Ramon Casas i Carbó
Encyclopedia
Ramon Casas i Carbó (4 January 1866 – 29 February 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
.
, Cuba
; his mother was from a well-off Catalan family. In 1877 he abandoned the regular course of schooling to study art in the studio of Joan Vicens. In 1881, still in his teens, he was a co-founder of the magazine L'Avenç; the 9 October 1881 issue included his sketch of the cloister of Sant Benet in Bages
. That same month, accompanied by his cousin Miquel Carbó i Carbó, a medical student, he began his first stay in Paris
, where he studied that winter at the Carolus Duran Academy and later at the Gervex Academy, and functioned as a Paris correspondent for L'Avenç. The next year he had a piece exhibited in Barcelona at the Sala Parés, and in 1883 in Paris the Salon des Champs Elysées exhibited his portrait of himself dressed as a flamenco
dancer; the piece won him an invitation as a member of the salon of the Societé d'artistes françaises.
The next few years he continued to paint and travel, spending most autumns and winters in Paris and the rest of the year in Spain, mostly in Barcelona but also in Madrid
and Granada
; his 1886 painting of the crowd at the Madrid bullfighting ring was to be the first of many highly detailed paintings of crowds. That year he survived tuberculosis
, and convalesced for the winter in Barcelona. Among the artists he met in this period of his life, and who influenced him, were Laureà Barrau, Santiago Rusiñol
, Eugène Carrière
, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
, and Ignacio Zuloaga
.
Casas and Rusiñol traveled through Catalonia in 1889, and collaborated on a short book Por Cataluña (desde mi carro), with text by Rusiñol and illustrations by Casas. Returning together to Paris, they lived together at the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre
, along with painter and art critic Miquel Utrillo and the sketch artist Ramon Canudas. Rusiñol chronicled these times in as series of articles "Desde el Molino" ("From the Mill") for La Vanguardia; again Casas illustrated. Casas became an associate of the Societé d'artistes françaises, allowing him to exhibit two works annually at their salon without having to pass through jury competition.
With Rusiñol and with sculptor Enric Clarasó he exhibited at Sala Parés in 1890; his work from this period, such as Plen Air and the Bal du Moulin de la Galette lies somewhere between an academic style and that of the French impressionists
. The style that would become known as modernisme had not yet fully come together, but the key people were beginning to know one another, and successful Catalan artists were increasingly coming to identify themselves with Barcelona as much as with Paris.
His fame continued to spread through Europe and beyond, exhibiting successfully in Madrid (1892, 1894), Berlin
(1891, 1896) and at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago
(1893); meanwhile the bohemian
circle that included Casas and Rusiñol began with greater frequency to organize exhibitions of their own in Barcelona and Sitges
. With this increasing activity in Catalonia, he settled more in Barcelona, but continued to travel to Paris for the annual Salons.
, 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 (and was later reconstructed in 1978). 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 tertulia
s 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
(MNAC); a creditable reproduction resides in the revived Els Quatre Gats.
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 (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.
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
.
in Paris, the Spanish committee chose two of Casas' full-length oil portraits: an 1891 portrait of Eric Satie and an 1895 portrait of Casas' sister Elisa. His 1894 Garrote Vil —a portrayal of an execution— won a major prize in Munich in 1901; his work was shown not only in the major capitals of Europe, but as far away as Buenos Aires
, Argentina
. In 1902, twelve of his canvasses were installed permanently in the rotunda of the Cercle de Liceu, the exclusive private club associated with Barcelona's famous opera house.
In 1903 he became a full Societaire of the Salon du Champ de Mars in Paris, which would have allowed him to exhibit there annually, but in fact he only exhibited there for two more years. In 1903, his piece for the salon was one that had originally been called La Carga (The Charge), which he retitled Barcelona 1902 in reference to a recent general strike
, although in fact the painting, which shows Guardia Civil routing a crowd, had been executed at least two years before that strike. In 1904, the same piece won first prize at the General Exposition in Madrid.
