Casas commemorated

One of the most re­peated clichés about artist Ramon Casas (1866-1932) is that he would now be known as the Mod­ernist painter if he had been French rather than Cata­lan. Pre­sum­ing there is some sub­stance to the claim, 150 years since the birth of Casas, as it is this year, would have been in­ter­na­tion­ally cel­e­brated. The truth of this can be seen in the re­ac­tions abroad to his work. In just about all re­views of the ex­hi­bi­tion, Barcelona & moder­nity: from Gaudí to Dalí, which took place in New York's MOMA in 2007, Casas is men­tioned as the sur­prise pack­age. In The New York Times, critic Michael Kim­mel­man wrote that “Casas was bet­ter than Pi­casso for many years.”

A cre­ator of icons, a su­perb draughts­man, with a lik­ing for glam­our and sen­su­al­ity when it came to por­tray­ing women (his pre­ferred sub­ject) but also to-the-point and so­cially-aware when he painted works such as The Charge, as well as being an ef­fi­cient poster artist and il­lus­tra­tor, Casas was ba­si­cally a mod­ern man for his times, in both his art and his life. In fact, Casas is a symp­tom, in the sphere of paint­ing, of the splen­dour of Cata­lan art at the turn of the 20th cen­tury. And, ob­vi­ously, he was not alone: Isidre Nonell, San­ti­ago Rusiñol, Anglada Ca­ma­rasa and many oth­ers ac­com­pa­nied him on his artis­tic jour­ney.

For­tu­nately, Casas is within reach of any art-lover wish­ing to see his work. The great­est Casas gallery is with­out doubt the Museu Na­cional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), which in its pre­sen­ta­tion of Mod­ernism makes his painterly side shine al­most as brightly as his work as a poster artist and draughts­man. How­ever, mas­ter­pieces by the Barcelona painter are to be found all over, in­clud­ing the Museu de Montser­rat, the Museus de Sit­ges, the Museu Co­mar­cal de la Gar­rotxa in Olot, the Museu del Mod­ernisme de Barcelona, and so on.

The last great ret­ro­spec­tive ex­hi­bi­tion of Casas took place in 2001 in the MNAC, which is the ex­cuse the gallery has made for not putting on any ex­hi­bi­tion of the painter this year to com­mem­o­rate the 150th an­niver­sary of his birth. Yet the Any Casas, pro­moted by the Gen­er­al­i­tat's cul­ture de­part­ment, has nu­mer­ous ac­tiv­i­ties planned, though many have still not been fully tied down: “We are a bit late,” ad­mits the newly-ap­pointed cu­ra­tor of the com­mem­o­ra­tions and di­rec­tor of the Museus de Sit­ges, Vinyet Pa­nyella, who es­ti­mates that the full pro­gramme of events for the Any Casas should be ready to be pre­sented this month.

Nev­er­the­less, there are ex­hi­bi­tions that can al­ready be an­nounced. A unique op­por­tu­nity for many vis­i­tors will be the chance to enter the Cer­cle del Liceu, which will dis­play a mar­vel­lous col­lec­tion of Casas's work. The Cer­cle will open its doors to the pub­lic in spring, with an ex­hi­bi­tion fo­cus­ing on the fig­ure of Júlia Peraire, the artist's great model and muse, who he met in 1906 when she was sell­ing lot­tery tick­ets. The two mar­ried in 1922.