She’s almost 90 and still living very much in the present, quietly painting every day in her West Side studio. Yet Françoise Gilot — Picasso’s muse and lover and the mother of two of his children — is about to revisit her past.
In May, John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, together with Valentina Castellani, a director of the Gagosian Gallery, will present an exhibition that chronicles the years when Ms. Gilot and Picasso were together — from roughly 1943 through 1952 — living in Vallauris, a small hillside town near Cannes in the south of France. It will be the gallery’s fourth Picasso exhibition and will include paintings, sculptures, drawings, pottery and prints.
Ms. Gilot doesn’t mind dredging up what must seem like many lifetimes ago. “When you are old your life has different chapters,” she said the other day, standing near a colorful abstract painting perched on an easel.
“I was an artist before I ever met Picasso,” she emphatically explained. Yet those years “are very much a part of my life.”
Like other blockbuster shows that are proliferating among some of today’s most prosperous galleries, Mr. Richardson believes the exhibition will be an eye-opener because “nobody realizes the tremendous importance of Françoise to Picasso during that whole period.”
The show, which will open at Gagosian’s newly renovated Madison Avenue gallery, is poised to generate as much excitement as the other Picasso shows that Mr. Richardson has masterminded. (The first, “Picasso: Mosqueteros,” in 2009 drew more than 100,000 visitors, a figure more normally associated with a museum exhibition.)
And the show, like all the others, will be a costly undertaking that involves getting loans from museums, publishing a lavish catalog with scholarly essays and bringing in an architect to redesign the gallery. It’s a lot of work and expense. Often dealers say nothing is for sale; generally, however, one or two works are available — at the right price — making these shows profitable after all.
Larry Gagosian says he believes that either way, the headaches were worth it. “Now we get offered all kinds of Picassos,” he said. “Everything from a print worth $4,000 to, well, the sky’s the limit.”
With his network of 11 galleries around the world, Mr. Gagosian is by far the most visible of all the dealers presenting these kinds of crowd-pleasing shows. But other blue-chip galleries including Acquavella and Pace have been presenting them on and off for decades. “I’ll never forget in the early ’70s when we had a Matisse show,” William Acquavella recalled. “We had people waiting on line in the pouring rain.”
His gallery, just two blocks north of Gagosian’s Madison Avenue headquarters, is attracting crowds right now with “Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism,” which opened on Oct. 12. The show, which was organized by Dieter Buchhart, an Austrian curator, includes 42 paintings, many on loan from museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Tate in London. “It’s good advertising,” Mr. Acquavella said. “Braque is an amazing artist and hasn’t really gotten his due.”