During a 1904 sojourn in Madrid, he produced a series of sketches of the Madrid intelligentsia, and befriended painters Eliseo Meifrén and Joaquín Sorolla, as well as Agustí Querol Subirats
, official sculptor to the Spanish government. In Querol's studio, he executed an equestrian portrait of the king, Alfonso XIII
, which was soon purchased by the American
collector Charles Deering
, who, over the next few years would commission or purchase several of Casas paintings.
in 1907 and hired Puig i Cadafalch to restore it. Casas would spend much time there, and would repeatedly depict the monastery and its surroundings. Five years later, when his mother died, he inherited the monastery.
In 1908 Casas and his now-patron Deering traveled through Catalonia. Deering purchased a former hospital in Sitges
to transform it into a sometime residence. Miquel Utrillo dubbed it Marycel.
Later that year, Casas began a six-month journey to Cuba and the United States at Deering's invitation. During this time, he executed a dozen oil portraits and over thirty charcoal drawings of Deering's friends and associates.
Returning to Spain in April 1909, he put on a solo shows in both Barcelona and Madrid. At the Fayanç Català gallery in Barcelona, he displayed 200 charcoal sketches, which he then donated to the Museo de Barcelona. His show in Madrid was at the Ministry of Tourism, and featured portraits of the city's leading figures, including the king.
His life continued in this vein for some time. In 1910 executed a painting of the funeral of his friend the art critic and novelist Raimón Casellas, who had committed suicide the previous year shortly after Barcelona's semana trágica and, for Deering, painted a second version of La Carga, this time with the prominent foreground figure of a Guardia Civil on foot rather than on horseback. Over the remaining years before World War I
he traveled extensively in Spain and Europe, sometimes alone and sometimes with Deering, visiting Vienna
, Budapest
, Munich
, Paris, the Netherlands
, Madrid
, and Galicia, sometimes on his own, sometimes with Deering. He continued to have major exhibits in Spain and France. In 1913 he acquired an architecturally notable home in Barcelona, a tower on Carrer de San Gervasi (now Carrer de les Carolines) in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood; in 1915, he, Rusiñol, and Clarassó exhibited together in the Sala Parés, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their first joint exhibition there.
Also in 1916, Deering purchased a house in Sitges
, known as Can Xicarrons (now a museum), and the magazine Vell i Nou dedicated an issue to Casas.
Up until this time, Casas had kept his distance from the battles of World War I
, but in 1918 he visited the front; he painted a self-portrait wearing a military cape.
Casas, Rusiñol, and Clarasó resumed regular annual joint exhibitions at Sala Parés in 1921; these continued until Rusiñol's death in 1931. However, that year he had a falling out with his friend Utrillo over Maricel Casas's close association with Deering; the breach was never healed.
In 1922, Casa finally married Júlia Peraire, and in 1924 she came along with him on a trip to the United States, during which he once again made portraits of the rich and famous.
By the 1920s, Casas had fallen far away from the avant-gardiste tendencies of his youth. If anything, his work from this period looks like it came from an academic painter of an earlier time than his work of the 1890s. He continued painting landscapes and portraits, as well as anti-tuberculosis posters and the like, but by the time of his death in 1932, shortly after the emergence of the Second Spanish Republic
, he was already more a figure of the past than the present.
Catalan people
The Catalans or Catalonians are the people from, or with origins in, Catalonia that form a historical nationality in Spain. The inhabitants of the adjacent portion of southern France are sometimes included in this definition...
Spanish
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
artist. Living through a turbulent time in the history of his native 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...
, he was known as a portraitist, sketching and painting the intellectual, economic, and political elite of Barcelona, Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
, 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
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 ...
.
Barcelona and Paris
Casas was born in Barcelona. His father had made a fortune in MatanzasMatanzas
Matanzas is the capital of the Cuban province of Matanzas. It is famed for its poets, culture, and Afro-Cuban folklore.It is located on the northern shore of the island of Cuba, on the Bay of Matanzas , east of the capital Havana and west of the resort town of Varadero.Matanzas is called the...
, Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
; his mother was from a well-off Catalan family. In 1877 he abandoned the regular course of schooling to study art in the studio of Joan Vicens. In 1881, still in his teens, he was a co-founder of the magazine L'Avenç; the 9 October 1881 issue included his sketch of the cloister of Sant Benet in Bages
Bages
Bages is a comarca in the center of Catalonia, Spain. It includes two subcomarques, el Moianès and el Lluçanès.Industries include the mining of potash at Súria and Sallent, and the manufacture of textiles along the rivers Llobregat and Cardener...
. That same month, accompanied by his cousin Miquel Carbó i Carbó, a medical student, he began his first stay in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, where he studied that winter at the Carolus Duran Academy and later at the Gervex Academy, and functioned as a Paris correspondent for L'Avenç. The next year he had a piece exhibited in Barcelona at the Sala Parés, and in 1883 in Paris the Salon des Champs Elysées exhibited his portrait of himself dressed as a flamenco
Flamenco
Flamenco is a genre of music and dance which has its foundation in Andalusian music and dance and in whose evolution Andalusian Gypsies played an important part....
dancer; the piece won him an invitation as a member of the salon of the Societé d'artistes françaises.
The next few years he continued to paint and travel, spending most autumns and winters in Paris and the rest of the year in Spain, mostly in Barcelona but also in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
and Granada
Granada
Granada is a city and the capital of the province of Granada, in the autonomous community of Andalusia, Spain. Granada is located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains, at the confluence of three rivers, the Beiro, the Darro and the Genil. It sits at an elevation of 738 metres above sea...
; his 1886 painting of the crowd at the Madrid bullfighting ring was to be the first of many highly detailed paintings of crowds. That year he survived tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
, and convalesced for the winter in Barcelona. Among the artists he met in this period of his life, and who influenced him, were Laureà Barrau, Santiago Rusiñol
Santiago 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....
, Eugène Carrière
Eugène Carrière
Eugène Anatole Carrière was a French Symbolist artist of the Fin de siècle period. His work is best known for its brown monochrome palette. He was a close friend of the sculptor Rodin and his work influenced Picasso...
, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French painter, who became the president and co-founder of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and whose work influenced many other artists.-Life:...
, and Ignacio Zuloaga
Ignacio Zuloaga
Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta was a Basque Spanish painter, born in Eibar, near the monastery of Loyola. He was the son of metalworker and damascener Plácido Zuloaga and grandson of the organizer and director of the royal armoury in Madrid.-Biography:In his youth, he drew and worked in his father's...
.
Casas and Rusiñol traveled through Catalonia in 1889, and collaborated on a short book Por Cataluña (desde mi carro), with text by Rusiñol and illustrations by Casas. Returning together to Paris, they lived together at the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre
Montmartre
Montmartre is a hill which is 130 metres high, giving its name to the surrounding district, in the north of Paris in the 18th arrondissement, a part of the Right Bank. Montmartre is primarily known for the white-domed Basilica of the Sacré Cœur on its summit and as a nightclub district...
, along with painter and art critic Miquel Utrillo and the sketch artist Ramon Canudas. Rusiñol chronicled these times in as series of articles "Desde el Molino" ("From the Mill") for La Vanguardia; again Casas illustrated. Casas became an associate of the Societé d'artistes françaises, allowing him to exhibit two works annually at their salon without having to pass through jury competition.
With Rusiñol and with sculptor Enric Clarasó he exhibited at Sala Parés in 1890; his work from this period, such as Plen Air and the Bal du Moulin de la Galette lies somewhere between an academic style and that of the French impressionists
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
. The style that would become known as modernisme had not yet fully come together, but the key people were beginning to know one another, and successful Catalan artists were increasingly coming to identify themselves with Barcelona as much as with Paris.
His fame continued to spread through Europe and beyond, exhibiting successfully in Madrid (1892, 1894), Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
(1891, 1896) and at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
(1893); meanwhile the bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
circle that included Casas and Rusiñol began with greater frequency to organize exhibitions of their own in Barcelona and Sitges
Sitges
*Church of Sant Bartolomeu i Santa Tecla . It houses two Gothic sepulchres , belonging to the an older church located on the same site...
