Now a pillar of downtown Chicago’s unparalleled collection of modernist public art, Miro’s Chicago almost didn’t get to take her rightful place in Chicago’s heart. First called The Sun, The Moon, and One Star, and sometimes known as Miss Chicago—it is unclear who ultimately named her Miro’s Chicago, but it wasn’t the artist—the story of this fascinating sculpture began nearly twenty years before. [3]
In the early 1960s, SOM Senior Partner William Hartmann had successfully convinced Pablo Picasso to design a new public sculpture for the plaza in front of the new Chicago Civic Center (now the Richard J. Daley Center). Hartmann’s colleague, SOM Partner and architect Bruce Graham happened to be working on a new project, the Brunswick Building, facing the plaza that would be the home for the new Picasso. It was Graham’s idea to ask Joan Miró if he would be interested in creating a public artwork for Brunswick Plaza, within view of the planned Picasso.
Bruce Graham was born in Colombia, and grew up in Peru and Puerto Rico; Spanish was his first language, and this undoubtedly helped him develop a relationship with Miró. He also knew that Miró and Picasso, both already well-known as masters of twentieth-century art, had not only a longtime friendship but also a friendly rivalry, which Graham used to his advantage when he approached Miró about a commissioned sculpture for Chicago.
Joan Miró, who was born in Barcelona in 1893, first met Pablo Picasso in Paris in 1920. At that time, Picasso’s career had already taken off. Picasso was born in Southern Spain and was over a decade older than Miró, but he had lived in Barcelona as a teen and considered the city his true home; the artists had much in common. The pair began a decades-long friendship as well as a playful rivalry, which Graham attributed to Miró’s Catalan heritage: “Catalans are much more competitive. But they got along very well. It was kind of like, ‘I can do one, you can do one.’” [4]
In fact, Picasso had decided to waive any artist fee for his sculpture for Chicago, and, as Graham tells it, “It was very easy for me to talk to Miró and say, ‘You know, Picasso is doing one across the street for nothing,’” and Miró agreed to do the same. [5] According to William Hartmann, Miró was kept abreast about the development of Picasso’s sculpture and designed his own work specifically with this relationship in mind. [6]
Miró, along with his longtime collaborator, Catalán ceramicist Josep Llorens Artigas and his son, Joan Gardy Artigas, also came to visit Chicago during this time. Graham showed them around. In addition to visiting the sculpture’s future site, Graham “took them to jazz places at night and they just loved it. They would get up and shout “Olé!” [7] In 1963, Miró provided a plaster maquette of the proposed sculpture. Neither Miró nor Picasso had worked at such a large scale on a public sculpture before. But while Picasso’s sculpture moved ahead as planned, the Brunswick Corporation put the brakes on Miro’s Chicago, likely due to cost.
Unveiled in 1967, Picasso’s giant, unorthodox Cor-Ten steel sculpture was controversial at first. But The Picasso (also not named by the artist) grew to become a beloved icon of Chicago, ushering in a new era of public art in the Loop: the next decade brought the installation of works by other world-class modern artists, including Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Isamu Noguchi, and Claus Oldenburg. But Miró’s sculpture remained unrealized.