Els Quatre Gats: The Café of the Four Cats
Why is it significant?
Stop in front of the brick and stone house with the pointed Gothic windows, the carved saint on the corner and the wrought-iron lantern hanging over the door.
Key Facts
| Place | Els Quatre Gats: The Café of the Four Cats |
|---|---|
| Address | Carrer de Montsió 3, 08002 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.38570, 2.17360 |
| Part of Walk | Young Picasso's Barcelona: Els Quatre Gats, La Llotja & the Merchant Streets of La Ribera |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop in front of the brick and stone house with the pointed Gothic windows, the carved saint on the corner and the wrought-iron lantern hanging over the door. It looks like a medieval guildhall dropped into a back street... but it was built in 1896, one of the first works of the young architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch.
On 12 June 1897 a showman named Pere Romeu opened a tavern on the ground floor. He had spent time in the cabarets of Paris and wanted Barcelona to have its own Chat Noir, and the painters Ramon Casas and Santiago Rusiñol and their friend Miquel Utrillo were behind the project. They called it Els Quatre Gats, the Four Cats. In Catalan, quatre gats means hardly anyone, a handful of people. A joke name for a place that would become the centre of everything.
Here there were puppet shows and shadow plays, poetry readings, music, arguments about Nietzsche and anarchism late into the night. And in a corner sat a teenager from Málaga with burning black eyes, who did not have much money but could draw anyone in a few seconds. In February 1900, Els Quatre Gats gave Pablo Picasso his very first solo exhibition: a wall of quick portraits of the regulars, pinned up without frames. He also drew a menu card for the house, often called his first commercial commission.
Inside, look for the big painting of two men pedalling a tandem bicycle. That is Ramon Casas and Pere Romeu, painted by Casas in 1897. The original now hangs in the national art museum on Montjuïc, so what you see is a copy... but in its day the picture was a manifesto: modern, ironic, in a hurry.
The tavern lasted only about six years before it closed, and the bohemians scattered, many of them to Paris. Decades later the name was revived, and the room is again full of people talking too loudly. Now carry on along Carrer de Montsió and follow the side streets east, towards a concert hall that looks like a garden turned to stone.