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Lot n° 40

Maria BLANCHARD (1881-1932). Maternity. Pastel...

Estimate :
20 000 - 30 000 EUR

Maria BLANCHARD (1881-1932). Maternity. Pastel on paper. Height 97 - W 70 cm at sight (one tiny abrasion) Provenance : Family of writer Paul Claudel. Formerly on deposit at Musée de la Piscine, Roubaix, until January 27, 2023. Maria Blanchard was born in Santander, Spain, in 1881. On her arrival in France in 1909, she trained with Kees Van Dongen. An emblematic painter of the First Paris School and Cubist experimentation, she returned to figurative painting at the end of her life. During her Parisian career, this creator's relationships with the artistic community of the turn of the century abounded, including the prestigious names of Picasso, Juan Gris, Laurencin, Modigliani and the poet Paul Claudel. Our "Maternité" is one of the most imposing and accomplished pastels of the artist's career, anchored in his return to the post-Cubist figuration of the early 1920s. As he approached the climax of this period, Paul Claudel met the woman he described in his diary, with his usual verve, as a "frightfully hunchbacked Spanish painter". Seduced by her spiritual painting and the incredible intensity of her "radiant faces", the poet bought several of her paintings, including Saint Tarcisius and the Child with the Chocolate Bowl. This childlike figure is probably the same as the one who reappears in a feminized, adult form in our painting. Also from the Claudel family collection, our work, an ode to maternal tenderness, was kept in the Musée de la Piscine in Roubaix, alongside another Mother and Child with Cubist accents from 1924. Whether it was the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who considered Maria Blanchard one of his muses and saw: "The struggle of angel and demon expressed mathematically in your body", or Paul Claudel, who dedicated a poem to her in his collection Visages radieux in 1931, Maria Blanchard died in Paris in 1932, having marked and inspired the greatest literary minds of her time. In 2022, the artist joins Mela Muter in the Musée du Luxembourg's flagship exhibition Pionnières. Here, she asserts her historic place in the Cubist adventure, complementing her Parisian presence at the Centre Pompidou, in her hometown of Santander and at Madrid's Prado, Reina Sofia and Thyssen-Bornemisza museums.

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