The Director of the Sybir Memorial Museum, Professor Wojciech Śleszyński, symbolically received the Council of Europe Museum Prize statuette at the Palace of Europe in Strasbourg.

It is the sculpture ‘Woman with Beautiful Breasts’ by Joan Miró.

The Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist, as well as a muralist, was born in Barcelona in 1893 and died in 1983 in Palma de Mallorca.

Joan Miró was a bold experimenter and creator of new artistic techniques. He was inspired by the art of primitive tribes and Japanese culture. He is mostly associated with colorful paintings resembling children’s drawings.

His works are found in the most famous collections, such as the Guggenheim Museum, the MOMA in New York, or the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Miró’s sculptures stand at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, and a large tapestry adorned the destroyed World Trade Center in 2001.

The sculpture ‘Woman with Beautiful Breasts’ was donated to the Council of Europe in 1977 by the Joan Miró Foundation, which — was the first to receive the Council of Europe Museum Prize. Since then, the sculpture has become a symbol and a kind of a passed-down trophy of the Council of Europe Museum Prize. Each year, it was transported to the next awarded museum, where it was admired by the public for 12 months.

In April 2022, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe decided that the statuette would no longer travel across the continent and would only be symbolically presented to museologists at the ceremony in Strasbourg.

Among the reasons were some difficulties the Council encountered while trying to regain the sculpture from the territory of the Russian Federation — when the Russo-Ukrainian War broke out in February 2022. Miró’s work was in the Moscow Museum of the Gulag.