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

The [Cavalry] Charge (1899/1902)

Ramon Casas, The Charge, Olot, Museu de la Garrotxa

Of the three paintings by Ramon Casas dealing with contemporary violence, La Carga(The [Cavalry] Charge is by far the largest--it's nearly 9 feet wide by 6 feet high.  This panorama depicts the charge of mounted members of the Civil Guard breaking up a labor demonstration.  The scenario takes place in non-specific plaza in Barcelona, against a backdrop of a church and smoky factories.  A vast crowd of workers, escaping the charging police rushes towards the rear of the plaza. while a smaller group of laborers are being driven back in the foreground at the extreme right. Right next to the latter are two clearly defined figures: an isolated worker who has fallen, with a mounted policeman with a sword and flying cape, appearing to be ready to trample him.  The rest of the intervening space in the plaza, occupying about two thirds of the surface, is empty except for the indistinct blob of another fallen figure close to the fleeing crowd.  Almost all the color in the picture both in the setting and the figures, is in bleak, dusty neutrals.  The only exceptions to this are in the black suit and white cuffs of the fallen man, and the black and white uniforms of the police, with one brilliant accent of the scarlet of their neck cloths.

Even more than in Casas' Garrote Vil, it is the startling emptiness of all of that open space--here like the eye of a hurricane, that makes the peripheral violence so intense.

By 1899, when Casas did this painting, Barcelona had been suffering not only anarchist bombings but a great deal of labor unrest, the largest being the May Day strike of 1890.  This sort of labor unrest was certainly not confined to Barcelona, or Spain: The Homestead strike of steelworkers against Andrew Carnegie was occurring in the U.S. at the same time (1892).  In Barcelona, another general strike would take place in 1902, and they would continue to occur all over Europe and the United States well into the 20th century.

Emanuel Leutze: Washington Crossing
the Delaware,New York Metropolitan Museum

But Casas himself declared that this painting did not reference a specific event.  It was rather done as a modern equivalent to the noble tradition of "History Painting:" large-scale works that commemorated historical events, normally designated for public spaces.  Goya's large 2nd of May, 1808, painted in 1814 (along with the more celebrated3rd of May), was Washington Crossing the Delaware(1851) --you get the idea.  The main difference here is that this a dramatic scene of a familiar realistic event that could have happened--but not technically one of a single incident.
likewise proposed by the painter as a commemorative history painting; and so certainly is Samuel Leutze's 

Casas: "Noi de Toma"

Art historians have pointed out that the plaza landscape encompasses a conflation of landmarks--the apparent church is a side view of Santa Maria del Mar, while the factories were located in the Poble Sec neighborhood, a significant distance away.  Is there some irony in that these two locales were basically the real venues in Casas' other two paintings of violence (Santa Maria del Mar for the Corpus painting, the factory smokestacks visible in ?  Various scholars have also pointed out that the fallen figure of the worker was modeled in Casas' studio; he was a well-known local character dubbed "Noi de Toma" (real name Josep Molera), and that Casas used his sketch of him in a cartoon for the magazine Pel i Ploma, showing a drunk man falling of the end of a tram.  The face of the policeman was also used by Casas for a cover illustration of the same magazine, but here his eyes are open.
Garrote Vil

Carmen Lord, in her study of Ramon Casas, chronicles the lack of success of the original composition in the painting's rejection by the Spanish jury for submissions to the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900.  But the painting did eventually gain success--Casas made some modifications to the painting (including evidently the shift of the policeman's gaze from straight ahead (as it appeared in Pel i Ploma) to looking down towards the fallen man.  He also gave it a more specific title: Barcelona, 1902!! -- maybe making it a more "real" history painting, since that was when that second violent general strike in Barcelona happened.  He exhibited it at the Exposition Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1903 to rave reviews--and references in the Catalan media marked its relevance to the strike of 1902.

