Antonio Rodríguez Luna Córdoba 1910-1985

Painted in 1934, and bold and stylised in execution, the political message inherent in the present work is clear. A peasant couple holding a bird stand beside a female figure, also with a bird in her hand. Beyond are fields of harvested corn; in the background are three trees in full leaf. But despite these symbols of hope and abundance, on top of the haystacks (the fruits of their labour), are three crosses. Luna’s politicizing of this rural scene coincided with the painter’s condemnation of the heavy handed repression of the social uprisings that had occurred in different regions of Spain that year.

Only a year earlier, in 1933, Luna had held his first one-man exhibition in the Museo de Arte Moderna, Madrid, at which the museum had purchased the painter’s Birds on the Water Melon Plantation (fig. 1). In its strong simplified forms and agrarian subject matter, the Madrid painting shares similarities with the present work. As political tensions mounted in Spain, however, Luna’s outlook darkened. He took part in the First Exhibition of Revolutionary Art in Madrid; he published drawings and prints in the left Wing magazine El Mono Azul and contributed to the content of the periodical October. Active as a revolutionary in the ensuing Civil War, he was banished to one of the concentration camps in Angelès-sur-Mer after which, in exile from Spain, he moved to Mexico. There he pursued an extremely active and successful career as a teacher and painter exhibiting widely. He returned to Spain after Franco’s death in 1975.

Fig. 1, Antonio Rodríguez Luna, Pájaros en el melonar, 1932, 92 by 71cm, Museo Nacional, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid