Ramon Casas

Ramon Casas i Carbó (1866-1932) was a Catalan Spanish artist. Living through a turbulent time in the history of his native Barcelona, he was known as a portraitist, sketching and painting the intellectual, economic, and political elite of Barcelona, Paris, Madrid, and beyond; he was also known for his paintings of crowd scenes ranging from the audience at a bullfight to the assembly for an execution to rioters in the Barcelona streets. Also a graphic designer, his posters and postcards helped to define the Catalan art movement known as modernisme. The emerging modernista art world gained a center with the opening of Els Quatre Gats, a bar modeled on Le Chat Noir in Paris. Casas largely financed this bar on the ground floor of Casa Martí, a building by Architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch in Montsió Street near the center of Barcelona; it opened in June 1897 and lasted for six years. His partners in the enterprise were Pere Romeu, who largely played host to the bar, as well as Rusiñol and Miquel Utrillo. The bar hosted tertulias and revolving art exhibits, including one of the first one-man shows by Pablo Picasso; the most prominent piece in its permanent collection was a lighthearted Casas self-portrait, depicting him smoking a pipe while pedaling a tandem bicycle with Romeu as his stoker. The original of the painting, or most of it: nearly a third of the canvas was cut away by an intervening owner, is now in Barcelona's Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. Like Le Chat Noir, Els Quatre Gats attempted its own literary and artistic magazine, to which Casas was a major contributor. That was short-lived, but was soon followed by Pèl & Ploma, which would slightly outlast the bar itself, and Forma, from 1904 to 1908, to which Casas also contributed. Pèl & Ploma sponsored several prominent art exhibitions, including Casas' own well-received first solo show in 1899 at Sala Parés, which brought together a retrospective of his oil paintings as well as a set of charcoal sketches of contemporary figures prominent in Barcelona's cultural life.While his painting career continued successfully through this period, as part owner of a bar Casas engaged heavily in graphic design, adopting the art nouveau style that would come to define modernisme. He designed posters for the café, many of which depicted Romeu's gaunt visage. He also executed a series of advertisements for Codorniu, a brand of cava, or, as its ads of the time claimed, champagne, and anisette. Over the next decade, he would design poster ads for everything from cigarette papers to the Enciclopèdia Espasa.