Ramon Casas, Charles Deering 

Charles Deering, the American Farm Machinery magnate and art collector, saw the painting in 1904 when it was shown in Madrid, and was duly impressed--he made pains to meet the artist, and they subsequently became close friends, traveling together in Europe and America, and Casas eventually became associated Deering in his project to restore an old hospital in Sitges into a subsequent personal residence.  Deering remained so impressed with The Charge, that he asked Casas to make a copy for him in 1911.  Casas replied that he never made replicas of his own work, but would do a second different version for him.  This painting, now in a private collection in Florida has the civil guards, this time on foot, in pursuit of a fleeing crowd of peasants.  The setting this time is specific, the Plaça Mercadal in the town of Vic (it still exists and has a fabulous Saturday market).  As is the case with Garrote Vil, Casas did a study without people of the site in preparation.  But once more, this scene is a made-up event not a real one.  The atmosphere is much darker--even rainy, the void between the peasants and the police is far less dramatic, and the coloring is much duller

Ramon Casas: The Charge II, Florida, Private Collection

--the police still have their red bandannas, but it is much more muted.  Although Isabel Coll Mirabent, in her book on Deering and Casas praises the work for its subtle technique, the overall impression for this writer is one of dreariness, more like chasing a herd of bison seen from the rear than a panicked crowd of humanity.

Attempted Assassination of Alfonso XII

Though non-specific (at least in its original conception), the original Chargeis dynamic and effectively represents a scene of a type that many residents would have been familiar with.  It's Casas' only real painting in which overt violence plays a part. This is fitting for the painter's one venture into a monumental "History Painting,"  but, like Garrote Vil and it's the implication--in this case that big void, that makes it so compelling, and a great drama, rather than a big group of fallen, bloody bodies or a large group of horsemen coming directly at you as seen in popular engravings of the period, such as the one showing an anarchist's attempted assassination of King Alfonso XII in 1878.
Corpus,

One final note: there is an excellent short film on the three violence paintings of Ramon Casas that visits the actual sites that Casas used, and goes into a great amount of detail, but, for English-speaking readers, has the disadvantage of being in Catalan.  I provide the link below:

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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.

For the excellent Video about Casas and the violence paintings (in Catalan) see:https://www.ccma.cat/tv3/alacarta/programa/La-carrega-de-Ramon-Casas/video/4272010/

On the 1890 General Strike:https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/general-strike-spain

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

Corpus: Exit of The Corpus Christi Procession Leaving Santa Maria del Mar

Ramon Casas,Corpus,: Exit of the Corpus Christi Procession Leaving Santa Maria del Mar, Barcelona, MNAC

This painting by Ramón Casas was exhibited at the at the IV Exhibition of Fine Arts and Artistic Industries at the Palace of Fine Arts in Barcelona.  It won a gold medal, and was immediately purchased for Barcelona's Municipal Museum, and is now in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. 

It depicts a festive scene of the Corpus Christi procession leaving Barcelona's iconic church of Santa Maria del Mar.  Part of the procession is already out of the picture, but a marcher is visible carrying a banner at center left, with other members of the parade leaving to go up the street in front of him.  Behind, the rest of the parade waits to depart at the church door.  This is a group of mostly secular marchers and a bevy of young girls in white, who have just taken their first communion.  In the foreground at right, is a group of spectators seen from behind.  Other viewers stand at left, while more merge to the right with the departing paraders, and even more can be seen from the multi-hued bunting-decorated balconies in the background. Mounted police in festive uniforms make space for the parade.  

Everybody is milling around the festive scene. Though there are patches of empty street here as in Garrote Vil, here they wind diagonally as a river, adding to the composition's rhythm Though most of the coloring is neutral grays, blacks and whites, there are accents of bright color. A group of turquoise-uniformed officials, as well as colored hats among the spectators, the bright bunting and the red blouse of a mother with her chubby daughter who views the parade from the extreme right, as well as the billowing plumes of the policemen lend an air of pleasant excitement.  In Casas' usual technique, a few details are picked out, but the rest is an impressionistic freely brushed-on composition.  The faces of the little girls are pink blobs among their white veils.

