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Artists, Poets & Intimates:
Portraits of a Life by Françoise Gilot
Curated by Mel Yoakum, Ph.D., Director, F. Gilot Archives and
organized by the Philip & Muriel Berman Museum of Art,
Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania
The legendary artist, biographer and socialite Françoise Gilot is one of the enduring personalities of the postwar School of Paris. A precocious painter at the age of twenty-one, the year of her first major exhibition in Paris, Gilot was already admired for her bold and vibrant portraits. Some sixty-five years later, she continues to create bold and expressive portraits in her vivid signature style.
This exhibition gathers many of Gilot’s best-loved portraits on paper, made over the length of her remarkable career. Drawn from the rich collection of Gilot’s art held at the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinas College, combined with loans from the Gilot Archive, it includes portraits of family, friends, and literary and historical figures reflecting the diversity of influences on her extraordinary life.
In 1943, Gilot met Pablo Picasso, then 40 years her senior. In 1946, the two began a decade-long relationship, which Françoise later chronicled in a bestselling book (and movie), entitled Life with Picasso. At his side, Françoise became part of one of the great periods of the modern art movement in Europe. Their glittering circle of legendary artists, poets and philosophers included such names as Chagall, Matisse, Cocteau, and Braque. More personally, Françoise also included their two children, Claude and Paloma, in many of her drawings and paintings.
Gilot and Picasso remained married for seven years. Gilot subsequently married and divorced the painter Luc Simon, and then married scientist Jonas Salk, with whom she lived for twenty-five years until his death. The works in the exhibition range from her earliest self-portrait in oil, painted in 1939, to mature works produced in the 1980s. Included are portraits of each of her husbands, children and friends, as well as an eclectic group of historical figures, such as Louis XIV, George Sand, and Virginia Woolf.
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