Els Quatre Gats — Picasso's First Stage

Els Quatre Gats is a famous Modernista café in Barcelona where a seventeen-year-old Pablo Picasso held his first art exhibition on February 1, 1900. Located inside the 1896 Casa Martí designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, the café opened in 1897 as a gathering place for avant-garde artists. Picasso displayed one hundred portraits and designed the menu before the café closed in 1903, later reopening in 1989.

Barcelona · from the walk “Stones & Secrets: Hidden Courtyards of the Barri Gòtic” · audio ~3 min · Generated

Els Quatre Gats — Picasso's First Stage

Carrer de Montsió 3, Barcelona

Which famous Barcelona café hosted Pablo Picasso's first art exhibition on February 1, 1900?

Look at the building in front of you. Those great pointed arches... the stained glass... the stone carvings. It looks like a medieval castle, doesn't it? But this is no relic of the Middle Ages. This is Casa Marti, designed in eighteen ninety-six by architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch... and it hides one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of modern art.......... On June twelfth, eighteen ninety-seven, a man named Pere Romeu opened a café right here on the ground floor. Romeu had worked as a waiter at Le Chat Noir, the legendary cabaret in Paris. He dreamed of creating something just like it in BarcelOna. With the help of three artist friends... Ramon Casas, SantiAgo Rusiñol, and Miquel Utrillo... he brought that dream to life. They called it Els Quatre Gats... The Four Cats.......... Now, why "four cats"? In Catalan, the expression "quatre gats" means "just a few people"... the kind who are a bit odd, a bit on the fringe. When Romeu told acquaintances about his plans, the most common reply was... "You'll be four cats!" They wore that mockery like a badge of honor.......... Inside, Ramon Casas hung his famous painting of himself and Romeu riding a tandem bicycle across the BarcelOna skyline. It carried an inscription that read: "To ride a bike, you can't go with your back straight." A manifesto in a single line... break tradition, or go nowhere.......... And what a gathering this place became! Gaudi himself sat at these tables. Composers like Isaac Albeniz and Enric Granados debated here. Shadow puppet shows, poetry readings, literary evenings............ But the most important guest was a seventeen-year-old boy who had just arrived in the city. His name... was Pablo Picasso. On the first of February, nineteen hundred, Picasso filled the main room with around one Hundred charcoal portraits of his bohemian friends... unframed, pinned straight onto the walls. Among them hung a single oil painting called "Last Moments," which would later be selected for the Universal Exposition in Paris that same year. One critic wrote that the portraits were "a portrait of the present age."

...... That exhibition Launched Picasso's career! And here's something most people miss... that menu you see reproduced on the door? Picasso designed it. Romeu trusted this teenager with the café's very image... a responsibility that had previously belonged only to Casas, the most celebrated artist in BarcelOna.......... Sadly, Romeu was a terrible businessman. He let friends eat for free, gave endless discounts, and by June nineteen oh three... the café went bankrupt. But the spirit never died. After Franco's dictatorship ended, the café was restored and reopened in nineteen eighty-nine, brought back to its original Modernista glory. The tandem painting you see inside today is a copy... the original now hangs in the Mnac museum, just up on Montjuic.......... So take a moment. Look through those Gothic arches. Somewhere in there, a teenage Picasso once pinned his drawings to the wall... and changed the world.

Nearby stories