An exhibition was not dedicated to her in Spain until 1982 and, almost a century after her death, the definitive exhibition of the brilliant artist, admired by Juan Gris and Diego Rivera, arrives at the Picasso in Malaga.
Was Federico García Lorca who gave the lecture in tribute to María Blanchard (Santander, 1881 – Paris, 1932) at the Ateneo de Madrid after her death. A few days before, the funeral in the Bagneux cemetery was filled with beggars and vagabonds whom the artist had helped in life, despite her desperate economic situation and her delicate state of health: the scoliosis that had been twisting her spine since before his birth had turned his last years into torture.
Admired by Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Gómez de la Serna, Gerardo Diego and other contemporaries, Blanchard constituted, however, a minor episode in the vast showcase of the avant-garde, despite his fundamental contribution to Cubism. It can be safely stated that the price she paid for her independence was too high: the first exhibition dedicated to the artist after her death in Spain did not arrive until 1982, at the former National Museum of Contemporary Art. Her legacy, therefore, constitutes an object of current demand and this is argued by the Picasso Málaga Museum with the retrospective María Blanchard: painter despite cubism, which opens on the 30th and can be seen until the end of September.
The exhibition will bring together about 90 works in a landscape that aims to account for all the facets of María Blanchard, as can be seen from its motto. Although known mainly for her contribution to Cubism, the painter embraced different stages, such as the one that led her in the 1920s to develop a figurative representation that was not always well understood, to the extent that it could constitute not so much a break with Cubism as a exploration of it with unpredictable results.
In any case, the main obstacle when organizing this exhibition, and what explains in passing the little attention paid to Blanchard at an institutional level, has to do with the difficulties encountered in locating his work: «The Reina Sofía Museum had acquired some significant pieces that they have generously lent, as did the Musée d’Art Moderne and the Center Pompidou in Paris, which is where most of the artist’s legacy is preserved. But, from here, it was necessary to undertake a thorough search in numerous museums and public and private institutions from Spain, France and Switzerland. As for collectors, Blanchard’s work is even more scattered. Therefore, we can offer to the public This exhibition is nothing short of a miracle», explains the curator, José Lebrero, until last year director of the Picasso Málaga Museum itself.
To find the origin of this apathy, we must delve into the personal history of María Blanchard and the indomitable character with which she guided her dedication to art: «Blanchard was born the same year Picasso and he moved to Paris in 1909. There he learned about cubism from Juan Gris and found his true vocation. In the 1920s she had already become a well-known artist who exhibited regularly, but her splendor faded even before her death,” says Lebrero. And she abounds in some keys: «Above all, Her condition as a woman already placed her at a disadvantage compared to their male colleagues. But she was also an expatriate woman who had not exactly left Spain with great financial support behind her. Furthermore, when she began to gain fame, she decided to host some relatives who moved from Spain in her Paris home, which aggravated her already diminished financial situation. On the other hand, neither her physical appearance, affected by her illness, nor her character, strongly independent of her, fit the mold of muse and lover with which the avant-garde gurus dispatched the women. women artists. After her death, and with no one to claim her work from Spain, her fame was reduced to an exclusively French-speaking environment. And here too it became diluted over the years. In fact, in parallel to the exhibition, the Picasso Museum Málaga will launch the first monograph on Blanchard published in English, filling an important gap in her bibliography.
The new exhibition is distributed in three well-differentiated sections, as José Lebrero explains: “The first pays attention to his formative years in Madrid before his departure to Paris, a period marked by family scenes and customs where the influences of Manet, Picasso and Fortuny. The second addresses the Cubist explosion that Blanchard was the protagonist of since 1914, a revelation for which it is appropriate to recognize the painter as the greatest female artist of Cubism. And the third stops at the post-Cubist period that, starting in 1920, Blanchard cultivated with a figurative intuition, in which she took advantage of all the skills incorporated during her Cubist stage for the representation of archetypal but never recognizable characters.
In addition to the retrospective, the museum has organized a series of conferences about Blanchard that will be inaugurated next Monday by José Lebrero, who will delve into the symbolic richness of the issues that the artist addressed in her work, the social commitment that her legacy conveys, and the complexity formal and innovative of his visual investigations, among other aspects. Subsequently, on May 23, the doctor in Art History and curator María José Salazar and the professor at the University of Oxford Xon de Ros will star in a meeting about, on the one hand, the figure of Blanchard as a paradigm of voiceless brushes and, on the other, its status as a banner of feminine genius.
Furthermore, a research program developed with the collaboration of the University of Malaga aims to settle another old debt in the definition of the artist, her life and her work as subjects of academic study (in this sense, her relationship, personal and artistic, with the Russian artist Angelina Beloff with which he established a revealing triangle completed by Diego Rivera during the time in which the three shared a roof in Paris). So fragile, so indomitable, María Blanchard chose the least easy paths to illuminate her art. The beauty that she came to refine in her work deserves, a century later, the projection that she denied in her time.
