Saxophonist

I'm Jill Shaw. I'm 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 from 1850 to 1970. I'm standing here in front of Maria Blanchard's Saxophonist, which dates to about 1919. So this work could be characterized as a Cubist painting. And Cubism was developed in the early 1900s by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They were looking at objects, deconstructing them, kind of reconstructing them with planes so that we could view these objects from multiple different viewpoints simultaneously.

So the story of Cubism is primarily discussed as very masculine, and Maria Blanchard is one of the very few women who contributed to the movement. Maria Blanchard excelled and developed her own style of cubism. Of the 75 works that she made during this very short period of time between 1916 and 1919, she uniquely made about 15 figure paintings, 10 of which were musicians.

So we often think in this period that everything's coming from Paris, everything's coming from Europe to America. In this case, Blanchard is really showing us the influence of an American music tradition. Jazz was introduced to Europeans primarily by Black musicians traveling because of the war, and that's what we have here.

One of her musicians, it's the only saxophonist that she depicted. She painted piano players, lute players, guitarists. And to have the one single saxophonist that she created is quite remarkable and it really sealed the deal for the DIA to acquire this work. I mean, given that we have such a rich tradition of music history here in the city, it seemed absolutely appropriate for us. And what I love about this picture is that Maria uses Cubism to explode the saxophonist. It really oozes jazz because it's got that syncopation and it's got that movement, pops of green and the pops of blue. This was one of her innovations as well; to infuse more deep, passionate, rich color into her Cubist works. The Cubists like Picasso, they were really known for a very muted palette, mostly browns, grays, blacks, and some whites. Maria Blanchard's Saxophonist is one of 12 Artworks to Inspire here at the DIA. We're especially pleased how she brings a new voice to our modern European galleries and she brings a new perspective to the DIA.