partnership continued through the decades, extending to Harvard University's Harkness Commons, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Labyrinth at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, and Barcelona Airport. Joan Gardy increasingly joined these projects, and his own stories illuminate the collaborative spirit. Years later, in Tokyo, he would arrange for Miró and his father to cross the city in three black limousines to secretly visit Kiyoshi Shibui's Japanese erotic art collection, the most important in Japan. These were artists who lived fully, who understood that art required not just technique but curiosity, friendship, and sometimes a willingness to cross a city in search of beauty others might hide.
There is a moment Joan Gardy remembers from 1961 in New York, when, with the insolence of youth, he cut one side of Salvador Dalí's famous moustache. Dalí examined himself and responded: "Look at my cosmic antennae, now I have a long one and a short one, like my testicles." This was the world these artists inhabited, serious in their devotion to craft, playful in their understanding that art requires both reverence and irreverence.
During the 1970s, Josep Llorens Artigas's health began to fail. His son assumed increasing responsibilities, becoming entirely familiar with the working practices and technical demands his father had developed over decades. When the elder Artigas died on December 11, 1980, Joan Gardy continued the work, though Miró surely felt the loss deeply. The collaboration between Miró and Joan Gardy would continue until the artist died in 1983, producing some of Miró's final monumental works.
What curator Robert Lubar Messeri identified as the collaboration's deeper significance speaks to its philosophical dimension: Miró's expressed desire from 1938 onward to bring himself closer to the human masses, an attitude Artigas shared completely. Together, they plumbed the depths of human civilisation from popular traditions and medieval architecture to contemporary public art, tracing a temporal arc between the distant past and the immediate present. They crystallised their ethical convictions through a technique historically relegated to handicraft, denying all possibility of creating merely decorative art.
Artigas believed ceramics held the privilege of being born from the union of the four elements of nature, making it the purest and most abstract art form. For Miró, ceramics offered liberation from what he called the assassination of painting, his contempt for conventional methods that merely supported bourgeois society. Together, they refused hierarchy between potter and painter, meeting as equals before the kiln.
The work earned various names: terres de grand feu, firestones, lands of great fire. Each glaze, each ceramic colour achieved through artistic function constituted a true creation of rare purity. Surfaces sometimes avoided glazes entirely, achieving a rougher finish that spoke to earth's resistance to decoration. The inconsistent nature of firing meant many pieces were discarded at early stages, while those that survived bore the specific vagaries of fire, the particular moment when glaze met flame.
Decades after their first collaboration, the catalogue raisonné compiled by Joan Punyet Miró and Joan Gardy Artigas documents the entirety of this work: from the first painted vases of 1941 to the final monumental ceramic walls of 1981. Each piece was unique, always created in stoneware or earthenware, always fired in wood kilns. Five hundred seventy reproductions preserve what fire and friendship created.
When Miró was asked near the end of his life what he thought of the permanent inundation of our lives by modern media, he responded: "If we do not attempt to discover the religious essence, the magic sense of things, we will do no more than add new sources of degradation to those already offered to people today, which are beyond number." This was his invitation: to step back, to approach art through feeling more than logic, through meditative immersion into the essence of creation.
The red suns blazed eternally against their grounds, fish swam through space existing nowhere except in Miró's imagination, and the dark perimeters held them all within circles that have defined contemplation since the first vessel turned on the first wheel. In Gallifa today, the kilns remain. Joan Gardy Artigas, now in his eighties, still works in the space where his father and Miró created their monumental murals, now converted to a loft overlooking the lake. The Fundació Llorens Artigas preserves its legacy, and visitors can see the seven wood-fired kilns, including those used for the UNESCO, Harvard, and Guggenheim commissions.
Here, in glazed earthenware, endures the record of collaboration, friendship, and that particular heat that transforms clay into something approaching the eternal. Here endures the memory of Artigas holding his breath as Miró wielded his palm-frond brush across meters of tile. Here endures the image of three men, a potter, a painter, and the potter's son, standing together in Altamira before paintings twenty thousand years old, finding in those ancient marks the same impulse that drove their hands toward fire and clay.
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