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Cubist Composition , c. 1918

FICHA TÉCNICA
Cubist Composition , c. 1918
Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 cm

When María Blanchard settled in Paris definitively in 1916, the city was profoundly affected by the Great War. Many artists had enlisted and other were trying to survive and work. Gris had gone to live in Beaulieu-les-Loches. María was living precariously in a small studio on Maine Avenue, and not until 1922 was she able to move to a larger one on Boulard Street where she would remain until her death ten years later. Her miserable living conditions were indeed tough. As Gómez de la Serna describes: "María was living in abandoned studios that belonged to those who had left due to the war. There she began to paint cubist hides, stew pots, coffee grinders, spice containers, jars, the anatomy of things mixed with the anatomy of human beings, as if we could see the entrails that the bayonets had exposed, all of which is submerged in a kind of swamp that had grown in Paris in those days."

Nonetheless, these first Parisian cubist years brought about her first successful phase and they marked the best years of her relationship with Juan Gris. In 1918 she spent some time in the home of Juan Gris and Josette in Beaulieu with Lipchitz and Metzinger. She was also able to count on the support of critic André Lhote and she also met the merchant Léonce Rosenberg, who enabled María to join a group of artists who were being promoted in her gallery L'Effort Moderne. The business relationship that she had with Rosenberg would allow her to provide some relief for her financial woes, although this relationship would end in 1922, some time after the merchant bought all of her cubist works. After that point María would initiate a new phase in her trajectory leaving behind her studio, her merchant and her pictorial language.

Cubist Composition has a good deal in common with two other oil paintings on canvas catalogued by Caffin Madaule, one of the same title, Cubist Composition, dated to 1918 (33 X 24 cm) from a private collection in Madrid , and another smaller one, Nature morte (Still Life), dated from 1916-18 (29 X 22.5 cm) that Caffin claims belonged to a Swiss collection and was subsequently sold at Sotheby's in 1990 . Although the composition of the three paintings is similar, they differ in some details, and in the case of the largest one, in color. The process is similar, using painted letters and dotting on some planes.

The closeness of these dated canvases situates this Cubist Composition of the Telefónica Collection in the central years of María Blanchard's cubist phase. In this painting the artist takes on a composition whose elements are not as well defined as in Nature morte cubist (Cubist Still Life) c. 1917 and c. 1919. The slight dotting that runs throughout some sections of the planes, although timid and very localized, alludes to a very frequent element in the cubist grammar that Juan Gris had been using since 1915. On her part, the letters "LA" and "SE", that María Blanchard frequently uses in her cubist works, evoke a headline of a newspaper La Presse, lending a concrete pattern to the image. The idea of using molded letters painted with a raised hand or a pattern was initiated by Braque in Le Portugais in 1911, but when María Blanchard uses it, it was already fully inscribed in cubist iconography and served as a formal witness and reference of reality in compositions that often reached the limits of abstraction. By recognizing the presence of a newspaper, the observer is situated before a representation of a real and familiar object, and consequently its quotidian context.

The very restricted and austere chromatic range (grays, ochres, whites, and very dark blue) would remind us of the cubist-analytical paintings from the beginning of the movement, if it were not for the use of planes; a color range more characteristic of synthetic cubism. They are big, predominantly angular, without a modulation of chiaroscuro, although there are contrasts of light which are obtained by intercepting planes of different colors and tones on the dark nocturnal blue of the background. The planes are superimposed one on the other and are cut by breaking any possible feeling of depth, like the big gray plane that appears to be form and substance at the same time, entering without interruption from the background and moving towards the foreground. María Blanchard creates a composition in which a certain imbalance counteracts an instinct for the construction of shapes, that tends to place them in the central part of the canvas. Even so, the plastic continuum remains broken, as Albert Gleizes remarked, "in a thousand surprises of fire and shadow" .

The painting responds to a purely plastic proposal, and the description of the objects that are represented loses its importance when faced with the unfolding and interrelating of colorful planes in space. We could relate this conception to the composite procedure of Juan Gris, who departed from abstractions in order to reach the concrete nature of the things that are represented. Without any kind of model before him, the painting comes to life as a pure experience of shapes, and in the resulting shapes Gris discovered associations with objects that he defined and then specified with his own characteristics. He was going--as he himself said--from generals to specifics, fortunately the relationship between the colorful shapes suggesting the morphology of objects. Here María Blanchard could have developed a similar procedure to that of Juan Gris, although, as of today, we do not possess writings that allude to the painter's work procedure. The letters that were published by L. Caffin Madaule make no allusion to it. C. B.

Signed in the lower left corner: "M. BLANCHARD"

ORIGIN

Arte Mun Gallery, Bilbao / Ignacio Lassaletta Gallery, Barcelona / Private Collection, Guillermo de Osma Gallery, Madrid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Muestra de Pintura siglos XIX y XX, Arte Mun Gallery, Bilbao, 1980, p. 47, rep. in color / Camón Aznar Contemporáneo, Camón Aznar Institute Museum, Zaragoza, 1998, p. 68, rep. in color.

EXPOSICIONES

Muestra de Pintura siglos XIX y XX , Arte Mun Gallery, Bilbao, 1980 / Camón Aznar Contemporáneo , Museo Instituto Camón Aznar, Zaragoza, 1998.

(1) Text by RAMÓN GÓMEZ DE LA SERNA, in María Blanchard 1881-1932 , Madrid, Biosca Gallery, 1976, p. 89.

(2) Caffin Madaule, L ., María Blanchard 1881-1932. Catalogue raisonné , I, London, DACS, 1992, p. 212.

(3 Ibídem, p. 213.

(4) GLEIZES, A. y METZINGER, J., Sobre el Cubismo , Murcia, school of Surveyors, Yebra Gallery, Province of Murcia and MOPU, 1986, p. 42.

(5) GRIS, J.: «Notas sobre mi pintura» (1923) cited by Kahnweiler, D.-H., Juan Gris, Madrid, Ministry of Education and Science, 1971, pp. 327-328.