Born into a family that would forever leave its mark on the world of art, Françoise Cauvin-Monet (1926-2017) was the granddaughter of Léon Monet, art collector and brother of the renowned artist.
She grew up in the family home, filled with numerous works by Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and, of course, those of her great-uncle Claude Monet.
Art was at the core of her family. Even though Françoise Cauvin-Monet initially studied medicine to ensure her independence, she was also trained in academic drawing by Robert Savary. Later, she was introduced to abstract and neo-figurative art by László Mindszenti.
In 1949, she met the man who would later become her husband. After completing their studies at the University of Paris and the birth of their daughter, they settled in 1956 in Rouen, the stronghold of the
Monet family.
Although Françoise Cauvin-Monet never spent a day without drawing, she rarely exhibited her art, as she did not want to compete with the renowned members of her family. Thus, she chose to keep her work away from the public eye. When she passed away in 2017, more than 4,000 works of art were unveiled.
Through her work, she experimented with a variety of techniques and developed her own pictorial field. Her nearly unconstrained compositions offer freedom of gesture, where figures, shapes, and colours converse with ease. One can easily see the influence of Chagall, Kandinsky, and the Dutch artist Corneille in her work, which is marked in every aspect by her femininity: from subject to line, from form to phrase. Her pictorial field offers a depiction of every aspect of a 20th-century woman: it humanizes the animal world, encapsulates circadian art, and explores her own journeys. Everything becomes a reason
to capture life in its sheer complexity.
Her style wavers between figurative abstraction, free figuration, surrealism, and Art Brut, among others, following her desires and techniques: collage, paint, Indian ink, graphite… Françoise Cauvin-Monet explored a variety of media to spontaneously capture the moment.
Her work was revealed for the first time in 2023 in a public institution at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris. The following year, her self-portrait was included in the collection of The Institute of France by the Marmottan-Monet Museum, which also plans an upcoming exhibition featuring her work in March 2025.
The Clavé Fine Art Gallery will also hold a retrospective of her work in parallel with the exhibition at the Marmottan-Monet Museum, to promote the previously unknown work of this talented female artist.