About this work
- *Seated Woman* (*Femme assise*), c. 1917, is an **oil on canvas** in the **Cubist** style. - It is held at the **Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas**. - The figure is presented **frontally**, in an **intimate, earthy-toned setting**, with a palette of **browns, ochres, and reds**. - The composition is **asymmetric**, with the figure's contours intertwining with the background planes. - Geometric shapes interweave with organic curves; the figure has an almost **monumental frontality** without idealization. - It was painted just after Blanchard had returned permanently to Paris in 1916, immersing herself in the city's Cubist milieu alongside Juan Gris and Diego Rivera.
*Woman Seated* is a Cubist oil on canvas that announces its subject with rare directness: the female figure is presented frontally, without the typical idealization of portraits of the past, which lends her an almost monumental dimension.
The woman sits in an environment that feels intimate, full of earthly colors and nuances that suggest warmth and emotional depth — a space where the contours of the figure are intertwined with the planes of the background, deliberately blurring the boundary between figure and space.
The palette of brown, ochre, and red tones creates a feeling of solidity and presence, while areas of shadow and light provide a dynamism that enriches the visual experience.
The anatomy of the seated woman is rendered in a stylized way, where geometric shapes intertwine with organic curves — Cubism's structural grammar pressed into the service of something intimate and psychologically weighted rather than purely intellectual.
In 1916, before the end of the war, Blanchard moved to Paris, where she would spend the rest of her life. *Woman Seated* was painted almost immediately upon her permanent return, at a moment when she was immersing herself in the city's avant-garde artistic milieu and absorbing the latest developments in Cubism.
She shared a studio with Diego Rivera and befriended Juan Gris, whose influence on her synthetic approach is unmistakable. Between 1913 and 1919 her works were affiliated with the Cubist movement, under the influence of Rivera, Gris, Gleizes, Lipchitz, and Lhote — yet her style remained highly personal, based on synthetic compositions and a predominance of colour.
*Femme Assise (Seated Woman)* is now held in the collection of the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, one of the few North American institutions with significant holdings of Blanchard's work. While
