With her features outlined in a similar manner, the main act of abstraction is in her hair and neck. He has maintained the arched eyebrow, the nose, the eyes, even the delicate cleft in her chin. Having drastically gone through the process of abstraction between this drawing and the previous one, Picasso nonetheless preserves Francoise’s air of mystery underneath her startling frankness. Admittedly, I feel guilty for identifying her as “Picasso’s lover,” as most writing about her has, since she has an entirely fascinating oeuvre apart from him, but his portraits of her touched me so. Picasso commented that she was too beautiful to be a painter upon their first meeting in the cafe Gilot, although her work was influenced by Picasso, has always preferred Matisse’s style over Picasso’s. She, too, was and still is a remarkable painter. She is the only woman to ever leave Picasso, reflecting on their affair as a “catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid.” For almost 10 years, they lived together in the French countryside and had two children, although they never married. He famously came over to her table with a bowl of cherries and introduced himself. Sitting at another table with his soon-to-be-discarded lover, Dora Maar, Picasso was immediately drawn to Gilot.
Her beauty, as captured in the drawing, is of a kind that opens my heart, even in the current state of confinement.įrancoise Gilot was 21 when she met 61-year-old Picasso at a cafe in Paris. Tangled strokes of the pencil flirt with the imagination. Her hair (!) sweeping, roaring, winding, with strands half as if they are conniving with one another, half exuding indulgently with magical realism in this otherwise sober drawing. Her eyes are perhaps tired, perhaps resigned, yet never lacking an observant quality to them, which brings her to life. That piquantly arched eyebrow is the only flirting flavor about her, submerged beneath a quiet, pensive attitude. Picasso expertly uses two straight, brusque lines to give her face direction, and to gather its boldness, its solemnity and its touch of gentleness into a point.
She is marvelously handsome, with a charming frankness captured by that angular nose. While her face is simply rendered, her hair explodes around it with Medusa’s allure.
Picasso portraits series#
I came across a series of Picasso’s drawings of his lover, Francoise Gilot, and was riveted by the teeming world of life behind her composed facade.
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