María Blanchard

(Santander, 1881 – Paris, 1932)

Author's artworks

19th-20th Century Spanish

María Blanchard is one of the leading exponents of
. Born to a well-to-do family from Cantabria interested in art and culture, Blanchard grew up in an atmosphere that favoured her own artistic inclinations. Although her life was marked by a number of physical deformities, nothing prevented the artist from forging a space for herself in the European art scene. In 1903, with the support of her family, she moved to Madrid to begin her career as an artist. There she attended the studio of Emilio Sala (1850-1910), whose style strongly influenced her early production, and also the studios of Álvarez de Sotomayor (1875-1960) and Manuel Benedito (1875-1963).

In 1909 she travelled to Paris to further her knowledge of painting. There she studied at Académie Vitti, where she broke away from the academicism then holding sway in Spain. During this period, she attended classes given by Hermen Anglada i Camarasa (1871-1959) and Kees van Dongen (1877-1968), who put her in contact with
, and by Marie Vassilieff (1884-1957), who guided her towards her first rapprochement with
, a movement Blanchard would fully and definitively embrace some years later.

After a brief sojourn back in Spain, in 1912 she returned to Paris with a scholarship from the Provincial Council and City Council of Santander. This time she settled in the Montparnasse quarter, in the company of Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and his wife Angelina Beloff (1879-1969) whom the Mexican painter had married the year before. On returning to Spain in 1915, her work was included in Los pintores íntegros, an exhibition which was not well received by critics or public. The conditions in Spain were very different from those of many European cities, where the innovative new art movements were widely accepted. During that time, she worked as a drawing teacher in Salamanca but, disappointed with the experience, she returned to Paris, this time for good.

At this time, she was actively engaged in the activities and gatherings of art circles in Paris, and in 1919 she began to collaborate with the gallerist and art dealer Léonce Rosenberg. It was then when she stopped practicing
and started a period of return to figuration, that would prove to be the most successful in her career. Two years later, in 1921, she exhibited her seminal work La comulgante (Girl at Her First Communion) at the Salon des Indépendents to great acclaim. From that moment onwards her works also began to be shown in exhibitions in other countries, like Belgium and Brazil. Deeply affected by the death of her friend Juan Gris (1887-1927), the worsening of her health problems and financial hardship, she fell into a deep depression that led to her isolation and to seek refuge in religion. However, even in those circumstances, she never stopped painting, and she continuing working tirelessly until her demise in 1932.

Despite the recognition garnered by María Blanchard while still alive, her work fell into relative obscurity after her death. In recent decades there have been attempts to correct that oversight, and many efforts have been invested to vindicate her figure. Among them we would underscore the publication of the catalogue raisonné of her work in 2003, and the retrospective dedicated to her by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2012.