. With this increasing activity in Catalonia, he settled more in Barcelona, but continued to travel to Paris for the annual Salons.
Els Quatre Gats
The emerging modernista art world gained a center with the opening of Els Quatre GatsEls Quatre Gats
Els Quatre Gats , often written Els 4 Gats, was a café in Barcelona 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 in Barcelona...
, a bar modeled on Le Chat Noir
Le Chat Noir
Le Chat Noir was a 19th-century cabaret, meaning entertainment house, in the bohemian Montmartre district of Paris...
in Paris. Casas 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...
, a building by 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 Montsió Street near the center of Barcelona; it opened in June 1897 and lasted for six years (and was later reconstructed in 1978). 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 tertulia
Tertulia
A tertulia is a social gathering with literary or artistic overtones, especially in Iberia or Latin America. The word is originally Spanish, and has only moderate currency in English, in describing Latin cultural contexts....
s and 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 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
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya
The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya , abbreviated as MNAC, is a museum of Catalan visual art located in Barcelona, Catalonia. It is housed in the Palau Nacional, built for the 1929 World's Fair...
(MNAC); a creditable reproduction resides in the revived Els Quatre Gats.
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 (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.
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
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...
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
Anisette
Anisette is an anise-flavored liqueur that is consumed mainly in France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. It is colorless and, unlike some other anise-based liqueurs, contains no licorice.True anisette is produced by means of distilling aniseed...
. Over the next decade, he would design poster ads for everything from cigarette papers
Rolling papers
Rolling papers are small sheets, rolls, or leaves of paper which are sold for rolling one's own cigarettes either by hand or with a rolling machine...
to the Enciclopèdia Espasa
Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana
The Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana is a Spanish encyclopedia comprising 72 volumes published from 1908 to 1930 plus a ten-volume appendix published 1930-1933...
.
His prominence grows
For the 1900 Exposition Universelle (1900)Exposition Universelle (1900)
The Exposition Universelle of 1900 was a world's fair held in Paris, France, from April 15 to November 12, 1900, to celebrate the achievements of the past century and to accelerate development into the next...
in Paris, the Spanish committee chose two of Casas' full-length oil portraits: an 1891 portrait of Eric Satie and an 1895 portrait of Casas' sister Elisa. His 1894 Garrote Vil —a portrayal of an execution— won a major prize in Munich in 1901; his work was shown not only in the major capitals of Europe, but as far away as Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
, Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
. In 1902, twelve of his canvasses were installed permanently in the rotunda of the Cercle de Liceu, the exclusive private club associated with Barcelona's famous opera house.
In 1903 he became a full Societaire of the Salon du Champ de Mars in Paris, which would have allowed him to exhibit there annually, but in fact he only exhibited there for two more years. In 1903, his piece for the salon was one that had originally been called La Carga (The Charge), which he retitled Barcelona 1902 in reference to a recent general strike
General strike
A general strike is a strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city, region, or country. While a general strike can be for political goals, economic goals, or both, it tends to gain its momentum from the ideological or class sympathies of the participants...
, although in fact the painting, which shows Guardia Civil routing a crowd, had been executed at least two years before that strike. In 1904, the same piece won first prize at the General Exposition in Madrid.
During a 1904 sojourn in Madrid, he produced a series of sketches of the Madrid intelligentsia, and befriended painters Eliseo Meifrén and Joaquín Sorolla, as well as Agustí Querol Subirats
Agustí Querol Subirats
Agustí Querol i Subirats was a prominent Spanish sculptor, born in Tortosa, Catalonia. - Life :...
, official sculptor to the Spanish government. In Querol's studio, he executed an equestrian portrait of the king, Alfonso XIII
Alfonso XIII of Spain
Alfonso XIII was King of Spain from 1886 until 1931. His mother, Maria Christina of Austria, was appointed regent during his minority...
, which was soon purchased by the American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
collector Charles Deering
Charles Deering
Charles Deering was an American businessman, art collector, and philanthropist. He was an executive of the agricultural machinery company founded by his father that became International Harvester. Charles's successful stewardship of the family firm left him with the means and leisure to indulge...
