Françoise Gilot

French artist Françoise Gilot (1921-2023) was a post-war painter of the Nouvelle École de Paris. Her work hovers between abstraction and figuration. She published a number of books, not just her famous Life with Picasso, in which she recounted her experiences of 10 years at the side of the most famous artist of the 20th century, but also of poetry and stories with her own illustrations.

This fold-out box set presents a hardback, facsimile edition of three sketchbooks made by Gilot on her travels between 1974 and 1981. A collection of direct impressions and abstract reflections, they are suffused with the distinct atmosphere of these places: Venice, India, and Senegal.

Gilot traveled to Venice in the summer of 1974. Her regular visits to the floating city as a child made a lasting impression, and she felt a deep, continued connection. There, she drew with a subtle palette, centered on different shades of a watery blue. Views of the city were mixed with reimaginations of the canals and cityscape, yet it is above all the spirit, history, and myth of Venice that animates her work. She paid tribute to its art with various pages characterizing her forebears: the Bellinis, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto. Gilot infused her illustrations with writing, her beautifully organic lettering becoming part of the drawings in which she depicted the canals, the cafés, the lovers at the water’s edge.

The second sketchbook is from Gilot’s trip to India in late 1979. She drew out on the streets and sat on bumpy plane rides between cities. The sketches, mostly black and white, capture people on the road, market stalls, cows and other animals, as well as wall advertisements for the coming election. Central to the sketchbook are the figures of women, working or carrying a load, always clad in impeccable saris whose folds especially captivated her: “The cloth is a cocoon,” she noted, “and in this latent metamorphosis lies the magic of the curved line.”

In 1981 Gilot visited Senegal, where she was impressed by the people she met, their movements and meetings, life in the circle huts and on marketplaces. Her sketchbook is almost jewel-like in intense colors, juxtaposed with deep-inked black-and-white line drawings. Again we see many women in flowing garments, their poses like ornaments on the page, we see plants and landscapes, sometimes clear and sometimes as form, moving in and out of abstraction.

This Art Edition includes a signed color lithograph, Indian Soul (2017). Especially created by Gilot for TASCHEN, it depicts a group of three women united though the ornamental folds of their saris. “It was women who maintained and repaired the roads for the cars,” the artist reminisces. “They always wore beautiful saris, and they would be carrying stones in hollow copper dishes on their heads… I kept being amazed—wearing a sari is a complicated business. And if their sari was a little stained, they washed it in the river.”

The three sketchbooks are accompanied by an additional booklet containing an introduction by Hans Werner Holzwarth, a conversation between the artist and Thérèse Crémieux on her work and travels, and translations of the handwritten text within the drawings.

Art Edition of 60 numbered copies (No. 61–120), each with the hand-printed six-color lithograph Indian Soul (2017), signed by Françoise Gilot.

Also available as two other Art Editions, each with a different lithograph signed by Gilot and limited to 60 copies, and as a numbered and limited edition of 5,000 copies

The artist: Born in 1921 in Neuilly, France, Françoise Gilot was a painter, printmaker, and writer. She started showing her work in the 1940s as part of the Nouvelle École de Paris movement, before exhibiting at many international gallery and museum exhibitions. She received awards and honors, including the Ordre des Arts et Lettres, and was made an Officier de la Légion d’Honneur. Her poetry books and memoirs on 20th-century art include the best-selling Life with Picasso (1964) as well as Interface: The Painter and the Mask (1975) and Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art (1990). She lived and worked in New York, until her death in June 2023.

The authors and editors: Hans Werner Holzwarth is a book designer and editor specializing in contemporary art and photography. His TASCHEN publications include the Collector’s Editions Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Neo Rauch, Ai Weiwei, Beatriz Milhazes, Julian Schnabel, Georg Baselitz, Glenn Brown, the David Hockney SUMO A Bigger Book, as well as monographs such as the XXL-sized Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Thérèse Crémieux is an actress and dramatist who has played in films by Robert Altman, Claude Lelouch, Laurent Heynemann, and Jacques Demy as well as in French theater. She collaborated on her own solo pieces with writer Philippe Ferran and directors Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, John Pepper, and Robert Cantarella. Her first play, Scènes étrangères, was produced at the Comédie-Française, and since 2011 she has written and published a number of plays including L’Art de la séparation, which takes place in Munich in 1933, Superstition, Dernière séance, and Low Cost.