The Next Greece? A Sketch of Spain
Joan Miró’s farmhouse in Mont Roig, about fifty miles from here, is well known from the Catalonian artist’s own depictions of it. The best of them, a work he called La Ferme (the farm), was owned by his friend Ernest Hemingway, whose widow later gave it to the National Gallery in Washington. The house itself still stands today, but it is empty, rundown, and neglected. Its walls are peeling and what furniture remains is in bad condition; the cobbles in the front courtyard where Miró and his family often dined alfresco are hardly visible among the weeds.
The Spaniards tend to enshrine the homes of famous artists—Picasso’s in Málaga and Dalí’s near Cadaqués. So what’s behind this obvious disregard for the house of Spain’s third great artist of the last century? The answer provides a case history in miniature of Catalonia’s economic woes. And Spain’s, for that matter.
Miró’s heirs, who own the property, have had it on the market for three years, but they can’t sell it. The village of Mont Roig would like to buy it, but can’t afford it. Like many Spanish villages, Mont Roig (population sixteen thousand) has high unemployment and a huge deficit. The region of Catalonia says it already faces the challenge of maintaining one hundred and thirty museums during what Juan Pluma Vilanova, head of Catalonia’s Directorate General for Cultural Heritage, called “a moment of limitations,” and can’t find the money to add one more. The Miró Foundation, the artist’s museum overlooking Barcelona, says the two million euros needed to restore the place was doable, but not the ongoing financial burden of keeping the house open.