I’ve been waiting to add the Taller Sert into my repertoire of modern art museums for years—starting with the Fundació Miró in Barcelona in 2010 and 2016, plus the Fondation Maeght in 2014 and 2016, the last of Josep Lluís Sert’s major famous modern art museums in Europe to tick off my list was the Taller Sert, Joan Miró studio in Palma de Mallorca. My host family laughed when I told them I was going to Mallorca, and my host dad just shook his head and said, “Palma de Mallorca: rich people, bad drugs, shit music.” What they didn’t realize was that I hadn’t come for the clubbing, the drugs, or the flashing lights, but to experience Mallorca the way Catalán-born Miró and Sert had. Not only did I want to see the studio that Sert had crafted for his friend, but I also wanted to experience the Mallorca that cured Miró’s depression. With a ticket that left Seville at sunrise, an itinerary with just one thing planned, and an easygoing, adventurous travel companion, I was ready to visit the Mallorca of Miró.
My first impression of the island was from the air. Blinking open bleary eyes as we passed over Menorca, I found that Mallorca wasn’t quite the size I’d expected—in fact, it was nothing near my expectation. I’’ve grown up vacationing on Gulf Coast barrier islands, and spent my last summer on an East Coast island the size of a bread crumb, so it was stunning to circle over an island that kicked up mountains from its coastline, an island that couldn’t capture both coasts in one aerial photograph. One reason Miró loved Mallorca so much was because here he enjoyed relative anonymity, and was widely known as the husband of his popular Mallorquina wife—but Pilar must have been one vivacious character of a woman, because it takes at least an hour and a half to travel by car from one coast to the other.
The one detail that has always stood out to me is that for Miró, living and working on Mallorca cured his depression. And while artists have taken up residence to stave off physical illness (Paul Gaugin and his Tahitian women, for example), it’s interesting to note how seriously Miró and his family took the state of his mental health, especially during a time when that aspect of health wasn’t widely acknowledged. Miró was depressed and unproductive in Paris and Barcelona, and Mallorca cured him. It remains sunny and warm year-round, but that’s true of many places around the world (the South Pacific, the Caribbean, Corsica, Sardinia, and the Côte d’Azur all come to mind), but clearly I was missing something, the undefinable x factor that made Mallorca special. That was what I wanted to discover.
Speeding down a graphite line of a country road on a vespa, the cross wind tussling my sundress and tossing my hair over my bare shoulder, I thought about how lucky I was to be here. Rich beauty always reminds me of why this life is worth living—it’s easy to see how Mallorca, with its sun-drenched olive orchards, brilliant pink oleander bushes, and cliffs that end in pure cerulean salt water, cured Miró’s depression. How could one ever paint in a cramped, gray Paris apartment, when warm wind and air fragrant with the honey of cactus pears exists on Mallorca? The landscape is straight out of a Fauvist painting, and easily reduces itself into thick lines of warm color. Its beauty not bound by any physical laws of nature, the Mallorcan countryside quickly becomes the thick swaths of color and swirling orbs of a Miró mural.
Visiting the Taller Sert was another experience entirely. A small studio etched into a cliffside overlooking the Mediterranean, rising out of thick oleander bushes and shaded by umbrella pines, it is a breath of fresh air in what is now a heavily developed vacation area, dead in early November. We visited right at opening time on Sunday morning. It was a silent, peaceful morning with Miró, and in the bright cloudless sky, the studio could show off the Sert trademarks that made it famous.
Of course the Mediterranean is an ideal climate for inspiration, but I’d never been enough a student of art to understand why Sert’s light wells were important beyond their aesthetic—like a snake, I love basking in bright white light, so I didn’t understand their significance. But in drawing, direct light that shines perpendicular to a canvas will generate a graphite glare, making it difficult to accurately determine proportions and realistically blend. Direct light must shine directly downward, parallel with the page, in order to eliminate that glare, or else be refracted to give the studio a soft, ambient glow. The light wells make sense from an aesthetic standpoint, but from an artistic one as well—and in the Mediterranean climate, the light wells lengthen the working day for an artist (not to mention the aspect of preservation for art—canvases are sensitive to bright light, hence why you’re constantly being heckled about flash photography in museums).
We passed cases of Miró’s trinkets and curios, an eclectic mix of primitive art icons, foreign coins, and postcards, and as we rounded a corner the bright Mediterranean light, refracted by the light wells in the ceiling, was decanted to lend the studio a bright (but not harsh) appearance. The Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró spent countless hours in restoration trying to abide by Miró’s wishes for the studio—to be left alone, exactly as he left it when he died—while also preserving its priceless provenance (the art, the studio itself, and the legacy). Therefore, the canvases on easels and unfinished paintings stacked along the walls aren’t originals, but careful copies, and the splatters and smears of paint, not to mention the palette, are completely original. It was more of a religious experience than visiting a cathedral; like a pilgrimage of modern art, it felt like I had arrived at spiritual enlightenment and bliss, and if not that, at least I knew something. Visiting one of the first premier works in Sert’s oeuvre was more than deeply satisfying, more than just an enrichment of knowledge. I had seen the masterpieces. Likewise, I had seen the developed and perfected museums of Sert that were the centerpiece wedding cakes of the Modernist and Rationalist movements. But now I had arrived at their birthplace, their origin of conception.
It was hard to part from the Taller Sert, where the interior corridors are tagged with Miró’s graffiti that would one day become his masterpiece Labyrinth, where the art and the building are as Mediterranean as the azure seas and the oleander bushes outside blowing in the wind. It felt almost like a betrayal to turn my back on it, to walk away. Once you’ve visited a place the first time, it’s easy enough to imagine that one day you’ll again return. I was misty-eyed as we buckled up our helmets, climbed on our vespas, and motored back across the island, but grinned as we cruised past the port on that cloudless blue day in Mallorca. I finally understood. I finally knew Miró.