AUTHOR: Baltasar Magro
PUBLISHER: Alianza Editorial
GENRE: Literature
READER’S NAME: Erin Elizabeth Gaston-Owen
DATE: 2 June 2021
Baltasar Magro’s María Blanchard, Como una sombra, is a novel based on the life of María Eustaquia Adriana Gutiérrez Blanchard (1881-1932), an artist from Santander, Spain, who was an integral part of the Cubist movement in France during the early Twentieth Century, though, as alluded to in the title, she remained in the shadows of her male cohort. The novel portrays Maria Blanchard’s last months of life, from December 1931 to April 1932, though much of it reads like an art history textbook, jumping back in time to provide in depth descriptions of her training, career highlights, and personal turning points, both spiritual and relational.
Just like the light and shadows motif that Magro weaves throughout the narrative, the work is both a celebration of Blanchard’s artistic and personal accomplishments, and a lament of the suffering and sacrifices that colored the canvas of her life. The artist’s severe scoliosis meant chronic pain, frequent exposure to public ridicule and, at times, stunted relationships.Several historical characters in the novel point out that her pain found its way into the pensive, pained faces of “the helpless, the lonely, the marginalized” depicted in Blanchard’s art. Throughout the novel, Magro threads a constant lament, too, for the lack of professional recognition for Blanchard’s work, compared to the success enjoyed by many of her close male friends and contemporaries like Juan Gris, Jacques Lipchitz, Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso.
While Blanchard managed to get her work into European galleries, she was still forced to paint reproductions to make ends meet and support family members who came to live with her at the end of her life. At one point, Magro describes her as “living a cloistered life… like a worker ant.”
At the same time, the author paints a picture of an overcomer with a rich network of enduring relationships, an artist who, while not as widely acclaimed as Picasso or Rivera, came to be known as the “angelic hunchback” because of how she helped redraw the lives of so many around her who were less fortunate. Magro’s Blanchard enjoys strong relationships with her father, who encouraged her art from an early age; her sister, Carmen, who lived with her during the last years of her life; a dear friend, Isabelle Riviere (and her daughter, Jacqueline, a former student); Father Alterman, who encouraged her painting and helped her provide for the poor with earnings from her art; and finally, with Angelina Beloff, or “Quiela,” perhaps her closest friend and colleague (and the former wife of artist Diego Rivera). The novel even recounts how Blanchard eventually used a painting to reunite one of her clients, André Raynald, with his estranged mother. Indeed, as depicted in Magro’s novel, María Blanchard’s life and art, with its shadows and light, involved “a tender brutality.”
Magro is clearly a gifted art historian. The novel would do well in parts of the United States like New York City and San Francisco, where there’s a vibrant art community. This reviewer believes that, were the work to be translated into English, a title including “art” or “artist” would help attact potential readers.
