María Blanchard
gigatos | June 9, 2022
Summary
María Gutiérrez-Cueto Blanchard (Santander, March 6, 1881-Paris, April 5, 1932) was a Spanish painter considered the great lady of Cubism.
María Blanchard was born into a family of the new mountain bourgeoisie, daughter of Enrique Gutiérrez-Cueto, born in Cabezón de la Sal, and Concepción Blanchard y Santiesteban, born in Biarritz. The Gutiérrez-Cueto Blanchard family already had two daughters when María was born, Aurelia and Carmen; years later their other daughter Ana was born. The paternal grandfather, Castor Gutiérrez de la Torre, was the founder of La Abeja Montañesa and his father of El Atlántico, a liberal newspaper that he edited for ten years while working at the Junta de Obras del Puerto.
Maria was born with a physical problem, as a result of a fall suffered by her pregnant mother when she got off a horse-drawn carriage. This malformation, resulting from a kyphoscoliosis with double deviation of the spine, would condition part of her life. As her cousin Josefina de la Serna explained, María “such a lover of beauty, suffered with her deformity to an impressive degree”. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, for his part, describes her as “petite, with her brown hair tousled in floating flights, with her childlike gaze, the whispering gaze of a bird with sad joy”.
Encouraged by her family, in 1903 she traveled to Madrid to train in the studio of Emilio Sala, whose precision in drawing and exuberance in color would influence her first compositions. The following year her father died and the whole family moved to Madrid, taking up residence at 7, Castelló Street.
In 1906 he went to the studio of Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor and attended the exhibition of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Two years later he participated again, obtaining the third medal in painting with the work Los primeros pasos. That year he moved to Manuel Benedito”s workshop. The Diputación de Santander and the city council of his hometown granted him scholarships that he would use to continue his studies in Paris.
On his return from his trip, he shared an apartment in the apartment and studio at 3 rue Bagneux with Angelina and Diego. The following year (1910), he attended the academy of Maria Vassilief, a Russian painter who introduced him to cubism, and with whom he would later share a room. She entered the National Exhibition of Fine Arts with Nymphs Chaining Silenus, obtaining a second medal, a reward that filled Maria with satisfaction, since it meant the recognition of her talent. At the end of her first stay in Paris, she spent some time in Granada, but decided to return to Paris to apply for another scholarship to the Diputación and the City Council of Santander, interceding for her with Enrique Menéndez Pelayo; the Diputación granted her 1500 pesetas for two years. She returned to Paris in 1912, settling in the Montparnasse district, at 26 rue du Départ, sharing house and studio with Diego Rivera and Angelina Beloff. During this second stay in Paris, Maria came into contact with the cubist avant-garde circle, especially with Juan Gris and Jacques Lipchitz.
In 1915, between March 5 and 15, Ramón Gómez de la Serna organized in Madrid the exhibition Pintores íntegros at the Salón de Arte Moderno in Carmen Street, where Diego Rivera, Agustín Choco and Luis Bagaría also exhibited; an exhibition that would receive all kinds of mockery and protests from the public and from part of the critics. Afterwards, the painter worked for a while as a drawing teacher in Salamanca, an experience that aroused the rejection and humiliation of her students, and led María Blanchard to settle permanently in Paris (she would never return to Spain).
Ramón Gómez de la Serna witnessed her return: “María lived in abandoned studios, to which those scattered by the war had not returned, and she began to paint cubist skins, pots, coffee grinders, spice racks, jars, anatomy of things, mixed with the anatomy of beings…. I went to visit her in one of those houses of “others” in which the clothes hung outside the closets in the idleness of not knowing what was going to happen”. Maria exhibited in the following years for important gallerists with Jean Metzinger and Lipchitz.
Blanchard was an active member of Cubism, but during the interwar period he opted for a return to figurative art, closer to his personality. His passage through Cubism helped him transform his use of color and enriched his later work, making it easier for him to extract expressive rigor from his figures in the following periods.
María Blanchard never reached the total decomposition of the form, characteristic of analytical cubism, but she assumes the cubist influence and assimilates it in her workmanship in the form of rich colors. Several of his paintings from that period are famous, such as “Woman with Fan” (1916, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), “Still Life” (1917, Fundación Telefónica) or “Woman with Guitar” (1917, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), which present examples of his intense study of the anatomy of things, as Ramón Gómez de la Serna pointed out, and of the weight of color in his painting. After this stage he returned to figurative techniques without abandoning the contribution of the avant-garde.
The effects of the First World War caused a certain return to order that began in Italy, through the group Valori Plastici, in Germany through the new objectivity and in other European countries, through individual contributions. The group of artists that arose in France was called The Evaders of Cubism (in Tabarant) or the Defectors of Cubism (in Vauxcelles).
Maria Blanchard, like the other cubist painters, following this trend, exhibited three works at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris: Nature morte, Nature morte and L”Enfant au berceau, works that already appear as property of Léonce Rosenberg, the artist”s dealer, however it was in 1920, when they broke relations.
She exhibits in the collective exhibition Cubism and Neocubism organized by the magazine Seléction in Brussels where she contacts the group of dealers called Ceux de Demain formed by Jean Delgouffre, Frank Flausch and Jean Grimar, who will take care of her work years later and will constitute the circle of friends in whose family environment she will feel safe.
