María Blanchard

María Blanchard (María Gutiérrez-Cueto y Blanchard) was a Spanish painter known for her own form of Cubism. She was born in Santander on 6 March 1881 with a deformity of the spine. She studied in Madrid under Emilio Sala and others, and from 1909 in Paris under Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa and Kees van Dongen, where she discovered Cubism. After spending 1914–16 in Madrid, she settled in Paris for good, became a close friend of Juan Gris and Jacques Lipchitz, and joined the Section d'Or; her Cubist works of these years include Woman with a Guitar (1917). In the 1920s she turned to a more figurative, intensely expressive style. Weakened by tuberculosis, she died in Paris on 5 April 1932.