Exhibition: María Blanchard. Painter despite cubism

María Blanchard (1881-1932) is the first Spanish woman to incorporate cubism into her paintings. Undervalued at the time, when the idea of ​​female artistic inferiority was widespread, and sadly still not as well known today, the Picasso Museum in Malaga now dedicates a monographic exhibition to the artist, which chronologically covers her artistic life.

The Spanish writer and great disseminator of the avant-garde movement, said of Blanchard that she was “the greatest and most enigmatic Spanish painter of all times”. Trained in Madrid, her creative perspective and work approach took a turn when she moved to Paris in 1909, where she discovered the Cubist avant-garde movement. In the French capital, where she would die in 1932, she was a close friend of the cubism master Juan Gris, shared a house with the Mexican Diego Rivera and, most importantly, she received some of the recognition that she did not manage to receive in Spain.The Picasso Museum exhibition seeks to highlight “the symbolic richness, social commitment, formal complexity and innovative character” of Blanchard as a painter. The paintings exhibited were all painted by the artist, including the most abstract paintings from her first period and the most figurative ones from the last.