DETROIT, MI.- The Detroit Institute of Arts today announced it has acquired a significant work by cubist artist María Blanchard. The Saxophonist (c.1919) exemplifies the Spanish-born artist’s distinct style, embodying the influence she had on shaping the cubist movement, a legacy largely overlooked in favor of her male counterparts.

“Against the backdrop of Detroit, a city with a rich history of music, it is fitting that The Saxophonist has found a home at the DIA,” said Jill Shaw, Head of the James Pearson Duffy Department of Modern and Contemporary Art and the Rebecca A. Boylan and Thomas W. Sidlik Curator of European Art, 1850-1970, at the DIA. “While Blanchard’s contribution to cubism was profound, recognition of her work and impact has long been overshadowed. We are thrilled to add this work to our permanent collection.”

Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that was introduced around 1907-1908 by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and disrupted Western conventions of artistic perspective and representation. Blanchard’s unique style of cubism features striking colors and bold formal experimentation. Whereas many cubists utilized a reduced color palette of neutral browns, blacks and earthy tones in order to amplify the fragmented geometric shapes in their compositions, Blanchard infused her work with intense vibrant colors. In addition, she tested the limits of representation by pushing her work to the brink of abstraction.

Between 1916 and 1919 – the period of Blanchard’s greatest experimentation – she made approximately 75 works, the majority of which were still lifes. Of the approximately 15 figure paintings she made during this period, around 10 presented musicians. The Saxophonist is unique in that it distinctly evokes a connection to the United States through jazz music, which Europeans first heard during World War I, largely thanks to Black jazz musicians.

In The Saxophonist – which oozes the energy of jazz – the composition, including the musician’s body and instrument, is broken into flat, fragmented planes of rich and colorful blends of yellow, green, blue and maroon. The stark juxtaposition of these saturated tones, adjacent to areas of bright white, adds a heightened sense of dynamism and movement. A construction of colored shapes, the composition is kaleidoscope-like, rendering light as reflected off multiple opposing angles simultaneously. The placement of the large white plane in the composition’s center guides the eye to the scene’s most important component: the saxophone itself.

Born in Santander, Spain, and trained in Madrid, Blanchard (1881-1932) settled in Paris in 1916 and joined the cubist movement. She was a contemporary of Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Juan Gris and other artists in Paris. For a time, she shared a studio with Rivera.

The acquisition of Blanchard’s The Saxophonist follows the DIA’s recent acquisitions of four major modern works by European women artists: Rita Kernn-Larsen’s And Life Anew (1940), Alice Rahon’s Androgyne (1946) and Painting for a Little Ghost Who Couldn’t Learn to Read (1947), and Remedios Varo’s Caja (Box) de Jean Nicolle (1948). Like Blanchard, these important artists are only recently garnering the attention they deserve.