La Carrega

Ramon Casas's 'La Carrega' (The Charge, 1903-1904) is one of the most politically charged works in Spanish art — depicting the violent suppression of a workers' demonstration by mounted Guardia Civil officers, it captured the brutal reality of social conflict in industrializing Catalonia. Casas was a central figure of the Catalan modernista movement and a founder of the Els Quatre Gats café that nurtured the young Picasso's early career. His engagement with this subject of police violence against workers was unusual for a painter of his privileged background and social position, and the work's directness and power gave it a lasting significance in Spanish social art.

Casas renders the charge with the technical mastery and compositional drama of his best work — the mounted officers and the fleeing or fallen demonstrators organized within a composition of violent diagonal movement. His handling of the figures in the chaos of the charge, the dust and confusion of the confrontation, and the specific visual character of the event creates both documentary power and pictorial organization. His palette in this work is characteristically restrained, the social drama conveyed through composition and figure handling rather than through coloristic extravagance.