“Everything else in my life only weighs me down and shuts out the light. This thing with you seems like a window that is opening up. I want it to remain open...”

—Pablo Picasso to Françoise Gilot

In 1944, a fateful printmaking 'lesson' began the courtship of the artist Pablo Picasso and his new young muse, Françoise Gilot, wherein the two, who had met at a restaurant, studied proof images together of Picasso’s 1930s Vollard Suite which would be published in the '50s. Picasso was enamored with Gilot’s youthful beauty; so was his friend and fellow titan of modernism, Henri Matisse, who once remarked that if given the chance he would paint Gilot with a pale blue body and leaf green hair.ⁱ This comment perhaps inspired Picasso’s 1946 creation of La Femme-Fleur, another iconic Gilot portrait wherein she is depicted with light blue skin and leaves for hair. For this second, more complete state of two lithographic portraits Picasso published of Gilot in November 1950, impressions were printed in black upon gray-blue Ingres Canson paper, imbuing Gilot with slight undertones akin to that rendered in La Femme-Fleur. For the edition, this thinner paper was laid to a sturdier Arches paper.

This impression of Françoise sur fond gris, however, is a rare proof of the portrait before it was applied to its support, offering a glimpse into Picasso’s process in the print studio. Here, Gilot is impeccably portrayed as a symbolic light in Picasso’s life: she emerges with a remarkable sense of depth from her surrounding darkness with a narrow face, arching eyebrows – Matisse described them as ‘circumflex accents’ – and youthfully plump lips, her head gracefully rested against her posed hand. While most of the artist’s work in lithography at this time was smaller in scale or compositionally simplified, by comparison, Françoise sur fond gris stands apart for its size and painterly, intricately worked surface – becoming one of Picasso’s most important lithographs. Gilot was a major catalyst for Picasso to work seriously with lithography, and as a result, he produced about three-quarters of his lithographs during their ten-year relationship. Though Gilot would later become the first and only of Picasso’s key lovers to decide to leave the artist, her influence on Picasso’s printmaking pursuits is utterly undeniable, resulting in some of his best, most refined work in the medium.

ⁱFrançoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, “Pablo Picasso’s Love: La Femme-Fleur,” The Atlantic, August 1964.