75th Anniversary of Santiago Rusiñol’s Death from June 13th 2006 to June 13th 2007
 On June 13th, 1931, Santiago Rusiñol died in Aranjuez, in the middle of one of the multiple visits he had made to paint the Royal Gardens. He had just turned seventy and thus ended an extensive, interesting career devoted to art. Painter, narrator, introducer of prose poems in Catalonia, playwright, journalist, ancient Catalan wrought iron collector, theoretician of total art and of the priesthood of art, creator of the literary figure Señor Esteve, and, above all, standard-bearer of the modernist movement during the final years of the 19th century until the 20th, Santiago Rusiñol made his life and his work the embodiment of the modern artist myth, with European projection and international recognition
This 2006 is the seventy fifth anniversary of the artist’s death, and the Sitges Town Council wishes to commemorate the event by organizing a grand cultural project centered around the figure of the “lord of Cau Ferrat” –the home-studio the artist had built for himself in Sitges between 1893 and 1894 and which he bequeathed to the town after his death– and the driving force behind the Modernist fiestas that turned the “Blanca Subur”, symbol of art and culture, a society in the middle of a process of transformation and battered by the wars in Cuba and the Philippines Filipinas, into an inevitable reference point in the regenerationist movement that took place in Catalonia and Spain within the framework of the “’98 crisis”.
During an entire year –from June 13th 2006 to June 13th 2007– the Sitges Town Council wishes to symbolically revive the spirit of the modernist fiestas and promote the image of the city that Santiago Rusiñol helped to create, an image that is inseparable from art and culture, civic-mindedness, modernity and Europeanism. To do so, the Sitges Town Council would like to contribute to relaunching Santiago Rusiñol’s figure and bringing his work up to date through diverse events –conferences, courses, a symposium, itineraries, a web site, book editions and reissues, a documentary– and, above all, the recovery and improvement of the town’s architectural and cultural heritage and the creation of the 21st century “Caus”, meaning dens or hideouts, that serve to renew the artistic and modernizing impetus that Rusiñol sowed in Sitges.
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Any Rusiñol 
