Naked Maja (postage stamps)
14 of them with denominations between 1 céntimo and 5 pesetas (Scott #386–396 and 400–402), have similar design in different colors—a portrait of Francisco de Goya in his mature years (1826) by Vicente López y Portaña.
This is what most stamp catalogs state, despite the fact that the round anniversary was two years earlier, in 1928,[6] and the date is also not the same: the artist died on 16 April, and the set was issued on 15 June.
[7] Stamps with naked Maja were privately ordered from the London printer Waterlow & Sons,[1] but the Spanish governmental mail service (Correos) recognized this issue as legitimate in exchange for a part of the circulation.
According to a New York newspaper, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle for August 1, 1930, 29,000 stamps of the first issue featuring the nude Maja, of all three denominations, were sold in total.
[8] Having lost the charm of its "Golden Age", economic prosperity, global leadership, and most of its colonial possessions, Spain in the 18th-19th centuries was experiencing chronic decline.
Both maja men and women wore daggers at their belts, dressed provocatively and foppishly, deliberately behaved themselves arrogantly, were notable for freedom of manners, and sometimes lived on banditry and looting.
Embodiment of this trend, majismo, became a favorite subject for Francisco Goya; and his painting La Maja Desnuda was in this sense a culmination.
The artist, however, painted his work for a very small elite audience and hardly imagined that his Maja in less than a century and a half would be available to the general public in hundred thousands of copies.
[20] Republicans actively used these stamps for political propaganda against corruption of decadent aristocracy and its monarchist supporters, which accelerated the change of the social system:[21][22] in April 1931, i. e. less than a year later, the King of Spain Alfonso XIII fled and was deposed, the country was declared a republic, and its nobility was deprived of all privileges.
For advertising purposes, United Artists Corp. tried then to mail out 2,268 postcards announcing the film and carrying a reproduction of the Goya's painting La Maja Desnuda, but the distribution was halted by the Post Office Department, which held that it violated Sections 1461 and 1463 of Title 18 of the United States Code, forbidding the mailing of "lewd, lascivious or indecent" matter.
[28] The film company's protest stating that the postcards reproduced a painting being publicly displayed in the Prado Museum in Madrid, was, however, rejected.
At hearings, the court found that the presence of the La Maja Desnuda painting in the museum was not a crime, but distribution of such images is "sexy-pandering to a lewd and lascivious interest on the part of the average man.
[29] In 2000, the scandalous series of 1930 Spanish stamps was immortalized in a novel, Hit List by Lawrence Block, where the central character Keller described in detail his teenager collector's feelings in relation to its purchase.
[31] Over the past decades, the La Maja Desnuda painting by Goya has been repeatedly reproduced by other nations on their postage stamps, including countries with significant religious domination in society: Paraguay, the United Arab Emirates, Albania, etc.
