Museum Day on Montjuïc in Barcelona

An art day, both museums on Montjuïc. We started at MNAC, climbing up past the stepped cascades to the Palau Nacional — the whole thing was built for the 1929 International Exhibition and it looks it, towers and a big elliptical dome over something like 32,000 square metres of museum. The fountains below were running full tilt even mid-morning.

Inside, the dome hall had its own painted ceiling, and the rooms off it ran from the Romanesque murals pulled out of churches all over Catalonia — the thing the museum is really known for, there since it opened in 1934 — up through a huge Miró ceramic mural of birds in one of the arched halls. We also stopped a while at a painting of families camped in the rubble with the Sagrada Família going up behind them, scaffolding and all.

Then across the hill to the Fundació Joan Miró, white Sert building with vaulted roofs and city views from the terraces, Tibidabo off in the distance. The rooms inside had tapestries, the bronze figures, and a pair of old landscape paintings Miró had painted right over — a green crescent moon dropped into somebody else's forest scene. His handwriting is still on the sign over the entrance.