On June 30th, PIASA will present a Print, Multiple and Illustrated book auction. Featuring 228 lots, the sale will include a magnificent lithograph by the incredible Pablo Picasso.
In May 1943, Pablo Picasso, then the lover of Dora Maar, met Françoise Gilot at a dinner at the restaurant Le Catalan. At the next table, Picasso noticed this beautiful young woman in the company of the actor Alain Cuny, a mutual friend - who eventually introduced them. For three years, they saw each other occasionally, but it was not until 1946 that their relationship became official, when they moved in together. She was his companion until 1953 and the mother of two of his children: Claude and Paloma.
She was also a painter, a writer, with an independent spirit and an undeniable beauty. She was 21 years old and 40 years younger than Picasso. She became a model for the Master, who portrayed her as a flower woman, developing an astonishing aesthetic vocabulary specific to his muse, combining abstract interlacing and naturalistic forms. To explain this plant metaphor, Picasso confided to her this intuition: "There is in you the impetus of a plant in spring, and I did not know how to express this idea that you belong to the plant kingdom".
Madly in love with Françoise, Picasso produced nearly two hundred lithographs in 1945-1946, a technique he had already practised but which he revolutionised by enriching it with formal inventions, after his meeting in 1945 with the lithographer Fernand Mourlot. On 14 June 1946, when Françoise had been living with him for a few months, Picasso drew a dozen portraits of her in lithographs such as Françoise au nœud dans les cheveux, Françoise aux cheveux ondulés and a very large format, soberly entitled Françoise, which we are presenting in this sale.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Françoise - 14 juin 1946
Estimate: 40 000 - 60 000 €
A technical feat due to its imposing format, this work is above all a testimony to the primordial place Françoise occupied in Picasso's life at the time. The model is depicted in a hieratic attitude and seems to be looking defiantly at the viewer. Particular attention is paid to the hair, which is drawn in a monochrome line, light but full, almost Matissian. Her dissymmetrical eyebrow in a circumflex accent and the mole below the left eye, together with variations around the mouth, complete the vegetal and solar aesthetic that he was so fond of representing the character of his companion.
This print contrasts with what Picasso produced later, around 1948, when his relationship with Françoise became more stormy. The lithographs became darker, less realistic and played on the velvety black, as a harbinger of the end of their relationship. Indeed, in 1953, the couple separated, on Françoise's initiative. She was the only woman who dared to leave Picasso.
