Anís del Mono. «Mono y mona» (Anís del Mono. "Male Monkey and Female Monkey")

Ramón Casas developed the commercial side of his work through advertising, which was driven by the emerging industrial society in Catalonia and which, in many ways, fixed its gaze on France, the hub of the modern poster. Illustrated magazines and publicity competitions were the incentives behind the evolution of this graphic language, where chromolithography became an effective tool to attract the attention of passers-by. Monumental figures on flat and contrasting backgrounds were used by the artist in the poster competition for Anís del Mono, where he employed the image of the “manola” with a commercial vison of national scope. Along this same line of the woman’s image as the focal point in advertising, Casas made a poster to promote the magazine Pèl & Ploma, applying the iconic image of the “La noia decadent”, the decadent girl: a stylishly dressed bourgeois woman, an image of indolence, bound at that time to vices such as idleness and a life of disorganisation, of standing outside the norm. The artist camouflaged this symbolism behind the modernist ideal of the feminine and with serpentine curved lines, the trail of which would be followed, in 1901, by Aleardo Villa in the poster Los Cigarrillos Paris son los mejores (Cigarrillos Paris Are the Best), which perpetuates this distorted image of the woman.



José Manuel Lara Oliveros