{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":45792,"auction_id":92,"set_id":121,"lot_number":"134","artist":"Juan Luna y Novicio (1857 - 1899)","title":"La Majordoma","starting_price":1800000,"signed_dated":"signed (lower right)
ca. 1890","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"20\" x 18\" (51 cm x 46 cm)","property":"PROPERTY FROM THE AMBASSADOR PEDRO CONLU HERNAEZ COLLECTION","coa":null,"provenance":"Acquired by Amb. Hernaez in the 1960s, Madrid, Spain","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"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.
I\nn a correspondence with Javier Gomez de la Serna \ndated May 26, 1889, Luna revealed that his painting was \nbecoming more inclined to a kind of everyday realism rather \nthan his tried and tested formula of romantic realism.
\"[My] painting is [becoming] more realistic each day,\" Luna \nwrote. The end that has been sought has not yet been \nreached, but the tendency to an intangible reality, there is no \ndoubt, and do not think it is a brutal and disgusting reality. \nNo, a sublime reality in a new form.\" (English translation by \nDr. Ambeth Ocampo, in his essay \"Juan Luna and the Pursuit \nof Greatness,\" published in the book \"Splendor, Juan Luna: \nPainter as Hero\")
In 1890, Luna corresponded with Rizal about a \"large\" \npainting he was doing depicting a \"modern and simple\" \nsubject. Titled Monjas Francesas y su Rebaño (French \nNuns and their Flock), which showed an orphanage along \na Parisian street, the piece would become a significant \nturning point in Luna's career, as it would manifest his \nsympathies and affinities with the ordinary people. He would \nbegin to document everyday Parisian living, focusing on the \nproletarians and the greater population of the impoverished \nmasses. As a Filipino expatriado in the French capital, \nLuna saw the oppressive conditions of the working class \nunder industrial capitalism (i.e. the widening inequality as \nprofits from production were favored over humane working \nconditions) as reflections of the injustices committed by the \nSpanish to his fellow Filipinos.
Luna’s participation in the Salon of 1890, a \nturning point in his career
Luna would join the Salon of 1890, in which a \nnew group, the Société Nationale des Beaux\u0002Arts, held its first exhibition organized and led by \nPuvis de Chavannes. The Société rejected the overt \northodoxy of the older Société des Artistes Français.
Members of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts \nwere influenced by the ideas of Gustave Courbet, \nthe French painter who rejected Romanticism and \nled the Realism movement in the 1840s and held as \nits battle cry the depiction of reality as it is. Courbet \nwas a supporter of the Paris Commune of 1871, in \nwhich he also participated. The Paris Commune \nwas a short-lived revolutionary government led by \nthe French working class that aimed to establish a \nsocialist republic governed by proletarians and put \nan end to the hegemony of the repressive state.
The Salon of 1890, reported The Art Amateur,\nan American magazine \"devoted to art in the \nhousehold,\" had as its \"great feature… the \ndelineation of contemporary life—genre painting, \nas it is called.\" Continues the magazine, \"But, if \nwe sometimes find a sincere and personal effort \nto render the living reality, it is not so agreeable \nto notice that a majority of the artists chose by \npreference scenes of rags and misery, surgical \noperations, and \"human documents\" of a like \nnature.\"
Luna felt rapport with the socialist-influenced \nSociété, writing to Rizal, \"I belong to the dissident \nSalon.\" At this time, Luna fully assimilated himself \ninto the French social realist movement. He \nsubmitted an entry in the 1890 Salon—held at \nthe historic Champs-de-Mars, titled Le Chiffonnier \n/ El Trapero (The Ragpicker), depicting an old \nman burdened by a rag basket on his shoulders. \nThe following year, he submitted three works: \nLes Ignorés, Héroes Anónimos, and Desherados \n(Disinherited), which depicted a funeral procession. \nOf Les Ignorés, he wrote to Rizal: “To my painting \nof the funeral, I gave the title Les Ignorés, and as \nyou must have noted, I now give attention to the \nhumble and disinherited.”