This painting could pass as simply a slice of late 19th-century Barcelona life.  The Corpus Christi processions in Barcelona and other Catalan towns were famous, and besides the

Arcadi Mas i Fontevila, Corpus Christi Procession,
Sitges, Maricel Museum

religious procession, there were other secular events that accompanied it.  A similar depiction of the Corpus festival in Sitges, way before invention of the famous flower carpets, was done by Arcadi Mas i Fondevila in 1888.

But there is a far more sinister agenda to Casas' painting, because by the time he completed and exhibited it, Barcelona's Corpus Christi Procession had been suspended for two years. That's because the 1896 parade was blasted by a terrorist bomb, as it was returning to its church.  Six people were killed, including two children, and over forty injured.  

The Corpus Bombing: Contemporary Engraving

During the 1890's, Barcelona had experienced not only labor unrest, but a series of bombings carried out by Anarchists.  Two had occurred in 1893, one targeting a general, the other the bourgeoisie as they were attending an opera at the Liceu Theater.  In the first two cases, the perpetrators were speedily arrested and executed, the first by a firing squad at the prison at Montjüic, the second, the Liceu bomber Santiago Salvador, publicly by garrote at the Pati dels Corders. 

Corpus Christi Parade, 2016

The official reaction to this third bombing was itself violent.  The actual deed was committed by a French anarchist, but the government decided to crack down on local Anarchists too: arrests, imprisonments, five executions by firing squad and deportations followed.  Labor Setmana Tràgica(Tragic Week) in 1909.  The Corpus Christi festival would not resume until the Franco regime reinstated it in 1941 (it continues today in a more contemporary form in both Barcelona and Sitges, as well as other towns).

unrest, anarchism and uprisings would continue in Barcelona, culminating in the

Carmen Lord's study of Ramon Cases includes several preparatory sketches, so he certainly had this painting in mind for a time beforehand, much as he had for Garrote Vil.  But what is interesting is that he makes some deliberate artistic choices that depart from the actual event:  To begin with, the bombing took place at nine in the evening, and the painting certainly implies a full daylight hour.  In addition, the actual procession began at Barcelona's Cathedral, and after winding through neighborhood streets, ended at Santa María del Mar, rather than heading out from it.  The bombing actually took place on the street approaching the church (Carrer dels Canvis Nous) to its right, and here the procession appears to be heading off to the left (Carrer de l'Argenteria).

But artistic notwithstanding, in Casas' painting, the facade of Santa Maria del Mar is readily identifiable, and to spectators at the exhibition this painting would have had immediate associations, and understood the subtlety of its message.

Southerland Springs First Baptist Church
on an ordinary Sunday

To contemporary viewers, not knowing the backstory, the tragic implications associated with this festive scene would be lost, but this device of a tranquil preface to a violent act is still one used particularly in film and television, to this day.  How many "Coming Soon" previews have we seen where the initial scene of happy ordinary lives is quickly blasted by some violent event?  If someone were to do a pictorial scene of such an event today, it might be of the parishioners of the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas serenely going to Sunday services at around 10:30 on November 5, 2017, half an hour before Devin Patrick entered it with his arsenal of death.

There is a Part III.  It will be posted soon.
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Carmen Lord, Point and Counterpoint: Ramon Casas in Paris and Barcelona,1866-1908.  This is her doctoral dissertation from the University of Michigan (1995) available online through Proquest. 

An historical analysis of the Corpus Christi bombing can be found at an excerpt from Temma Kaplin. Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso's Barcelona. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1992:

 https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft9q2nb672&chunk.id=d0e641&toc.id=d0e238&brand=ucpress

The photo of the present-day Corpus Christi procession is by Margaret Coad, and is at:

 https://margaretcoad.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/fiesta-del-corpus-the-feast-of-corpus-christi/

A link to a You Tube of an Ordinary Sunday at Southerland Springs First Baptist Church:https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/First-Baptist-Church-YouTube-12335491.php