Juan Luna: La Majordoma

Juan Luna y Novicio (1857 - 1899)

La Majordoma

 

signed (lower right)

ca. 1890

oil on canvas

20" x 18" (51 cm x 46 cm)

 

Opening bid: PHP 1,800,000

 

Property from the Ambassador Pedro Conlu Hernaez Collection

 

Provenance: Acquired by Amb. Hernaez in the 1960s, Madrid, Spain

 

ABOUT THE WORK

At the height of his fame at the turn of the 1890s, Juan Luna decided to take a divergent path. When his lyrical Hymen, oh Hyménée! won the bronze medal at the Paris Exposition of 1889 despite it being submitted as hors concours, it seemed that Luna had no other way but up, considering that he had just participated—and won at the world's biggest exposition in the world's magnificent art capital. He had also been accorded recognition for his artistic talents and was warmly received by the European monarchs of the time, including King Alfonso XII of Spain and King Umberto and his wife, Queen Marguerita, of Italy. However, this was also a time when the Propaganda Movement further strengthened with the establishment of La Solidaridad, peopled by Rizal, Del Pilar, Jaena, and the two Luna brothers, among others. It would publish its own newspaper of the same name, with the first issue coming out on February 15, 1899. The Propaganda Movement, although reformist in form, was revolutionary and radical in essence. Juan Luna as a Painter of the Common People Luna’s Social Realist Period of 1890 - 1893 by ADRIAN MARANAN “Despite access to the head of the table, Luna would eventually find himself more concerned with those without a seat. If 1872 was formative in Rizal’s nationalism, 1889 can be viewed as a decisive year for Luna. Towards the end of his life, Luna became more active as a politician for the fledgling Philippine government after Emilio Aguinaldo proclaimed independence from Spain in 1898. But it was in the City of Lights, between splendor and struggle, that Luna’s own nascent expression of nationalism was born.” —MARINELLA ANDREA C. MINA, “OF SPLENDOR & STRUGGLE: THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE AND THE WORLD OF JUAN LUNA,” ESSAY PUBLISHED IN THE MONOGRAPH “SPLENDOR, JUAN LUNA: PAINTER AS HERO,” 2023 The Beginnings of Luna’s Social Realist Period I n a correspondence with Javier Gomez de la Serna dated May 26, 1889, Luna revealed that his painting was becoming more inclined to a kind of everyday realism rather than his tried and tested formula of romantic realism. "[My] painting is [becoming] more realistic each day," Luna wrote. The end that has been sought has not yet been reached, but the tendency to an intangible reality, there is no doubt, and do not think it is a brutal and disgusting reality. No, a sublime reality in a new form." (English translation by Dr. Ambeth Ocampo, in his essay "Juan Luna and the Pursuit of Greatness," published in the book "Splendor, Juan Luna: Painter as Hero") In 1890, Luna corresponded with Rizal about a "large" painting he was doing depicting a "modern and simple" subject. Titled Monjas Francesas y su Rebaño (French Nuns and their Flock), which showed an orphanage along a Parisian street, the piece would become a significant turning point in Luna's career, as it would manifest his sympathies and affinities with the ordinary people. He would begin to document everyday Parisian living, focusing on the proletarians and the greater population of the impoverished masses. As a Filipino expatriado in the French capital, Luna saw the oppressive conditions of the working class under industrial capitalism (i.e. the widening inequality as profits from production were favored over humane working conditions) as reflections of the injustices committed by the Spanish to his fellow Filipinos. Luna would join the Salon of 1890, in which a new group, the Société Nationale des BeauxArts, held its first exhibition organized and led by Puvis de Chavannes. The Société rejected the overt orthodoxy of the older Société des Artistes Français. Members of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts were influenced by the ideas of Gustave Courbet, the French painter who rejected Romanticism and led the Realism movement in the 1840s and held as its battle cry the depiction of reality as it is. Courbet was a supporter of the Paris Commune of 1871, in which he also participated. The Paris Commune was a short-lived revolutionary government led by the French working class that aimed to establish a socialist republic governed by proletarians and put an end to the hegemony of the repressive state. The Salon of 1890, reported The Art Amateur, an American magazine "devoted to art in the household," had as its "great feature… the delineation of contemporary life—genre painting, as it is called." Continues the magazine, "But, if we sometimes find a sincere and personal effort to render the living reality, it is not so agreeable to notice that a majority of the artists chose by preference scenes of rags and misery, surgical operations, and "human documents" of a like nature." Luna felt rapport with the socialist-influenced Société, writing to Rizal, "I belong to the dissident Salon." At this time, Luna fully assimilated himself into the French social realist movement. He submitted an entry in the 1890 Salon—held at the historic Champs-de-Mars, titled Le Chiffonnier / El Trapero (The Ragpicker), depicting an old man burdened by a rag basket on his shoulders. The following year, he submitted three works: Les Ignorés, Héroes Anónimos, and Desherados (Disinherited), which depicted a funeral procession. Of Les Ignorés, he wrote to Rizal: “To my painting of the funeral, I gave the title Les Ignorés, and as you must have noted, I now give attention