Composición cubista (Cubist Composition)

Born into a sexist and ableist society, María Blanchard endured, in her critical fortunes as an artist, discrimination that was twofold: for being a woman and for being born with functional diversity. Neither would hold her back, however, from becoming one of the pre-eminent artists in the twentieth century.
Within the generation of Spanish artists who moved to Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Blanchard was unique because she was a woman. She studied Fine Arts in Madrid but, with an eagerness to explore avant-garde art and searching for a sense of freedom, she applied for a grant in 1909 to move to Paris, and it was there where she would continue to study painting at the Academia Vitti, learning to shake off academic language and understand her own creativity. In Paris she encountered Cubism and entered into the circle of artists that included Juan Gris, Jean Metzinger and Jacques Lipchitz. Composición cubista (Cubist Composition) is one of the most monumental and complex works to decipher in María Blanchard’s Cubist period after she settled permanently in Paris in 1916. She organised the structure of the painting with highly geometricized colour planes that mask barely perceptible objects. Although the work approached abstraction, she introduced one element, the baroque moulding, in much more detail than the rest to avoid losing touch with reality. Furthermore, the bold combination of chosen colours, from lemon-yellow to pink, orange and green, only serve to stress the spectator’s bewilderment and their inability to discern the keys Blanchard employs to define the objects and space they are immersed in. 

Raúl Martínez Arranz