Françoise Gilot

Galerie Mouradian-Vallotton, Paris
Sale: Galerie Auktion Burkard, Lucerne, November 27, 1999, lot 111
Acquired at the above sale

This work is in very good condition. The canvas is unlined. There is some minor surface dirt and the picture may benefit from a light cleaning. There is some fine minor craquelure to the pigment at the upper right and left quadrants. Otherwise, fine. Under UV light: no inpainting is apparent.
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In 1962, coinciding with several summer holidays with her children sailing in Greece, Gilot embarked on a new series of about fifty abstract canvases on the tale of Theseus, Ariane and the Minotaur. At the same time Gilot was in the process of writing Life with Picasso, her best-seller memoir exploring her ten-year relationship with Picasso, which she felt offered striking parallels with these myths. The resulitng paintings represent the completion of a shift in Gilot’s style, from an emphasis on the simplification of visible realities, which characterized her paintings in the decade earlier, to a new visual language where form and content take on a symbolic resonance. Gilot calls these paintings her “Labyrinth Series.”

Her impulse was to discover visual and pictorial equivalences to the dramatic intensity of the myth with dynamic and colorful compositions adorned with pseudo-calligraphic Greek letters for the momentous episodes of the tale as she retraced them in her mind.

Gilot considered this an original approach since following the main episodes of a legend often leads painters to become overly narrative.  Closeness to a myth needs not be literal and must not aim at an artificial orthodoxy vis-à-vis gods and heroes who are more meaningful to us as archetypes of our own emotions than revered as deities.

There is nothing descriptive in these paintings—only structures, rhythms and colors that by themselves evoke the different phases of the legend and also its multifaceted meanings as envisioned by Theseus, Ariadne or the Minotaur.  What interested Gilot was to see the myth from an androgynous point of view where all the characters were just the different aspects of one person, namely, the painter, on a voyage of self-discovery. Gilot devoted three days a week to writing and three days a week to painting the Labyrinth series canvases.  She often worked through the night.

Le Tribut de Minos is marked on the verso as “XX” in the series (the paintings were not created chronologically) and evokes King Minos of Crete through signs and symbols set against the reoccurring colors of red and orange (Ariadne) and black and white (Theseus). Though completely introspective – to make statements that are personally meaningful and archetypal without directly disclosing content—these paintings, when exhibited, seem to encourage discovery.