Els Quatre Gats
Encyclopedia
Café
A café , also spelled cafe, in most countries refers to an establishment which focuses on serving coffee, like an American coffeehouse. In the United States, it may refer to an informal restaurant, offering a range of hot meals and made-to-order sandwiches...
in Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
which opened on 12 June 1897. It also operated as a hostel, a cabaret, a pub and a restaurant. Active until 1903, Els Quatre Gats became one of the main centers of Modernisme
Modernisme
Modernisme was a cultural movement associated with the search for Catalan national identity. It is often understood as an equivalent to a number of fin-de-siècle art movements, such as Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Secessionism, and Liberty style, and was active from roughly 1888 to 1911 Modernisme ...
in Barcelona. The artist Ramon Casas i Carbó
Ramon Casas i Carbó
Ramon Casas i Carbó 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...
largely financed this bar on the ground floor of Casa Martí
Casa Martí
The Casa Martí is a modernista building designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch in 1896, having been commissioned by relatives of Francesc Vilumara, a textile magnate...
(1896), a building by the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch
Josep Puig i Cadafalch
Josep Puig i Cadafalch was a Spanish Catalan Modernista architect who designed many significant buildings in Barcelona...
in Carrer Montsió near the center of Barcelona. Els Quatre Gats was reconstructed during the transition to democracy
Spanish transition to democracy
The Spanish transition to democracy was the era when Spain moved from the dictatorship of Francisco Franco to a liberal democratic state. The transition is usually said to have begun with Franco’s death on 20 November 1975, while its completion has been variously said to be marked by the Spanish...
, in 1978. Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
visited this pub–restaurant often in his early art career.
A center of Modernisme
Other major artists who met in this cafe were Santiago Rusiñol i PratsSantiago Rusiñol
Santiago Rusiñol i Prats was a Catalan post-impressionist/Symbolist painter, poet, and playwright.He was born in Barcelona in 1861, and died in Aranjuez in 1931 while painting its famous gardens....
, Miquel Utrillo as well as the sculptor Julio González
Julio González (sculptor)
Juli González i Pellicer was a Catalan abstract and cubist painter and sculptor.-Biography:Born in Barcelona, as a young man he worked with his older brother, Joan, in his father's metal smith workshop. Both brothers took evening classes in art at the Escuela de Bellas Artes...
.
Els Quatre Gats was the inheritor of a legacy of tertulias and art reunions specific to Barcelona, but also drew inspiration from the Parisian cabaret Le Chat Noir
Le Chat Noir
Le Chat Noir was a 19th-century cabaret, meaning entertainment house, in the bohemian Montmartre district of Paris...
. Art exhibitions, literary and musical meetings, marionette
Marionette
A marionette is a puppet controlled from above using wires or strings depending on regional variations. A marionette's puppeteer is called a manipulator. Marionettes are operated with the puppeteer hidden or revealed to an audience by using a vertical or horizontal control bar in different forms...
shows and shadow play
Shadow play
Shadow play or shadow puppetry Shadow puppets have a long history in China, India, Turkey and Java, and as a popular form of entertainment for both children and adults in many countries around the world. A shadow puppet is a cut-out figure held between a source of light and a translucent screen...
s also took place there.
Ramon Casas' partners in the enterprise were Pere Romeu, who largely played host at the bar, as well as Rusiñol and Miquel Utrillo. The bar hosted revolving art exhibits, including one of the first one-man shows by Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
; the most prominent piece in its permanent collection was a lighthearted Casas self-portrait, depicting him smoking a pipe while pedaling a tandem bicycle
Tandem bicycle
The tandem bicycle or twin is a form of bicycle designed to be ridden by more than one person. The term tandem refers to the seating arrangement , not the number of riders. A bike with two riders side-by-side is called a sociable.-History:Patents related to tandem bicycles date from the late 19th...
with Romeu as his stoker.
The review
Like Le Chat Noir, Els 4 Gats attempted in 1899 its own literary and artistic magazine, to which Casas was a major contributor. That was short-lived (fifteen issues), but was soon followed by Pèl & Ploma, which would slightly outlast the bar itself, and Forma (1904–1908), to which Casas also contributed. Pèl & Ploma sponsored several prominent art exhibitions, including Casas' own well-received first solo show (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.Later history
The bar closed in 1903, when Romeu was unable to keep it open because of debts. It was later used by the Cercle Artístic de Sant LlucCercle Artístic de Sant Lluc
The Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc is an arts society which was founded in Barcelona in 1893 by Joan Llimona, Josep Llimona, Antoni Utrillo, Alexandre de Riquer, the city councillor Alexandre M...
until the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. In the 1970s, a group of restaurateurs took steps to revive it, and it reopened in 1989.