María Blanchard and the Ideology of Primitivism

Abstract

The primitivism that informed the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century directed attention to women’s creativity and was instrumental in the incorporation of women artists in their circles. But the same ideology that authorized women artists was partly responsible for their subsequent marginalization. The attendant risk of this ‘preference for the primitive’, in E. H. Gombrich’s phrase, is illustrated in the case of María Blanchard. She had been among the select group of Cubists attached to Léonce Rosenberg’s gallery in Paris, only to fall gradually into virtual obscurity as her contribution was interpreted in terms of a feminine mystique. This essay examines her artistic trajectory in the light of Michel de Certeau’s distinction between tactics and strategies, relating the former to Luce Irigaray’s notion of mimetism, to explain some of the problematics faced by women in the avant-garde circles, whose artistic identities were often constructed, and still are to some extent, around the idea of the primitive.

Key words:

• Gender
• women painters
• Spanish Avant-Garde
• Primitivism
• Cubism
• Neo-Cubism
• María Blanchard
• Mimetism
• Kitsch
• Mysticism

Notes

1 Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1989).

2 See the seminal essay on the topic by Carol Duncan, ‘Virility and Domination in Early 20^th Century Vanguard Painting’, Artforum, 12:4 (1973), 30–39.

3 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, in The Selected Works of Virginia Woolf (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), 561–634 (p. 565).

4 Almudena de la Cueva & Margarita Márquez Padorno, ‘La Residencia de Señoritas (1915–36): una habitación propia para las españolas’, in Mujeres en Vanguardia, ed. Almudena de la Cueva & Margarita Márquez Padorno [exhibition catalogue] (Madrid: Publicaciones de la Residencia de Estudiantes, 2015), 24–79.

5 The exceptionality is reflected in the words of the critic Manuel Abril: ‘La obra de esta adolescente ha sido la sorpresa de la temporada’ [Mallo was twenty-eight at the time]; quoted by Fernando Huici in Fuera de orden: mujeres de la vanguardia española—María Blanchard, Norah Borges, Maruja Mallo, Olga Sacharoff, Ángeles Santos, Remedios Varo [exhibition catalogue] (Madrid: Fundación Cultural MAPFRE VIDA, 1999), 13–31 (p. 26; my italics).

6 See Javier Pérez Segura, Arte moderno, vanguardia y estado: la Sociedad de Artistas Ibéricos y la República (1931–1936) (Madrid: CSIC, 2002).

7 ‘Lo que le complace de estas obras primigenias es—más que ellas mismas—su ingenuidad, esto es, la ausencia de una tradición que aún no se había formado’ (José Ortega y Gasset, La deshumanización del arte y otros ensayos de estética, prólogo de Valeriano Bozal [Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1987], 84).

8 Some of the arguments presented here find an earlier formulation in my monograph, Primitivismo y modernismo: el legado de María Blanchard (Oxford/New York/Bern: Peter Lang, 2007); also in my ‘Tácticas de la mujer en la vanguardia: el caso de María Blanchard’, in María Blanchard, ed. Carmen Bernárdez [exhibition catalogue] (Madrid: MNCARS/Fundación Marcelino Botín, 2012), 95–108.

9 Federico García Lorca, ‘Pequeña elegía a Maria Blanchard’, in Obras completas, ed. Arturo del Hoyo, con prólogo de Vicente Aleixandre, 3 vols (Madrid: Aguilar, 1991), III, 301–05.

10 E. H. Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art (London/New York: Phaidon, 2002), 236.

11 Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Marcel A. Ruff (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), 552.

12 Gill Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and ‘Feminine’ Art, 1900 to the Late 1920s (Manchester/New York: Manchester U. P., 1995), 71.

13 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge MA: Harvard U. P., 1990), 27.

14 Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977), 131.

15 As with other idiomatic expressions the meaning may change according to context; here can also be translated as ‘behave yourself’ or ‘be wise’.

16 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Recueillement’, in Les Fleurs du mal, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Ruff, 101.

17 Christopher Green, Cubism and Its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (New Haven/London: Yale U. P. 1987).

18 Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde, 71.

19 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley/London: Univ. of California Press, 1984). My argument follows Bridget Elliott’s use of Certeau’s model in her analysis of Laurencin’s feminine aesthetic in ‘ “The Strength of the Weak” As Portrayed by Marie Laurencin’, in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, ed. Norma Broude & Mary D. Garrard (Berkeley/London: Univ. of California Press, 2005), 277–99.

20 Green provides a detailed account in Cubism and Its Enemies, 65 and 181–83.

21 Green, Cubism and its Enemies, 340, n. 47. For a documented survey of the debates surrounding Cubism, see also David Cottington, Cubism and Its Histories (Manchester/New York: Manchester U. P., 2004).

22 For Eugenio Carmona, a leading scholar of Spanish Cubism, a distinctive feature of Blanchard’s Cubism is the effect of spatial flatness, arguing that this is ‘una planitud que existe en su obra desde 1916 y que en alguna medida es distinta del efecto de planitud en staccato que practicaría Juan Gris o a los efectos de desarrollo visual de lo objetivo a lo abstracto desarrollado por Lhote en su obra de 1917’ (Eugenio Carmona, ‘María Blanchard y la segunda vida del cubismo 1916–1920’, in María Blanchard, ed. Bernárdez, 41–66 [p. 55]).

23 See María José Salazar ‘Maria Blanchard: la gran desconocida’, in María Blanchard, ed. Bernárdez, 109–12.

24 See Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market between 1910 and 1930 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1981).

25 As Gill Perry states: ‘Blanchard’s abandonment of Cubism in the late twenties in favour of a more figurative and quasi-spiritual interests has encouraged perception of her Cubist work as somehow going against her nature’ (Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde, 71).

26 Green, Cubism and Its Enemies, 193.

27 The painting is held in the collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. See <http://parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/musee-d-art-moderne/oeuvres/petit-garcon-au-canotier#infos-principales> (accessed 7 June 2018).

28 Paul Claudel, ‘Saint Tarsicius’, Visages radieux, in Œuvre poétique, avec une intro. par Stanislas Fumet (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade/Gallimard, 1957), 789–90. Blanchard’s painting ‘Saint Tarsicius’ (c.1930–1931) is held in the Société Paul Claudel, Paris. For a reproduction of this painting, see Ros, Primitivismo y modernismo, figure 10.

29 The dialectic between modernism and nationalism is explored in the essays collected in Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy, ed. Matthew Affron & Mark Antliff (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1997); see, especially, the essay by Emilio Gentile, ‘The Myth of National Regeneration in Italy: From Modernist Avant-Garde to Fascism’, 25–45.

30 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. & ed. H. M. Parshley, with an intro. by David Campbell (London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 703. Also see the comments on religion and woman, 653–60.

31 Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 2000).

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.