The Catalan Modernisme (1888-1911)

The term Modernism has very particular and extensive connotations for the development of society and culture in modern Catalonia, and inspired many Catalan artists.

The term Modernisme has very particular and extensive connotations for the development of society and culture in modern Catalonia. It refers to a twofold process occurring in the Principality (and secondarily in Valencia and Balearic Islands) during the two crucial decades spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within a continuing surge of social transformation there emerged together impulses for the explicit modernization of a culture considered archaic, pedestrian and provincial – Catalan culture as it had taken shape during the nineteenth-century revival movement of the Renaixença- and for the creation of specifically national art. Both motives were intertwined, and related to a complex social ferment. Associated with the growth of political Catalanism, awareness increased that only by becoming cosmopolitan and abreast of the latest advances abroad would Catalan culture shake off its provincial complexion, thus to attain a higher degree of differentiation and independence from perceived deficiencies in the official Spanish-Castilian culture centred in Madrid.

…in the sphere of architecture and the decorative arts, Modernisme has tended to be confused with Art Nouveau, further adding to the terminological vagueness from which the phenomenon has suffered. After 1900 the most authentic exponents in the decorative arts rejected the label of modernists, although that is obviously what they are for us, and the term was relegated to refer only to the decorative Art Nouveau (on its way to being the facile mannerism mentioned above adopted by a fashion-conscious bourgeoisie). Our present-day perspective allows us to discern that alongside this Art Nouveau wave -predominant, it is true- there flourished various other distinctive aesthetic tendencies, in particular a strong neo-Gothic strain and a synthetic realism, inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen, whose outstanding exponent was the painter Ramon Casas…

(Eliseu Trenc Ballester & Alan Yates. “ALEXANDRE DE RIQUER (1856-1920) The british Conection in Catalan Modernisme”. The Anglo-Catalan Sociaty. 1988)

Plafón de cerámica (Fr. Panneau en céramique . En. Ceramic panel) ANIS DEL MONO de RAMON CASAS.