Guitarrista 1919

Curator: Look at this marvelous painting by María Blanchard. It's called "Guitarrista," or "Guitar Player," painted in 1919. It’s oil on canvas. Editor: The first word that comes to mind? Fractured. It’s like a guitar player exploded and reassembled itself into this geometric dream. Not bad. But, does it sing? Curator: Blanchard was part of the Cubist movement, following in the footsteps of Picasso and Braque, of course, and the interesting point, maybe, is that she was using cubism to investigate form and perception, sure, but also gender. This image has a complicated relationship with the historical representation of male performers in Spain, but upended and remade by her own experience as a woman. Editor: It's like she’s pulled the music apart, deconstructed the sounds themselves. I sense that behind these sharp angles, there is almost a palpable feeling of… confinement? Does that come from the compression of form, do you think? Or is that knowing about Blanchard’s struggles as an artist? Curator: Possibly both. Cubism, for Blanchard, was as much a philosophical project, almost an architecture. And Blanchard was dealing with significant personal suffering. But what seems especially powerful about this particular example is the sense that the musicality still breaks through. It’s dissonant, but it doesn't vanish. Editor: Yes, even deconstructed there’s still a hum. This reminds me, almost against its will, of the jazz age... A portrait of music on the verge of dissolving into pure, beautiful chaos. The figure almost melts into the instrument itself. Curator: Precisely. It speaks to the broader social and cultural disruptions after World War One, you see, yet retains an individual expressiveness. Editor: Makes me want to listen to something… dissonant yet beautiful, perhaps.