When Horror and Violence Are Expressed With Subtlety: Ramón Casas i Carbó

Casas: Self-Portrait

Ramon Casas: Interior, Outdoors, Madrid
Museo Reina Sofie

The Catalan painter Ramón Casas i Carbó (1866 - 1932) is barely known in the United States, though he was a prodigiously talented portrait painter and graphic artist.  He was more or less Spain's answer to John Singer Sargent, who was about a decade older.  Most of his paintings in the United States are in private collections in Florida and Chicago, reflecting the residences of his friend Charles Deering and his half-brother James, the very rich heirs of the farm machinery company that eventually became International Harvester.  One exquisite work, the Interior Outdoors, depicting his sister and brother-in-law relaxing after lunch on the patio of their Barcelona apartment, was on view in San Antonio at the San Antonio Museum of Art last year in the exhibition of Spanish art that commemorated San Antonio's three-hundredth anniversary.

Ramon Casas: Julia Peraire
Barcelona Cercle de Liceu

Casas himself came from a wealthy family-- he was in no way a starving artist--and enjoyed great success in Spain during his lifetime.  He was a mover and shaker in the Catalan equivalent of Art Nouveau, called Modernisme, and one of the investors and principal forces behind a short-lived but influential bar and art venue called Els Quatre Gats(the Four Cats), where the teen-aged Pablo Picasso had his first one-man show.  He had a gorgeous model and girlfriend, Julia Peraire, whom he finally married later in life (she was 22 years his junior).

I do not intend to go into all the details of Casas personal and artistic life here, and can instead direct you to Carmen Lord's superb doctoral dissertation dealing with Casas's life between 1866 and 1908), which is available online, and the hard-to-find Charles Deering and Ramon Casas, A Friendship in Artby Isabel Coll Marbent (maybe a library near you has a copy) which deals with

What I want to discuss are just three paintings of Casas, all done in the 1890's, none of which is a charming portrait, but which instead chronicle contemporary events of violence, and how the artist dealt with them, in a way that is as far as you can get from the in-your-face explosiveness- approach to these things now--whether news events or fictional ones in film and other media.

Garrote Vil ("Ordinary Garrotting") (1894)

Ramon Casas, Garrote Vil, Madrid, Museo Reina Sofía

This painting, now in the Reina Cristina Museum in Madrid, depicts an execution of a real criminal named Aniceto Peinador condemned to death in 1893 for a robbery and murder committed three years earlier.  At that time in Catalonia, executions were public, and the means of execution was garroting.  This consisted of having the condemned sit in a chair on a platform, where an iron collar was placed around his neck; this was progressively tightened with a torque from behind until he died of strangulation; his body was then left there on exhibition for four hours, after which it was released for burial.  In Barcelona these executions, all between 1891 and 1897, were carried out in the Pati dels Corders (the Ropemakers' Courtyard), which abutted the Reina Amalia prison (where Enriqueta Martí was later imprisoned). Subsequently, this means of death was performed indoors, out of the public eye, the last of them during the dying days of the Franco regime in 1974.

Casas was there in 1893, and, according to Carmen Lord, made some quick sketches.  He also did a painting of the Pati empty of figures. In 1894, he would present his finished painting, entitled simply Garrote Vil, at his preferred gallery, the Sala Parés.

Ramon Casas, The Pati dels Corders

The painting is stark and stunning: A large crowd rings the bleak Pati dels Corders, held back by the walls around it, as well as spectators hanging over all the balconies of surrounding buildings. The Reina Amalia prison with its wall and the one access doorway to the fatal spot is to the left. Black-robed members of the Society of the Holy Blood with pointed hoods and the vague figure of a crucifix ring the platform. Peinador sits in the execution chair, partially blocked by an inner ring of officials, while the executioner stands behind him. You can barely see the criminal, but the tension of the scene is heightened by the rings of blank patio space and the concentric disposition of drama's players.  The foreground is occupied by spectators, mostly male, seen from the back and from a vantage point somewhat above them.  The tilting of their hats in various directions provides tension, but their focus is avidly on the scene in front of them. In a subtle diagonal they focus on the victim, and tension is further achieved by the single bare vertical foreground tree somewhat off center; only later do we perceive that there were actually two rows of bare spindly trees within the patio itself.

The actual execution scene is far back on the patio, and the positioning of the figures there, reinforced by the gray horizontal block of the execution platform, appear very, very still.  Adding to the feeling of foreboding is the smoky, industrial sky, the monochromatic buff-colored buildings, and the basically neutral tones of everyone's clothing. Only horizontal and gentle diagonal streaks of scarlet banners, and a few accents of the same color in scattered foreground hats break the monotony, but also serve to emphasize the dead space of the patio's open areas.

The painter's technique is fluid, but the lack of detail does not intrude on the geometry of the composition. Casas's painting, with its distant and partially obscured view of the execution itself, evokes horror through what we don't see clearly, but know what's going on.

Isidre Mompart's Execution (photograph)

Photographs of garroting in the Patí dels Corders exist.  The setting, the crowds and the victim, this time mass-murderer Isidre Mompart in 1891 are very similar, though the view is from the opposite side of the Patí, and the crowd in the Patí itself, far denser. This photo, taken by a member of the Holy Blood Brotherhood, was probably known to Casas. But the photograph, with a clear view of Mompart, perhaps already executed, though gruesome, is a chronicle not a commentary.

It is Casas' artistic adjustments in the painting that transform a messy, nasty public event into restrained commentary.  When he first showed the painting in the Sala Parés, the memory was recent, and such executions ongoing.  Carmen Lord comments that many of those who came to see the picture had attended the actual event.  One delicate-minded lady actually fainted away in front of it. The painter subsequently exhibited it in Paris and at the National Fine Arts Exhibition in Madrid in 1895, where it won a medal.

Javier Bardem: Drooling Garrotee

In its time, Garrote Vil was a sensation because of its depiction of a lurid public event.  For this 21st century viewer, though, its distanced, nuanced view of the event and its restraint makes it far more horrifying as a sort of subtle commentary on violence that my lifetime has forgotten--we are so smitten with the violence of violence itself in minute, noisy detail.  Some idea of the power of understatement vs. bombastic display may be suggested by a close-up of Don Lorenzo, the over-the-top villain played by Javier Bardem in Milos Forman's cliché ridden and over-picturesque film Goya's Ghosts (2006).  At the film's end, Don Lorenzo, after a sort of auto-da-fé travesty, is garrotted in the street, up close and personal, and Bardem's character comes to a drooling end.

Two more paintings of social commentary await in part 2, coming up sooner rather than later.

_________________________________________________________________________

Two works on Ramón Casas in English are:

Carmen Lord, Point and Counterpoint: Ramon Casas in Paris and Barcelona1866-1908.  This is her doctoral dissertation from the University of Michigan (1995) available online through Proquest. 

Isabel Coll Mirabent, Charles Deering and Ramon Casas.  A Friendship in Art, Evanston, IL., Northwestern University Press, 2012.

On Aniceto Peinador's execution, see the entry in Miquel Barcelonauta's blog Barcelofília: http://barcelofilia.blogspot.com/2011/12/pati-de-corders-lloc-de-les-execucions.html

There's a whole popular book on the Garrote Vil, if you have a morbid imagination: Eladio Romero Garcia, Garrote Vil. Rituales de ejecución, verdugos y reos en la España contemporánea,