New to the collection:
Françoise Gilot is often remembered as a lover and muse to Pablo Picasso, but she dedicated herself to modern art well before she met the Spanish painter in 1943. During World War II, Gilot created a series of paintings that were encoded with comments about the Occupation and the war.
Les Couleurs de la mer (The Colors of the Sea) is one of the few remaining works from this period, if not the first one Gilot completed with this theme. In the spring of 1942, Gilot fled German-occupied Paris for her family’s villa on the Brittany coast. She later recalled, “one morning as I was watching the fish market, the thought came to me to use fish as a metaphor to express my feelings…In these paintings, I wished to express in a cryptic manner my feelings about the slaughter of French culture.” The objects in Les Couleurs de la mer give strong symbolic meaning to the world events Gilot was witnessing. It is thought that the lemon was used to suggest the current war situation as “sour” or “acidic,” while the two dead fish represent both Christ and the German attack of French culture. The parsley in the back, intentionally placed in a clear glass, was to represent the belief that France would survive and be revived from the war—the vibrancy of the plant communicating that all hope is not dead, and life will be returned to France. Les Couleurs de la mer also reveals Gilot’s deep admiration for Henri Matisse and what she called his “bright compositions that seemed so serene and disengaged.” Just one year after finishing this still life, Gilot had her first gallery exhibition and met Picasso at a restaurant in Paris, thus beginning a decade-long tumultuous relationship between two artists born forty years apart.
FRANÇOISE GILOT
French, 1921 – 2023
Les Couleurs de la mer, 1942
Oil on canvas
14 x 27 ⅞ inches
Museum purchase with funds provided by an anonymous donor, 2025.11