FRANÇOISE GILOT
Art Periods
Gilot tackles the medium of oil paint in 1939 mentored by Endre Rozsda. During the occupation of Paris, the Nazis censore suspected criticisms. Gilot resolves to voice her opinions through symbols. Each painting becomes a riddle. As the war ends, Gilot joins the group of Les Réalitées Nouvelles, headed by Sonia Delaunay and Nicolas de Staël. They pledge to express themselves solely through abstraction to reach a new modernity.
​
In 1943, Gilot meets Pablo Picasso; they have two children, Claude and Paloma. In 1952, she joins Daniel Henry Kahnweiler’s gallery. She shows “cheerful” kitchen scenes. Yet, bars on the window and sharp knives are defining a not so happy mood. In 1954, she marries the painter Luc Simon; they have a child, Aurélia. In this period of deep emotions, 1945-1960, life is the subject of the artist’s works: children, friends, dancers, objects and scenes of everyday life. Her paintings reflect her feelings of happiness, nostalgia, or confinement.
​
King Minos’ Minautore, is enclosed in a labyrinth like prison. Theseus, sails to Crete to kill the beast. When he arrives, King Minos‘s daughter Ariadne falls in love with him. She gives Theseus a long thread to unravel as he proceeds into the labyrinth. Theseus kills the Minotaur, finds his way out and sails off with Ariadne. At Naxos, he betrays and forgets Ariadne. From 1960 to 63, Gilot paints a completely abstract
series on the theme of Theseus and the Minautore. In 1963, she writes Life with Picasso, co-authored by Carlton Lake.
​
The Tate Gallery finds Gilot an artist’s studio in London. Gilot feels liberated in England, which she views as more irrational and eccentric. While in Greece, Gilot is elated by the milky blue veil at dawn. As she paints the ruins, Gilot says, “It was as if all of a sudden the quintessential dwellers of Noah’s Ark had chosen my studio as a place in which to disembark.” Gilot juxtaposes the natural cycle of the animal world with the rise and fall of civilizations. Hawks dive towards lizards in a will to survive, while some monkeys ponder on the meaning of existence.
​
Movement defines this period. In 1970, Gilot marries the scientist Dr. Jonas Salk and moves to California. The Southwestern nature is untamed with its earthquakes, fires, torrential rains and subsequent flooding. The characters in her plays are transformed into silhouettes, dancers, acrobats or football players that are thrust into motion, as are hills, trees, and oceans. Meanwhile, the sun erases all details and inspires Gilot to move away from textured subtle renditions to flat planes of strong colors that are used at their most intense.
​
Never wanting to repeat herself, Gilot often turned to different medium to renew her creativity. Her drawings are the diary of her emotions. She still executes lithographs at the Atelier Mourlot and collaborates with June Wayne of the Tamarind Press. To respond to California’s modern open space architecture, she has big folding screens build for her. In response to a major exhibition in Australia, she uses set design technique and creates “Floating paintings” on loose canvases. Meanwhile, she writes poetry and a book, The Painter and the Mask.
​
Upon moving to New York, Gilot is pained by the many homeless people in the city. Their plight reminds her of the people displaced during World War II. Entering a philosophical reflection, the artist creates the character of the Wanderer, a small silhouette lost in an immense landscape. A few years later, the small beings disappear altogether and are replaced by imposing celestial bodies seen up close. Gilot selects the comets as the new wanderers, seemingly unpredictable in their course.
​
Gilot says: ”In an abstract painting, forms and colors evoke a certain state of mind.” The abstractions are glimpses of emotions caught in time as they travel through space, frozen. Her abstract compositions allow us to cut loose from the world around us, escape reality, with her diagonals, we become a vector, a pure force unhindered, our mind is freed, we become a spirit, an explosion.
​
