2023-06-07 14:49:40
The French artist Françoise Gilot has died this Tuesday in a hospital in Manhattan, in New York, at the age of 101. The painter herself moved her residence in the eighties to the United States, where she adopted dual citizenship. Her career had started in 1952, when at the end of March of that year she exhibited her work to the public for the first time at the Galerie Louise in Paris, owned by the art dealer DH Kahnweiler. She is also a commercial for Pablo Picasso, the artist’s partner at that time. Picasso did not attend the opening, claiming that he had already seen all of her paintings and that he did not want to divert the focus from Gilot. “Over the years, although I continue to use tonal interaction to establish planes in space, I have increasingly devoted color to the expression of tone and feeling,” the artist wrote about her relationship with color. Part of her work can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), at the Metropolitan, at the Pompidou in Paris.
New cartouches to explain the old Picasso
Further
“It is good to exaggerate, go further, pursue the extreme limit of what the pictorial imagination suggests. When red invades all the available space, it ceases to be a color to create an emotional climate or even to become the very meaning of the piece”, she explained about her artist’s chromatic theory. “Colour is there to get the heart rate up, bring a tear, grind the teeth, and seduce. It is the result of a condensed sensation, therefore intuitive and passionate”, she added. For Françoise Gilot, color was an innate knowledge that could be refined with years of practice, but could not be taught or learned. Because she recognized in colors the direct expression of the “sensory affinity” that one has with life. And she pointed out a very clear simile: “Color is like fireworks that explode on a summer night, hitting the viewer in the plexus.”
She was convinced that the painter gave clues and the viewer built an image from the puzzle before his eyes. “Like nature itself, the painter is evasive and the viewer undertakes a search, eager to decipher the enigma, perhaps eager for a more rational logic than the artist never intends,” she pointed out about the complicated relationship between viewer and creator.
a painter of color
At the beginning of his painting he focused on the portraits of his friends and family. He preferred them to the professional models from the academies. She was convinced that she had a gift for characterizing the human beings she cared about. The attachment that she felt from her to her family and close friends allowed her to select among her different physical traits, those that best reflected her character. In 1954 this cycle of family portraits ended with her separation from Pablo Picasso. They had spent a decade together and, as she herself said, it was a passionate but difficult relationship. She needed to find her own resources, a particular universe, “and not within the confines of the world shared with Picasso”.
“I knew Picasso’s work and thoughts more accurately than anyone else.” The literary critic Carlton Lake said so after writing a biography of Picasso for the Atlantic Monthly in 1956. It was then that he spoke to Gilot for the first time. The French artist no longer lived with the man from Malaga. It had been three years since she had left him and she took his children Claude and Paloma with her. A decade later, in 1964, she published a memoir about her life with the painter. “Everything he said, everything Picasso said, and every hour of the ten-odd years they spent together,” Lake added of the biography he helped write Gilot, in a calm, even tone, “Françoise has recorded in her mind everything he said, everything Picasso also said.
The journalist insists in the prologue on the truth of Gilot’s testimonies, aware of the wave of cancellations and accusations that Picasso’s ex-partner would receive once the book was published. That is why he remembers that the personal letters between the two are there, in addition to “many other pertinent documents, three large drawers full of them, which, due to being stored in an attic, miraculously escaped the fate of Françoise’s other personal effects stored in her house. from the south of France, in the year 1955”.
In Spain the memories took 30 years to translate. The new version is from the Elba publishing house and on this tour it becomes clear that Picasso did not care if Françoise was happy or unhappy, only if she brought happiness to the rest of the family. At the end of the forties, the perfect woman for Picasso was still the one who devoted herself to the needs of the painter and those of his children.
So when the artist found out that Gilot had decided to leave his side, the painter went crazy. He told her that she was a product of his, that she wouldn’t go anywhere without him. That people would only approach her to meet the person whose life had been part of the great Picasso. “For you, reality has already ended,” Gilot recounts that the artist told him. The French artist endured the shadow of the author of the Guernica the rest of her life, remembered as “the only woman who survived Picasso”.
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