Françoise Gilot

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Gallery Yares, Scottsdale
Françoise Gilot, New York & Paris
Acquired from the above circa 1991

The work is in very good condition. The panel is sound and perimeter is reinforced on the reverse seemingly by the artist. There are few scattered surface scuffs mostly around the extreme edges and some apparent pinholes at the upper corners. There is some frame abrasion along the lower edge including the lower half of the signature. Under UV light, some original pigments fluoresce but there is no apparent inpainting.
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Françoise Gilot met Geneviève Aliquot, who was to become the most enduring muse of Gilot’s career as an artist, at the age of twelve when the two were in boarding school in Neuilly. The two students soon became dear friends and in those following early years Geneviève was the model and inspiration for hundreds of drawings and paintings. In 1943, Françoise and Geneviève, a student of Aristide Maillol, had their first joint exhibition at a small gallery in Paris owned by Madeleine Decre on Rue Boissy d’Anglas. Geneviève was also central to that fateful night in May 1943, when Gilot met Pablo Picasso at La Catalan, the Left bank restaurant frequented by artists and writers of the day.

Geneviève was not at all supportive of Françoise’s relationship with Picasso and tried to convince her that it could ultimately prove to be catastrophic. The friction between Picasso and Geneviève, both vying for Gilot’s attention, erupted in a break in the friendship, and Gilot remained out of contact with Geneviève during the years Gilot lived with Picasso (1946-1953). Absent from Gilot’s life and also from her work during these years, we do not see images of Geneviève reappear until 1953, initially with drawings and then with the present work.

Geneviève can be seen in many paintings and hundreds of drawings and watercolors in the following five decades. She is the most recognizable leitmotif in Gilot’s oeuvre if one knows how to recognize her Athenian features and voluminous hair (see fig. 1)

The present work is very evocative of Gilot’s style of this period. The vibrant color palette and harmonies, the swirls of Geneviève’s raven black hair, the overall visual integration through rhyming of line and form emerge here to become hallmarks of Gilot’s artistic trajectory.