Self-Portrait

Although she may be best known as Pablo Picasso's muse, Françoise Gilot is a prolific artist in her own right. Executed in 1946, the year she joined Picasso in his apartment on Rue des Grands-Augustins, Self-Portrait marks a moment of intense study and growth in her career. Having explored still-life and abstract compositions in preceding years, Gilot made an abrupt shift to self-portraiture in May of 1946. While this line drawing reflects the influence of Picasso--whose contemporaneous line drawings of Gilot are similarly spare--it also points to her interest in Japanese prints and the work of Henri Matisse, with whom she maintained a lively exchange of ideas.