These three works earned him the respect of the \nSociété and gave him honors, including exclusive \nmembership in the group, which also accorded him \nthe privilege of sitting in screening committees and \nin the jury for painting competitions. Luna said to \nRizal that this milestone was \"an appointment I \ndid not expect.\" He was also granted the special \nprivilege of submitting as many as ten paintings \nwithout undergoing the thorough jury process. \nThrough his admission to the Société, Luna was \nnot anymore an outsider; he became an exclusive \nmember of a prime art circle in a city revered as the \nvery center of artistic gravity.
La Majordoma, a social realist portrait of a French \nProletarian
I\nt was in this milieu that Luna painted La Majordoma. The \nwork at hand depicts an old majordome, the head servant \nof a French household. Luna endows the lady with dignified \nelegance through his smooth brushwork and muted shades \nof grey, a color traditionally associated with wisdom and \nrichness. The work comes from a series of Luna paintings, \nin which he manifested his preference for depicting the \naffairs of the masses' everyday living and the unwanted \nconsequences of the Industrial Revolution on workers’ and \npeople’s rights, as opposed to the romantic grandiosity of \nportraying defining events and personalities in history and \ngaining inspiration from the literature and art of the Classical \nEra of Greek and Roman splendor. Like the narrative of the \npeople's history or \"history from below,\" Luna at this time \ndeeply identified with an \"art from below.\"
There exists a thematically similar work titled Head of a \nLaborer, also painted in 1890 and now in the collection of \nthe Lopez Memorial Museum.
Luna’s social realist period as a reflection of his Filipino \nNationalist Ideals
I\nn this period of stylistic and thematic change for Luna, \nhe found an affinity in reading socialist-themed literature, \nsuch as Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and Le Socialisme\nContemporain, an anthology edited by Emile de Laveleye \nand reproduced in its pages the writings of none other than \nthe great Karl Marx and prominent Catholic socialists. In a \nletter to Rizal, Luna wrote that he had been searching for \n\"a book stressing the miseries of contemporary society, a \nkind of Divine Comedy, with a Dante taking a walk through \nshops where one can hardly breathe, and where he would \nsee men, children, and women in the most wretched state \nimaginable.\" Luna had also been thinking of a subject for a \nmonumental painting that would encapsulate his newfound \nideals. He asked Rizal, “What book would you advise me to \nread to inspire me? By someone who has written against \nthis naked materialism and this infamous exploitation of the \npoor, the struggle of the rich with the wretched! I am looking \nfor a subject worthy to be developed on a canvas of eight \nmeters.”
Luna would also share with Rizal about his visit to a French \niron foundry, where he encountered the miserable conditions \nof the workers. He wrote, \"I was there three or four minutes, \nand it seemed that I had swallowed sand and dust all my \nlife. They penetrated my nose, mouth, and eyes…and to think \nthat those wretches breathed coal and dust twelve hours \nof each day! I believe that they are infallibly condemned to \ndeath, and that it is a crime to abandon such people.\" The \nsight strengthened Luna's empathy for the proletarian class.
Luna's social realist period would climax in the now-lost \nmasterpiece Peuple et Rois (People and Kings), painted \nfrom 1891 to 1892 and portrayed the desecration of the \nFrench royal tombs in the Cathedral of St. Denis by the \nrevolutionaries of the French Revolution of 1830 (the \"Second \nFrench Revolution\"). In a way, Peuple et Rois echoed the \nanti-friar sentiments of the ilustrados.
Although European in form and subject, Luna espoused \nand imparted in La Majordoma a sense of dignity to his \nfellow natives in the Philippine motherland, which had been \ndeemed morally, culturally, socially, and ethnically inferior \nto their peninsular counterparts. In these European images \nof the working class, and with an art further strengthened \nby his recognition in the European expositions, Luna hoped \nto endow his fellow countrymen with the utmost sense of \nnational pride, especially within their historically crucial \nmilieu of the Filipinos' endeavor in the formation of a shared \nnational identity that is crucial for the struggle for eventual \nindependence.\n\n","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":2800000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":2800000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":3364480,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":44524,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/92/121/lot/134.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":44867,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/92/121/lot/134d.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":44866,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/92/121/lot/134c.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":44865,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/92/121/lot/134b.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":133,"next":135,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}