Held on 19 Dec 2012
María Blanchard (1881-1932), a pioneer in the formation of the historical avant-garde, does not fall within the roles usually given to female artists at the start of modernity. A hunchback who never married or had children, Blanchard had little in common with the artist-model defined by impressionism (Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt) or with the artist-partner sometimes found in surrealism (Remedios Varo, introduced by Max Ernst, or Meret Oppenheim, introduced by Alberto Giacometti). Unlike women artists in other contexts, María Blanchard is neither a symbol of the modern woman nor a reflection of the desire of the men populating avant-garde circles. On the contrary, her painting represents the case of an artist that was very independent and deeply committed to the notion of modernity. Between 1913-1919 she worked on a cubism quite close to the Kantian ideal of the autonomy of form, rivalling Juan Gris in an effort to redefine the language of cubism using the rules of painting. Then from 1919 to 1932 she took part in the return to order and the construction of a classical idea of art, a conceptualisation bearing a certain relationship with political and cultural nationalism. In short, she was an artist who displayed in just a few years a large number of the qualities and controversies that surrounded the avant-garde during the first third of the 20th century.
This seminar is the culmination of a multi-faceted research project that involves, on the one hand, the publication of a catalogue raisonné of Blanchard's artworks (Fundación Telefónica y Museo Reina Sofía, 2004); and on the other, the exhibitions held at Fundación Botín and Museo Reina Sofía. The debate is structured into a series of concise presentations that highlight the most relevant aspects of Blanchard's work.
Carmen Bernárdez. Professor of Art History at the Universidad Complutense.
Eugenio Carmona Mato. Chaired Professor of Art History at the Universidad de Málaga.
María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco. Professor of Art History at the Universidad Complutense.
Xon de Ros. Professor of Modern Spanish Literature at Oxford University.
María José Salazar. Curator at Museo Reina Sofía, curator of this exhibition.
6:00 p.m. Eugenio Carmona. María Blanchard and the redefinition of cubism
6:20 p.m. Carmen Bernárdez. María Blanchard: Agency and History
6:40 p.m. Xon de Ros. The work of María Blanchard in the context of avant-garde primitivism
Break
7:15 p.m. María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco. After cubism? María Blanchard's painting after 1918
7:40 p.m. María José Salazar. María Blanchard, the great unknown
8:00 p.m. Round table with the participants
Saturday 30 May and 6 Jun, 2026 - 18:00 H
In the years of the Popular Unity Government in Chile, three young film-makers, Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, went to the offices of Chile Films to present a film project. This session screens three films which convey the three directors’ experience of exile. In Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland), Angelina Vázquez depicts the social and working conditions of Chileans exiled in the Nordic country. The fictional work Lentement, directed by Marilú Mallet, follows a young Chilean exile around spaces of Montreal blighted by nostalgia and political rage. In Huellas (Fingerprints), Valeria Sarmiento returns to Chile to explore the memory of violence inflicted by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The session culminates in a talk with the three directors, gathered here for the first time.
Sunday 31 May and Friday 5 June, 2026
In a kind of road movie, Marilú Mallet travels across her native Chile after forty years of exile. The journey is an exploration of the dynamism of national identity, leading the film-maker to return to questions previously explored in her filmography and to search for new forms of filming the encounter between body and landscape.
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