He presented three paintings and two drawings at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1921. Undoubtedly one of them entitled Figure or Intérieur, which is known as La Comulgante, a work that is considered to have been started in 1914 during her stay in Madrid, but it could well be a replica, the artist”s usual working method. With this painting, so named in the letters and writings of Juan Gris and André Lhote, she obtained great critical acclaim. The latter, a direct witness of the events, reflected it in the following writing: “The exhibition of La Comuniante, constitutes an almost scandalous event, according to Maurice Raynal”s phrase. There is no art critic who does not celebrate this revelation in enthusiastic terms…”.
Diego Rivera left for Mexico for good, plunging Angelina Beloff into a deep depression that distanced her from Maria. She moved into a small house at 29 Rue Boulard, near the homes of André Lhote and the Rivière family. Gerardo Diego meets her during his stay in Paris: “I admired her clairvoyance and her deep sense of art and life…”. She appears again at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1922 with two works, La femme au chaudron and La femme au panier, also obtaining great critical acclaim.
He exhibited twenty-one works at the Centaure Gallery in Brussels from April 14 to 25, 1923, organized by Ceux de Demain; the catalog was presented by his friend and painter André Lhote; the reviews could not have been more praiseworthy, which opened an important market for him in Belgium. He signed a tough contract with his dealer Lheon Rosemberg, which gave him a certain financial security. He exhibited for the last time at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, showing four paintings, Portrait, Portrait, Femme assise and Le buveur.
Estranged from Juan Gris for several years, his death caused her great pain, which turned into a general despondency and a serious state of depression. She sought solace in religion, relying on the advice of Father Alterman, whom she knew through mutual friends. It is a stage of mysticism, of religious dedication, which moved her to think of entering a convent, something from which she was dissuaded by Father Alterman himself. Despite her personal religious crises, Maria continued to paint tirelessly.
Her cousin, Germán Cueto, a sculptor, settled in Paris with his wife, the upholsterer Dolores Velázquez, and their two young daughters. This family was a relief for her loneliness and Maria poured all her maternal love into little Ana and Mireya, whom she portrayed in several works. Another cousin, Julia, nicknamed La Peruana, was living in Paris at the time. In this way she managed to create a certain family environment. He exhibited again at the Centaur Gallery in Brussels, and the critic Waldemar Georges made a magnificent study of his work.
Maria worked tirelessly, even though she was already ill, and in a state of physical abandonment as described by Isabel Rivière: “For years and years she wore a horrible dress of huge yellow and green squares that we could not get rid of, neither with the most subtle trickery nor with the most direct attacks…. When we tried to insinuate, without giving her much importance, that black was really what suited her best, she would answer with a pleading and smiling smile of a little girl from whom they wanted to take a candy: ”I like to dress up so much””.
Her sister Carmen moved with her husband Juan de Dios Egea, a diplomat, and their three young children to Paris in 1929, which was a heavy burden for Maria. In addition, her sisters Ana and Aurelia spent long periods of time with her. This family overload, although it surrounded the artist with love, also meant a great economic effort, which dented her spirit and her health.
Maria lived moments of anguish. Economically burdened, she felt the weight of her illness and the family overload; her sisters, unaware of the drama she was living, even thought of sending her mother to her, something against which the artist rebelled: “…I have four mouths to feed, I am sick, there are five, do you want more?…”. Maria pawns the family”s silver objects that she kept to cope with the new family situation. Despite her state of health, she traveled to Brussels and later to London. He exhibited at the Vavin Gallery in Paris. He painted San Tarcisio, of deep and authentic religious sense. On May 26, 1930, Paul Claudel visited his studio and was impressed by this painting to which he dedicated a poem in 1931.
She was selected to participate in the French art exhibition that toured several cities in Brazil. She was selected for the exhibition of Mountain Painters held at the Ateneo de Santander, which opened its doors in August.
Maria felt physically and psychically exhausted. Gómez de la Serna relates this moment: “Maria, strong in her contracted stature, has undermined her nature, which falls ill with a wasting disease that no one can stop”. “If I live I will paint many flowers”, were her last words of artistic desire, but on April 5, 1932, when the blue trains from the South arrived full of flowers, the greatest and most enigmatic painter of Spain died”.
Her burial, like her life, could not have been simpler, being buried in the cemetery of Bagneux, accompanying her on her last journey, Francisco Pompey, André Lhote, César Abín, Angelina Beloff, Isabel Rivière and part of her family; and along with them a good number of indigent and homeless people whom the artist had helped over many years.
The obituary published in L”Intransigeant reads: “The Spanish artist died last night, after a painful illness. The place she occupied in contemporary art was preponderant. Her art, powerful, made of mysticism and a passionate love for her profession, will remain as one of the most significant and authentic artists of our time. Her life as a recluse and ill, had contributed to develop and sharpen one of the most beautiful intelligences of that time”. When Federico García Lorca learned of her death, that same year he dedicated to her a lecture he gave at the Ateneo de Madrid, Elegy to María Blanchard.
In July 2018, the Association “Herstoricas. Historia, Mujeres y Género” and the Collective “Autoras de Cómic” created a cultural and educational project to make visible the historical contribution of women in society and reflect on their absence consisting of a card game. One of these cards is dedicated to Blanchard.
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