Francoise Gilot’s Lifetime of Varied Styles, Moods Captured in Riggs Galleries’ Show

LA JOLLA —  Francoise Gilot has been painting for 50 years, but the eight years that she spent living with Pablo Picasso overshadow the rest and have come to define her in the public eye. Gilot’s ambition as an artist sprouted well before she met Picasso in 1943, at the age of 22. By then, her talent had already begun to bloom, with her first exhibition at a Paris gallery behind her.

Her first oil painting, made in 1939 and now on view at the Riggs Galleries’ exhibit celebrating her career, employs a motif long familiar to French painting--a view through open doors, across a balcony to the landscape beyond. Gilot’s play of cool interior colors against the verdant tapestry of the distant hills affirms the poignancy of this motif as a metaphor for contrasting private and public, internal and external realms. The painting gives rich and convincing form to Gilot’s belief that art “has to be existential--it is a way to understand oneself.” It also anticipates her repeated use of a frame within the larger frame of the picture, a compositional device that calls attention to the fact that painting is an abstraction of reality, a subjective translation of the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface.

Gilot’s work of the late 1940s and early ‘50s bears the strong imprint of Picasso’s influence, but it is also the most vital and dynamic of her career. In a series of small, colored pencil studies, she sends a jolt of energy through the traditional floral still life, transforming the organic rhythms of nature into dense explosions of geometric pattern.

A 1944 painting, “Still Life in Green and Pink,” has Gilot reducing each table-top object to a flat emblem, then charging the scene with animated contours and a bold, delicious palette of gray, green and lobster pink. Picasso’s elegant, economical line shows up again and again in Gilot’s drawings, as does his then-radical shattering of the illusionistic picture plane into distinct, fractured facets.

In her 1953 self-portrait, “Etude Bleue,” Gilot exploits the tension between the real and the depicted world as coyly as her mate did 40 years earlier when he did a collage with a piece of oilcloth printed with a chair caning pattern onto a painting to stand for the caning itself. Here, Gilot leaves exposed a strip of the wood panel she is painting on, so that it doubles as a frame for the mirror she is seen gazing into. Such visual punning propels her work into more sophisticated--but certainly not uncharted--territory.

Picasso and Gilot separated the same year as this self-portrait. Legend has it that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with a historical monument. She returned to Paris from their villa in the south of France and tried to wrest her artistic life from Picasso’s all-powerful grip. She succeeded fairly quickly in shedding the external trappings of his influence, but after more than 30 years, she has yet to fill that void with a compelling artistic vision of her own.

Among the strongest works of the past three decades is a series of paintings inspired by a trip to Tunisia in the mid-1950s. Recoiling from Picasso’s powerful spell, Gilot adopted--albeit briefly--a loose, figurative style for these paintings of nudes at their bath. Moody and luminous, these transitional works (as well as a tender portrait of a mother and child from the same period) possess more visual and emotional appeal than any of the work that follows. A blocky, abstract style replaced the grace and sensuousness of the Tunisian work. By the late ‘60s, Gilot’s work had gained weight but sacrificed muscle, as her interpretations of classical myths grew clumsy and crude.

In addition to maintaining studios in New York and Paris, Gilot began spending a great deal of time in La Jolla after 1970, when she married Jonas Salk. During the next 10 years, she pared down her work to a poster-like flatness and a bright, exuberant palette, while focusing more on personal visions of the world. Work from the last few years, however, seems the thinnest yet, relying on easy decorative schemes and safe, soothing colors.

Gilot’s show, titled “Past Visions, Windows to the Future,” covers an exhausting span of styles, but this breadth does little to mask the middling quality of the work along the way. The show continues at Riggs Galleries (875 Prospect St., La Jolla) through Sept. 30.