Resumen de María Blanchard and the Ideology of Primitivism
The primitivism that informed the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century directed attention to women’s creativity and was instrumental in the incorporation of women artists in their circles. But the same ideology that authorized women artists was partly responsible for their subsequent marginalization. The attendant risk of this ‘preference for the primitive’, in E. H. Gombrich’s phrase, is illustrated in the case of María Blanchard. She had been among the select group of Cubists attached to Léonce Rosenberg’s gallery in Paris, only to fall gradually into virtual obscurity as her contribution was interpreted in terms of a feminine mystique. This essay examines her artistic trajectory in the light of Michel de Certeau’s distinction between tactics and strategies, relating the former to Luce Irigaray’s notion of mimetism, to explain some of the problematics faced by women in the avant-garde circles, whose artistic identities were often constructed, and still are to some extent, around the idea of the primitive.
