Original work: Composition musicale, hacia 1918.
Author: María Blanchard (Santander, 1881-París, 1932).
Owned by: Masaveu Collection. © of the reproduction/photograph: Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson.
Organised by: Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga. Legado Paul, Christine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (Museo Picasso Málaga)
Curator: D. José Lebrero Stals
Works from the Masaveu Collection lent for the exhibition:
Composition musicale, about 1918. Artist: Blanchard, María (Santander, 1881-París, 1932). Owner: Masaveu Collection
Composition avec personage, about 1916-1918. Artist: Blanchard, María (Santander, 1881-París, 1932). Owner: Masaveu Collection
«María Blanchard. Pintora a pesar del cubismo» was an ambitious exhibition that offered a chronological survey of the different stages in the creative life of the painter María Blanchard (1881–1932). Though underestimated by the critics and culture industry of her time, María Gutiérrez-Cueto Blanchard, better known as María Blanchard, stands out in art history today for her contributions to the modern movement and for becoming the first woman in Spain who systematically used the Cubist method to construct images by fragmenting and combining geometric shapes in an optical space of multiple simultaneous perspectives. This show highlighted the rich symbolism, social engagement, formal complexity and innovative quality of the painter’s oeuvre in her relatively short career as an artist.
A cultured woman determined to live and create as she pleased until the end of her life, Blanchard defied the gender stereotypes of her era. The Masaveu Collection contains three of her works, although the two loaned for this exhibition are probably the most important. Both produced during her Cubist period (19161918), at a time when she was starting to question this style and gradually drift closer to figuration, as Composition avec personnage seems to intimate, these pieces bespeak the powerful influence of Juan Gris on her work.