One of the most aesthetically enjoyable yet curious things that has happened in Spain over the past fifty years has been the use of Miró (or Miró-inspired) logos for the construction of national and regional identities.

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Let’s begin in 1973. Titled “Sol de Mallorca,” this poster by Joan Miró was made for the Mallorca Tourism Board on the occasion of the meeting of the Association of British Travel Agents, which brought some 2,800 agents to the island.

Fast forward to 1979. That year, the Barcelona savings bank, La Caixa de Pensions, hired the American company Landor Associates to create its new corporate image. They asked Joan Miró, who, in 1980, settled on this image, supposedly of a child depositing a coin.

For more on the La Caixa logo, see Melissa Aronczyk, “Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity” ( @OUPAcademic, 2013), pp. 34–37. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/branding-the-nation-9780199752171?cc=us&lang=en&

At around the same time, Miró painted this promotional poster for the upcoming 1982 FIFA World Cup, which Spain was hosting.

It was—I think we can all agree—far more appealing than the soccer-ball-spanish-flag “official” logo, found here at the bottom of the poster.

Then came the big one. In 1983, Turespaña commissioned Miró to produce a logo to promote tourism. This was the result. Originally conceived as promotional material for the World Cup, this sun has come to be known as “El sol de Miró” and is perhaps Miró’s most well-known image.

A 2003 article from @el_pais gives a bit more context for the so-called “last work of Miró”: https://elpais.com/diario/2003/02/23/domingo/1045975961_850215.html

1983 was also the year the Catalan graphic designer Josep María Trias created this logo for the 1992 Barcelona Olympic bid. Though initially runner-up, the image was chosen to be the official logo once the city won the bid. It was, he says, largely inspired by Miró.

Finally, let’s skip forward to 1990. That year, Angel María Villar and Paolo Rossi presented the new logo of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), which was a Miró-inspired sun-cum-football.

Here’s the coverage of the announcement at the time in @mundodeportivo: http://hemeroteca-paginas.mundodeportivo.com/EMD01/HEM/1990/01/19/MD19900119-012.pdf

As Aronczyk notes in her book, it’s rather strange that Miró, himself a rather ambivalent Spaniard, would come to design some of the most important images of the country’s financial and national institutions—not to mention the image of national identity itself.