Femme à la guitare (Woman with Guitar)

When María Blanchard settled in Paris in 1916 on a permanent basis, the city she had experienced on previous visits with Diego Rivera was already unrecognisable. The First World War had already upended every aspect of life, and a return to order and a reinstatement of classicism and tradition had taken root in art. Cubism was no exception to this trend and was discarding the experimentation that had characterised its origins, with its creations seeking greater legibility and formal clarity. In Paris, Blanchard would encounter some of the major representatives of this new style known as Synthetic Cubism: Juan Gris and Jean Metzinger, whom she met through Jacques Lipchitz and André Lothe, coming into contact with all of them at the L’effort Moderne gallery, managed by art dealer Léonce Rosenberg and a standard-bearer of this new style.

 

This painting corresponds to a period of collaboration and friendship between Blanchard and Juan Gris that saw her, like Gris, revise a classical theme from French pictorial tradition: personage as musical instrument. The artist composed the figure through interweaving, in two dimensions, geometric planes coloured with no apparent connection. The synthesis she would arrive at is extreme, with neither volume nor perspective, just precise details such as the guitar strings, an eye and three fingers to help recognise the figure represented.

Raúl Martínez Arranz

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