to the humble and disinherited.” These three works earned him the respect of the Société and gave him honors, including exclusive membership in the group, which also accorded him the privilege of sitting in screening committees and in the jury for painting competitions. Luna said to Rizal that this milestone was "an appointment I did not expect." He was also granted the special privilege of submitting as many as ten paintings without undergoing the thorough jury process. Through his admission to the Société, Luna was not anymore an outsider; he became an exclusive member of a prime art circle in a city revered as the very center of artistic gravity. It was in this milieu that Luna painted La Majordoma. The work at hand depicts an old majordome, the head servant of a French household. Luna endows the lady with dignified elegance through his smooth brushwork and muted shades of grey, a color traditionally associated with wisdom and richness. The work comes from a series of Luna paintings, in which he manifested his preference for depicting the affairs of the masses' everyday living and the unwanted consequences of the Industrial Revolution on workers’ and people’s rights, as opposed to the romantic grandiosity of portraying defining events and personalities in history and gaining inspiration from the literature and art of the Classical Era of Greek and Roman splendor. Like the narrative of the people's history or "history from below," Luna at this time deeply identified with an "art from below." There exists a thematically similar work titled Head of a Laborer, also painted in 1890 and now in the collection of the Lopez Memorial Museum. Luna’s social realist period as a reflection of his Filipino Nationalist Ideals In this period of stylistic and thematic change for Luna, he found an affinity in reading socialist-themed literature, such as Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and Le Socialisme Contemporain, an anthology edited by Emile de Laveleye and reproduced in its pages the writings of none other than the great Karl Marx and prominent Catholic socialists. In a letter to Rizal, Luna wrote that he had been searching for "a book stressing the miseries of contemporary society, a kind of Divine Comedy, with a Dante taking a walk through shops where one can hardly breathe, and where he would see men, children, and women in the most wretched state imaginable." Luna had also been thinking of a subject for a monumental painting that would encapsulate his newfound ideals. He asked Rizal, “What book would you advise me to read to inspire me? By someone who has written against this naked materialism and this infamous exploitation of the poor, the struggle of the rich with the wretched! I am looking for a subject worthy to be developed on a canvas of eight meters.” Luna would also share with Rizal about his visit to a French iron foundry, where he encountered the miserable conditions of the workers. He wrote, "I was there three or four minutes, and it seemed that I had swallowed sand and dust all my life. They penetrated my nose, mouth, and eyes…and to think that those wretches breathed coal and dust twelve hours of each day! I believe that they are infallibly condemned to death, and that it is a crime to abandon such people." The sight strengthened Luna's empathy for the proletarian class. La Majordoma, a social realist portrait of a French Proletarian I t was in this milieu that Luna painted La Majordoma. The work at hand depicts an old majordome, the head servant of a French household. Luna endows the lady with dignified elegance through his smooth brushwork and muted shades of grey, a color traditionally associated with wisdom and richness. The work comes from a series of Luna paintings, in which he manifested his preference for depicting the affairs of the masses' everyday living and the unwanted consequences of the Industrial Revolution on workers’ and people’s rights, as opposed to the romantic grandiosity of portraying defining events and personalities in history and gaining inspiration from the literature and art of the Classical Era of Greek and Roman splendor. Like the narrative of the people's history or "history from below," Luna at this time deeply identified with an "art from below." There exists a thematically similar work titled Head of a Laborer, also painted in 1890 and now in the collection of the Lopez Memorial Museum. Luna's social realist period would climax in the now-lost masterpiece Peuple et Rois (People and Kings), painted from 1891 to 1892 and portrayed the desecration of the French royal tombs in the Cathedral of St. Denis by the revolutionaries of the French Revolution of 1830 (the "Second French Revolution"). In a way, Peuple et Rois echoed the anti-friar sentiments of the ilustrados. Although European in form and subject, Luna espoused and imparted in La Majordoma a sense of dignity to his fellow natives in the Philippine motherland, which had been deemed morally, culturally, socially, and ethnically inferior to their peninsular counterparts. In these European images of the working class, and with an art further strengthened by his recognition in the European expositions, Luna hoped to endow his fellow countrymen with the utmost sense of national pride, especially within their historically crucial milieu of the Filipinos' endeavor in the formation of a shared national identity that is crucial for the struggle for eventual independence.

 

Lot 134 of the Leon Gallery live and online auction on November 30, 2024. Please see leon-gallery.com and leonexchange.com for more information and to place an online bid.

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