“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 1943, Pablo Picasso brought a bowl of cherries to the table of Françoise Gilot at Le Catalan, a restaurant on the Rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris, where she was dining with a school friend. Accompanied by his mistress at the time, Dora Maar, Picasso surreptitiously invited the young Gilot to his studio on the same street, after learning she too was a painter. What blossomed was a ten-year relationship and two children, before the relationship’s inevitable breakdown due to Picasso’s volatile personality and wandering eye. Gilot left Picasso in 1953, and she stands out among the artist’s lovers as she resolutely saw a life beyond that which Picasso offered, choosing to part ways with him before he could decide for her.
A bold yet tender image, La femme à la fenêtre is one of Picasso’s most notable aquatints that offers a sentimental interpretation of Gilot’s private ruminations. She is depicted standing in profile looking wistfully out of the picture plane, immersed in thought. Picasso’s masterful handling of the intaglio technique – to which aquatint is employed with painterly application creating delicate tonal effects – suspends Gilot between the soft contrast of a dark background and naturalistic light shining through the window, illuminating her face. She is both accessible and closed off, she turns away yet has a tantalising gaze, simultaneously preoccupied in distant thought – perhaps a deliberate choice by Picasso to echo the tension between the pair. In an unusually narrow, rectangular composition, Gilot is intimately, claustrophobically close to the picture plane, her hands pressed against the window as if to stop the perimeter from compressing further. The cropping of the image heightens the physical and emotional intensity of the scene, the resulting image a momentary glimpse into the psyche of a distant lover.
Conceived in 1952 a year before Gilot left their home in the south of France, the subliminal tension in the image is made explicit in Picasso’s aquatint entitled L’Egyptienne, created in the wake of her departure in 1953. Here Gilot is rendered as a contorted creature, the delicacy of her angular features lost in the distortion of line. Her gaze turns from wistful and passive to direct and imposing, her hands large and grotesque. The subtle hints of the pair’s imminent dissolution in the restrained composure of La femme à la fenêtre is now directly confrontational, a formal change fuelled by Picasso’s surge of rage at Gilot after their separation. Both intensely private and fuelled with emotional fervour, La femme à la fenêtre is a compassionate attempt to capture the complexity of Gilot’s insulate emotions. A final chapter in the decade-long love affair, the work is a sentimental study of one of Picasso’s greatest loves already lost.
