Gallery Highlight: Françoise Gilot's Journeys
On display at MacGryder Gallery this month: Limited edition lithographs by 97-year-old French Modernist Françoise Gilot, drawn from her travel journals.
By the 1970s and ‘80s, the French artist Françoise Gilot, whose recent work is currently displayed in New Orleans' MacGryder Gallery, had already made her name as a pioneer of the Modernist movement—a career famously launched by a chance meeting with Pablo Picasso in a café on the eve of her first formal exhibition in 1946.
That relationship would evolve into a ten-year creative and romantic partnership (detailed in her best-selling 1964 memoir Life with Picasso) that ended with Gilot’s insistence upon pursuing her own career apart from his shadow, from which she went on to achieve worldwide acclaim in abstract compositions recognized for their visual and emotional resonance.
But the sketches found in her personal travel journals, created between 1974 and 1981, reveal Gilot’s until-now-unobserved reactional processes. Published for the first time in 2018 by Taschen, Gilot’s sketchbooks are filled with her immediate, and often unfinished, impressions of Venice, India, and Senegal, mostly in watercolor and mostly created on bumpy plane rides on the way home.
"You could call it a diary, " Gilot told Lauren Christensen of The New York Times in August 2018. “What I draw has meaning. In my mind, I notice what I feel, and not what is there.”
To accompany the publication of the sketchbooks, Gilot, then 96 years old, created three unique Art Edition lithographs representing India, Venice, and Senegal. This June, as part of its A Sense of Place group exhibition, New Orleans’ MacGryder Gallery—which has represented Gilot since 2017—will display these extremely limited edition lithographs, alongside copies of Françoise Gilot: Three Travel Sketchbooks.
“In these, she put a very potent sense of place into a printmaking artwork, where she combined new painted imagery in watercolor with those decades-old images from her travel sketchbook, using a new hybrid method to do these lithographs,” said Jill McGaughey, owner of MacGryder Gallery. “At 96, after 40 years [since she had worked in photography], she is still innovating, still pushing new territory.”
In A Sense of Place, Gilot’s works stand alongside other notable place-infused artwork from the internationally renowned fashion photographer David Leslie Anthony, the African American watercolor master Dean Mitchell, and New Orleans’ own realist painter Rolland Golden—all on display until July 1.
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