On the evening of Tuesday 6 June, it was announced that the artist Françoise Gilot had died. Having lived to the age of 101, she had a career that spanned a staggering eight decades – leaving behind 1,600 paintings and 3,600 works on paper. She was also the acclaimed author of internationally bestselling books, one recently reissued by New York Review Books Classics.
An artist from the get-go, Gilot declared at the age of 21 that she “felt painting was my whole life”, and her output ranges from portraits to landscapes, still lifes to collage. Often luminously coloured, her work uses angular shapes that intersect to make up a beach scene, a cityscape, a speeding comet or a mother and child. But she also turned to monochrome: her 1994 Aspects of Femininity challenged the multitudinous ways women are perceived, while her 1946 work Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple had hard-edged lines in its re-examination of the Biblical tale, focusing on temptation, punishment and the blaming of women. Her work now features in the collections of the Met and MoMA in New York, as well as the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2021, her 1965 work Paloma à la Guitare fetched $1.3m at Sotheby’s.
