Avant-Garde and Kitsch in María Blanchard’s Neo-Cubism

Abstract The exceptionality of the women artists who achieved recognition within the circles of the avant-garde in the first decades of the twentieth century involved a number of performative strategies to avoid the risk of being confined to the category of ‘women painters’. The case of María Blanchard, a Spanish painter integrated in the School of Paris, exemplifies the problematics faced by women working in the avant-garde. Her trajectory from synthetic Cubism to neo-Cubist figuration follows the pattern of many of her male contemporaries working under the sociopolitical and market pressures in the post-war period, but the simultaneous assimilation of and ironic distance from the prevailing aesthetic ideologies is a distinctive feature of her style shared by other women artists. As Cubism became mainstream and began to lose its subversive power, Blanchard’s interest in challenging conventional artistic discourses and hierarchies found expression in kitsch aesthetics.