FRANÇOISE GILOT | Applause (Blue Acrobats)

Acquired from the artist

Collegeville, Pennsylvania, Ursinus College, Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art; Oceanside, California, Oceanside Museum of Art & Riverside, Riverside Museum of Art, Transitions, Works by Françoise Gilot, 2012, n.n.

Françoise Gilot, The Painter and the Mask, Fresno, 1975, no. 8, illustrated p. 65 (titled The Acrobats)
Françoise Gilot Painting—Malerei (exhibition catalogue), Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz Museum, Chemnitz, 2003, no. 16, illustrated in the catalogue

The canvas is unlined. There is some paint shrinkage in the black pigments in the right half of the composition. Under UV light, some original pigments fluoresce but no inpainting is apparent.
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Gilot’s use of color was influenced by Matisse, whom she admired greatly and who became a close friend through Pablo Picasso, with whom Gilot had a long term relationship as well as two children, Claude and Paloma. Gilot described how "Matisse was the king of color. I first met him in February 1946 with Picasso, when he was living at his house, Villa le Rêve, in Vence. I expected his house to be bright, but the shutters were pulled shut so as to let in just the smallest amount of light. It was a complete surprise, this darkness. In the first room, when we entered, there was a big cage of birds. I thought, 'Poor little birds that are not allowed to see the sun.' The opposite of what you expect is always interesting. I began to understand. Matisse had been afraid at one point that he was going blind. He was therefore protecting his eyesight. And strangely enough, it is in almost complete darkness that you see things best because you see them one by one as they emerge” (quoted in “Françoise Gilot Reminisces About Henri Matisse,” in The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2014). During her visits with the bedridden Matisse throughout the 1940s, Gilot observed him creating his famed cut outs using cut and pasted paper. In 1947, Matisse published the groundbreaking artist’s book Jazz, the illustrations for which were created using pochoir from these original cut-out maquettes (see fig. 1). Matisse's distinctive visual vocabulary continued to influence Gilot throughout her career, as is clearly evidenced in the present work painted almost thirty years later. 

This animated composition is as analogous to the daring of the acrobats as it is to that of the artist. The clapping hands encircling the perimeter allude to the enthusiasm of the public encouraging the death-defying high wire act of the acrobats. Yet the composition holds their precarious success and security of mid-air contact in anxious suspension. Vibrant reds and blues sharply contrast with orange, black and white as Gilot reinforces the element of danger through her arrangement of complementary colors.



The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Françoise Gilot and it is registered in the artist’s archives.