First Communion (La comulgante)
María Blanchard (1881 to 1932) · 1914
A young girl in a long white communion dress and veil stands stiffly in a room, holding a prayer book, with a big pale bow at her waist. Her face is solemn and slightly too old for her body, and the room around her tilts and folds into flat coloured planes, a patterned wall, a tiled floor, a bunch of flowers. She looks less like a child on a happy day than a small figure trapped inside a ritual. The painting is life size, and the girl's fixed dark eyes follow you across the room.
María Blanchard was born in Santander with a spinal deformity that shaped her life, and she was one of the very few women at the centre of Cubism in Paris, a close friend of Juan Gris. This picture, painted in 1914 just before she adopted a fully Cubist style, shows her on the edge of it: the figure is still solid and readable, but the space has already broken up into shifting facets, and the colour is cold and strange. Look at the hands, the pointed shoes and the way the dress is built from angular white and grey planes like a paper sculpture. There is a real tenderness in the face, and a real unease.
When it was shown in Madrid at the National Exhibition of 1921 the painting caused a scandal and was mocked, which confirmed Blanchard's decision to live in Paris. It came to the Reina Sofía as part of the effort to give her a proper place in Spanish art history, and it now hangs among the Cubist rooms near Gris. In recent years the museum has made a point of restoring the women of the avant garde to the story, and this is the picture that makes the case most strongly.
Did You Know? Blanchard's friend the poet Federico García Lorca gave a lecture in her memory in 1932 and called her a painter of the truth of things.
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