The Ramon Casas Exhibition received more than 38.000 visitors

The Ramon Casas exhibition, a long yearned modernity closed yesterday after an exhibition of three months in Museu de Maricel were the sample received 38.395 visitants. We are dealing here with a very positive figure, well above the most optimist expectations expected by the organization. After the exhibition in Sitges, Ramon Casas, a long yearned modernity will travel to CaixaForum in Madrid (between 8 March and 11 Juny) and Palma (from 6 Juliol to 22 October).

The expectation generated by the exhibition gave way to a large number of visitors, that has been constant from the beginning to the end. The 38.395 visitors involved an average of 500 visitors daily, more than double those received usually by Museu de Maricel and Cau Ferrat. During the last days, the queues have been constant and almost daily. Only this Saturday, the exhibition received 1,288 visitors.

Visitors were extremely diverse as they came in 337 groups belonging to different profiles, ages and origin, that watched the exhibition as part of guided tours designed by the organization.

Ramon Casas, a long yearned modernity, is the central exhibition of the Year Ramon Casas, that celebrates the 150th anniversary of his birth. Both in Sitges, as in the versions that will be present in Madrid and Palma, the sample organized by Museums of Sitges, l’Obra Social “la Caixa” and the National Art Museum of Catalonia; with the collaboration of the Catalonian Self-Government, the Provincial Government of Barcelona and the City Hall of Sitges. The curator is Ignasi Domènech, head of Collections of the Museums of Sitges, and Francisco Quilez, coordinator of the Collections of the National Museum of Catalonia.

During its presence in Sitges, the exhibition was accompanied by different activities, such as educative workshops, conferences and book presentations whose main goal was to project the human figure and works of the artist among the general public. At the same time, Museus de Sitges also promoted «Menú Ramon Casas», with the participations of twelve restaurants in Sitges, and a contest of modernist showcases and the presentation of a tapa and a beer bearing the name Ramon Casas. The exhibition also had its projection through  a documentary with the same title that was shown on canal 33 the past 30 Desember.

Today, Monday, the exhibition is being dismantled to prepare the works that travel to Madrid. The Maricel Museum will open again with all collections exhibited next 1 April.

Closing ceremony with two books
Museums of Sitges said farewell to the Casas exhibition with a double act of presentation of two books and a children’s workshop in which the children painted Ramon Casas. From one side, the facsimile edition of Desde El Molino, that gathers all the chronicles that Santiago Rusiñol published at La Vanguardia between the years 1880 and 1892. Such chronicles appeared in the book Desde El Molino, in 1894, including illustrations of Casas himself. The facsimile edition was edited by L’Andana, with notes by Eliseu Trenc –professor of the University of Reims–, that translated te texts frpm French. The English version was carried out by Christine Laffargue, professora at the Institute Victor Duruy in París.

During the presentation of the work, held yesterday at the Blue Hall of Palau de Maricel, Trenc stressed the condition of a fine tuned chronicler of Rusiñor to describe the different milieus in Paris, “with sensibility“ and literary capacity.     The Mayor Miquel Forns, stressed the complicity between the two artists, that arose specially in those years in which they also discovered Sitges, 125 years from now. Forns read a fragment of the first speech of Rusiñol in Sitges: That in France he could have many millions, but he could never buy a land such as thid one, were the wine is malvasia, or the coast is luminiscesce4, women are fire and everything while swimming in an atmosphere of life and friendship”.

Yesterday, during the closing ceremony, it also took place the presentation of  Petita història de Ramon Casas (Abridged History of Ramon Casas), illustrated by Pilarín Bayés inspired by the texts of Vinyet Panyella and edited by Mediterrània, with the collaboration of the Provincial Government of Barcelona. The president of this body of government, Mercè Conesa, came to the closing ceremony and stresed the importance of Sitges as cultural capital, that is quite evident with the exhibition held in Maricel. The Curator of the Year Ramon Casas, Vinyet Panyellas, went over the integral character of the commemoration of the 150 years of the birth of Casas, based on a program that included the organitzation of exhibits, editions, conferences, childre’s workshops and educational programs among other cultural proposals.