About this work
*Woman with a Fan* is an oil on canvas executed at a decisive crossroads — formally bold, rooted in Spanish tradition, and charged with the energy of a painter stepping fully into her own. The figure is in all likelihood a dancer, a choice that allows Blanchard to play with colour and movement, arranging the composition as a series of simultaneous planes that recall, in their dynamism, the works of Futurist artists or Marcel Duchamp's.
Flat, interlocked shapes lock the subject into a surface that reads almost like stained glass — faceted planes of warm ochres, earthy reds, and cool blue-grey interrupting one another without dissolving. The motif is broken up into multiple planes that reference other viewpoints, while the colour range includes very bright tones that vibrate against the more muted ground, drawing the eye into and around the figure rather than letting it settle anywhere for long. The choice of the woman-with-fan theme bears a relation to classical Spanish tradition, giving the radical Cubist syntax an unmistakably Iberian anchor.
From 1913 to 1922, Blanchard worked principally within the Cubist language she had encountered first-hand in Paris, and *Woman with a Fan* is considered one of the most ambitious paintings from her early years — a work she displayed in 1915 at the *Los pintores íntegros* (The Painters of Integrity) exhibition, the first to show Cubist works in Madrid.
The patchy critical reception of that show was one of the reasons behind the artist leaving Spain to settle permanently in Paris.
In 1916, before the end of the war, Blanchard moved to Paris, where she met many Cubist artists and began developing her own style — forming a close friendship with Juan Gris, who heavily influenced her work. The painting thus sits at the hinge point of her biography: made during her final months in Spain, it is both a declaration of allegiance to the Parisian avant-garde and a farewell to her homeland. It now lives at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, where it hangs as evidence of a painter who arrived at the radical edge of European modernism entirely on her own terms.
At 0.97 by 1.61 metres, the canvas commands a wall rather than decorating one — it rewards a room with height and breathing space, where its rhythmic geometry can do its work at a distance. It suits interiors that live comfortably with tension: a reading room with deep-toned walls, a studio apartment where art does the talking, a hallway wide enough to stop in. The viewer it speaks to most directly is someone drawn to works that contain genuine intellectual structure without going cold — where the grid never quite suppresses the person inside it. The mood here is alert, propulsive, slightly syn
