In the year 1979 the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen opened his doors to the public, which belongs to the art collector Wilhelm Hack, who willed his embracing art collection to the city of Ludwigshafen and gave in this way his name to the museum. Key aspects of the exhibition is the art of the 20th century.

One of the most characteristic of the museum building ist the big wall, composed with the amount of 7200 ceramic tiles, created by one of the greates artists of spain: Joan Miró i Ferrà. The mosaique of this wall shows bizzare creatures and fantasy figures. With the width of 55 meters and the height of ca. 10 meters, the Miró-Wall of the museum is  proverbial one of the biggest arts created by the catalonian artist.

 
IMage source: de.wikipedia.org, photographed by Immanuel Giel (Public Domain)

The transportation of more than 7000 tiels from the far away Catalonia to Ludwigshafen/Rhein was handled by the local transportation service INTERTRANS which archieved a milestone of logitic in the company history, because there were several barriers to be skipped on the long way from the south Spain to the southwest of Germany.

The tiles were created and burned in a small catalanian village called Gallifa (near Barcelona) which is placed on into the mountains of this region. Then, a phone call arrived at Intertrans to handle some art plates in spain which have to covered from the mountains - but the hilly land there was no easy. Because of this circumstancas, our crew had to drop always 4 plates into a box, and every box had to be transported by a mule nto the foot of the mountains, where they could be loaded on developed land to a small lorry for transportation to the consignment station. From there, the ceramic tiles startet their 20 hour long way to their new home in Ludwigshafen - no easy way in those days after Franco because of the bootlegging of this time. And this was because the domestic  customs duty office had an eye on the colorful plates. 70 000 DM were the tax because the officers thought the artwork patches were part of sanitarian staff!

But at the end, all possible and impossible formalities were done and after the short way, studded with several traffic problems, the artwork parts reached their new home at the museum, were they today are still the landmark of this institution - a blur of color in the big city.

Newspaper articles about the Wall by Miró

Please click on the previews to open the articles in their original size (German only!):

Nowadays, after more then 25 years this project was done, still several of our collegues remember the times when this big artwork did his trip of about 1200 kilometers.