, who, over the next few years would commission or purchase several of Casas paintings.
Júlia Peraire
Increasingly in demand as a portraitist, he settled again for a while in Barcelona. Shortly thereafter he made the acquaintance of a young artist's model named Júlia Peraire, 22 years his junior. He first painted her in 1906 when she was 18. She soon became his favorite model and his lover. His family did not approve of her; they eventually married, but not until 1922.Patronage and stardom
Casas' mother purchased the monastery of Sant Benet de BagesBages
Bages is a comarca in the center of Catalonia, Spain. It includes two subcomarques, el Moianès and el Lluçanès.Industries include the mining of potash at Súria and Sallent, and the manufacture of textiles along the rivers Llobregat and Cardener...
in 1907 and hired Puig i Cadafalch to restore it. Casas would spend much time there, and would repeatedly depict the monastery and its surroundings. Five years later, when his mother died, he inherited the monastery.
Sitges
*Church of Sant Bartolomeu i Santa Tecla . It houses two Gothic sepulchres , belonging to the an older church located on the same site...
to transform it into a sometime residence. Miquel Utrillo dubbed it Marycel.
Later that year, Casas began a six-month journey to Cuba and the United States at Deering's invitation. During this time, he executed a dozen oil portraits and over thirty charcoal drawings of Deering's friends and associates.
Returning to Spain in April 1909, he put on a solo shows in both Barcelona and Madrid. At the Fayanç Català gallery in Barcelona, he displayed 200 charcoal sketches, which he then donated to the Museo de Barcelona. His show in Madrid was at the Ministry of Tourism, and featured portraits of the city's leading figures, including the king.
His life continued in this vein for some time. In 1910 executed a painting of the funeral of his friend the art critic and novelist Raimón Casellas, who had committed suicide the previous year shortly after Barcelona's semana trágica and, for Deering, painted a second version of La Carga, this time with the prominent foreground figure of a Guardia Civil on foot rather than on horseback. Over the remaining years before World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
he traveled extensively in Spain and Europe, sometimes alone and sometimes with Deering, visiting Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, Budapest
Budapest
Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...
, Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, Paris, the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
, Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
, and Galicia, sometimes on his own, sometimes with Deering. He continued to have major exhibits in Spain and France. In 1913 he acquired an architecturally notable home in Barcelona, a tower on Carrer de San Gervasi (now Carrer de les Carolines) in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood; in 1915, he, Rusiñol, and Clarassó exhibited together in the Sala Parés, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their first joint exhibition there.
Tamarit and after
In 1916, Casas and Deering traveled to Tamarit in Catalonia. Deering purchased the entire village, and placed Casas in charge of the project of restoring it. Several years later, in 1924, he would return to Tamarit to paint numerous landscapes.Also in 1916, Deering purchased a house in Sitges
Sitges
*Church of Sant Bartolomeu i Santa Tecla . It houses two Gothic sepulchres , belonging to the an older church located on the same site...
, known as Can Xicarrons (now a museum), and the magazine Vell i Nou dedicated an issue to Casas.
Up until this time, Casas had kept his distance from the battles of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, but in 1918 he visited the front; he painted a self-portrait wearing a military cape.
Casas, Rusiñol, and Clarasó resumed regular annual joint exhibitions at Sala Parés in 1921; these continued until Rusiñol's death in 1931. However, that year he had a falling out with his friend Utrillo over Maricel Casas's close association with Deering; the breach was never healed.
In 1922, Casa finally married Júlia Peraire, and in 1924 she came along with him on a trip to the United States, during which he once again made portraits of the rich and famous.
By the 1920s, Casas had fallen far away from the avant-gardiste tendencies of his youth. If anything, his work from this period looks like it came from an academic painter of an earlier time than his work of the 1890s. He continued painting landscapes and portraits, as well as anti-tuberculosis posters and the like, but by the time of his death in 1932, shortly after the emergence of the Second Spanish Republic
Second Spanish Republic
The Second Spanish Republic was the government of Spain between April 14 1931, and its destruction by a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco....
, he was already more a figure of the past than the present.