Mujer con abanico (Woman with a Fan)

From 1913 to 1922, María Blanchard made much of her work within the Cubist language she had encountered first-hand during the time she spent in Paris. Mujer con abanico (Woman with a Fan) is one of the most ambitious paintings from her early years, a work she would display in 1915 at the Los pintores íntegros (The Painters of Integrity) exhibition, the first to exhibit Cubist works in Madrid. The patchy critical reception of the show was one of the reasons behind the artist leaving Spain to settle permanently in Paris that same year.
Her choice of the woman with fan theme bears a relation to classical Spanish tradition. This figure in all likelihood a dancer, enables Blanchard to play with colour and movement and thus arrange the composition in a series of simultaneous planes which recall, in their dynamism, the works of Futurist artists or Marcel Duchamp’s.

Raúl Martínez Arranz