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