Françoise Cauvin-Monet was born in 1926 in a family that would forever leave its mark on the art world. She is the granddaughter of Léon Monet, collector and brother of the artist Claude Monet. Françoise grew up in the family home, surrounded by works by Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley and, of course, her great uncle Claude Monet. Art was an integral part of this family, and even though Françoise chose medicine to guarantee her independence, she also trained in academic drawing with Robert Savary, then learned abstract and neo-figurative art with László Mindszenti. In 1949, she met her future husband and, after their years of study at the University of Paris, they settled in Rouen in 1956, the Monet family fiefdom, after the birth of their daughter.
Although she never stopped drawing every day, Françoise Cauvin almost never exhibited her work. Not wishing to compete with the great names in her family, she chose to preserve her art away from outside eyes. And yet, when she passed away in 2017, a collection of over four thousand works was discovered.
His work experiments with a variety of techniques, tracing out its own pictorial field. Her compositions, with few restraints, leave room for freedom of gesture, where figures, shapes and colors interact in a natural way. The influence of Chagall, Kandinsky and Dutch artist Corneille can be felt in her creations, where femininity marks every aspect of her work: from subject to line, from form to phrase.
Françoise’s pictorial field is devoted to depicting all the facets of a 20th-century woman, humanizing the animal world or capturing the world of circus performers or her travels. Everything is a pretext to capture life and its complexity. Her style oscillates between figurative abstraction, free figuration, surrealism, art brut and many other influences, according to her moods and inspirations. Collage, paint, Indian ink, graphite… Françoise explores a multitude of media to capture the moment with spontaneity.
In 2023, his work was revealed for the first time in a public institution at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. The following year, the Musée Marmottan will include her Self-portrait (s.d, drawing, 44 x34 cm) in the collections of the Institut de France, and will program a solo exhibition of the artist’s work in March 2025. The Clavé Fine Art gallery, for its part, is proposing a retrospective exhibition of her work, in parallel with the museum exhibition at the Musée Marmottan, in order to promote the little-known work of this talented woman artist.