Still Life with a Box of Matches (Nature morte à la boite d'allumettes)

This densely layered tabletop brims with the classic elements of a Paris cafe: glassware, a soda siphon, a bottle of Benedictine liqueur, and the box of matches identified in the title. Reflecting María Blanchard’s Cubist wit with bold color and heavy impasto, the painting incorporates small fragments of glass beads as one of the many textures on the work’s surface, along with coarse and fine sand. During her lifetime, Blanchard was celebrated by her fellow Cubists, and she shared studios with Juan Gris and Diego Rivera, the latter of whom described her as producing Cubism’s “finest works, apart from our master, Picasso.”