Museo Carmen Thyssen

Event presented by Fernando Francés, director of the CAC
With the presence of Gloria Crespo, director of the documentary

26, Rue du Départ – Once Upon a Time in Paris

A documentary on the life and oeuvre of María Blanchard, directed by Gloria Crespo MacLennan and based on research by the director that has enabled her to add new information to the artist’s biography.

Interviews with experts and relatives of the artist, archival materials and unpublished documents are used to tell the positively heroic life story of this artist, who was at the forefront of early twentieth-century avant-garde art. She was part of the cultural movement known as Cubism, headed by Picasso, and is acknowledged today as the most important female Cubist in history. On returning to figurative art, she impressed critics with her unsettling work La Comulgante (Girl at Her First Communion), which earned her acclaim as the great artist that everyone sensed she was.

Contradictory and eccentric, cheerful and melancholic, ironic, timid and temperamental, María Blanchard was a highly talented woman in a men’s world who had the merit of belonging to it on an equal footing. Completely lacking in practical sense, she lived a hard life marked by a terrible destiny: she was born hunchbacked. Her deformity, lack of pragmatic sense, humility and modesty coupled with bad luck prevented her from shining in the same way that many of her contemporaries did. Hence this tribute to a woman who would willingly have exchanged her talent for beauty.


About Gloria Crespo

Gloria Crespo MacLennan. Holds a degree in Fine Arts. She worked for the daily newspaper El País for 16 years as graphic editor of the culture supplement Babelia and the weekly magazine El País Semanal. She continues to contribute to the daily by writing for the culture section and is also in charge of photography on the weekly magazine Contexto.

Venue:
Auditorium of the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga