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FRANÇOISE GILOT(1921-2023)Interieur 25 5/8 x 18 1/8 in (65 x 46.1 cm)
15 May 2025, 14:00 EDT
New YorkUS$70,000 - US$100,000
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FRANÇOISE GILOT (1921-2023)
Interieur
signed 'F. Gilot' (lower left)
oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 18 1/8 in (65 x 46.1 cm)
Painted in 1955
signed 'F. Gilot' (lower left)
oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 18 1/8 in (65 x 46.1 cm)
Painted in 1955
Footnotes
This work is registered in the Françoise Gilot Archive under the number 307.
Provenance
The artist's studio, La Jolla.
Acquired directly from the artist by the current owner, August 1981.
Exhibited
La Jolla, Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, Gilot 100, 2022.
Palm Springs, Palm Springs Convention Center, Palm Springs Modernism Show, 2024.
Françoise Gilot's remarkable artistic career spanned decades, resulting in a vast oeuvre of highly personal works distinctive to various points in the artist's life. Interieur, painted in 1955, marks a period in which Gilot returned to a more classical technique of painting that drew inspiration directly from nature. Having always been intrigued by the world of dance, Gilot hired ballerina Germaine Brocks to serve as her model. Represented in the present work, Brocks soon became a fixture in many of the artist's other paintings from 1955. When recalling her working relationship with Brocks in May of 2016, Gilot explained that: "In 1954, I decided to resume drawing from nature, taking inspiration from professional models or from friends. For the later part of 1954 and all of 1955, most every day, I worked with a young English classical dancer called Germaine Brocks. Having fair hair, pale complexion and a fine silhouette, Germaine was a well-known model in the Paris art world and she became for me quite an inspiring and poetic presence" (Françoise Gilot quoted in T. Gott, Françoise Gilot Blue eyes (Les yeux bleus), Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria Edition 56, 2018).
Eager to shake some of the stylistic habits adopted throughout her relationship with Picasso, Françoise Gilot returned to painting the world around her following their split in 1953. Like many of her works from this time, Interieur is an intimate portrait set within the domestic interior that the mother of two found herself increasingly occupying. The painting balances an attentive realism with the expressive restraint of half tones and broad brush strokes on a thick, textured canvas. A quietly forceful work of introspection, Interieur is a tribute to Gilot's ability to forgo artistic conventions in favor of inspiration dictated by her subconscious.
This work hails from the private collection of Gilot's first archivist. Working alongside each other in Gilot's La Jolla studio, the current owner and the artist formed a close friendship, and it was in August of 1981 that the current owner acquired Interieur directly from the artist in her studio; it has thence remained within the same private collection for over forty years.