About this work
The canvas is built from interwoven geometric planes laid flat in two dimensions, with colour applied in blocks that carry no apparent tonal connection to one another. Blanchard pushes the synthesis to an extreme — there is no volume, no traditional perspective — and yet the image never fully dissolves into abstraction.
Just a few precise anchors hold the figure together: the taut lines of guitar strings, a single eye, three outstretched fingers.
Blues, ochres, and browns dominate, combined to produce an atmosphere that feels simultaneously melancholic and introspective. What arrives first is a kind of controlled tension — the sense that something recognisably human has been taken apart with great care and equally great feeling.
When Blanchard settled permanently in Paris in 1916, the city had already been transformed by the First World War. A return to order had taken root across the arts, and Cubism itself was moving away from its experimental origins toward greater legibility and formal clarity.
In this climate she encountered the leading voices of Synthetic Cubism — Juan Gris and Jean Metzinger — through the orbit of Jacques Lipchitz and André Lhote, all of them gathering at Léonce Rosenberg's L'Effort Moderne gallery.
*Woman with Guitar* belongs to the period of close collaboration and friendship between Blanchard and Gris, during which she took up a classical theme from French pictorial tradition: the fusion of personage and musical instrument.
Working in an encaustic technique with wax at its core, she achieved a surface that is crafted, flat, and almost miraculously uniform — the presence of brushwork or palette-knife marks remaining highly subtle. The painting now resides in the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
This is a work that rewards a quiet room and good natural light — the kind of space where the eye has time to travel across the composition and locate those anchoring details. It speaks directly to viewers drawn to early modernism, to the history of women within the avant-garde, or simply to painting that holds its own structural logic with quiet authority. The cool palette makes it at home in interiors with linen, stone, or muted wood tones. It is not a decorative object; it asks to be read.
