Installation view of Françoise Gilot: Shaping Freedom Through Abstraction, 2024. Exhibition at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art.
Did you know that the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College is the international center for the study of Françoise Gilot’s work?
Despite the limitations of having such an impressive archive in an academic museum at a small liberal arts college, the museum is making strides to make the collection more accessible to students, scholars and the general public.
For those unfamiliar with Françoise Gilot: she was a daring French painter and printmaker who came out of the post-WWII School of Paris. Gilot is known for her experimental approaches and desire to push her mediums–turning to circular canvases when limited by typical squares, moving away from stretched paintings to 20-30 foot floating pieces, and enjoying costume design. She did not back away from a challenge.
Black and White photograph of Françoise Gilot, n.d. Original photograph. Gift of Mel Yoakum, Ph.D. FG.Photo.1.1.3.
Gilot is also known for her memoirs, specifically her bestselling memoir, Life with Picasso, documenting her romantic (and challenged) relationship with the famed artist. Despite her artistic talent and fascinating creative process and spirit, she is notoriously known for that relationship with Picasso, not her art-making. As proof, check out this New York Times article title announcing Gilot’s passing: “Artist in the Shadow of Picasso.”
Gilot made art until she passed at the age of 101 in June of 2023. Her creativity never stopped.
Gilot is a gem in our art history canon.
Another gem is the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, located in Collegeville, Pennsylvania – 45 minutes north of Philadelphia.
The museum houses Gilot’s archives and over 270 pieces of her work, including the most comprehensive collection of her lithographs and etchings in the world, with the exception of the artist’s estate.
The Berman is excited to continue celebrating her work and relationship with the museum. This summer, they opened a new exhibition of her work, Françoise Gilot: Shaping Freedom Through Abstraction, and published a digital resource about significant moments in her life and career.
Françoise Gilot, Twilight Birds, 1975. Color lithograph printed in 3 runs of 9 colors. Gift of Mel Yoakum, Ph.D. BAM2013.276.
How does a museum in Pennsylvania become the international center for a French artist?
Good question.
Gilot first visited the Berman in 1991 when her husband, Dr. Jonas Salk was honored by the college for his work on the first safe polio vaccine. Coincidentally, her friends and longtime collectors of her work, Philip and Muriel Berman, had just opened a museum on the campus two years prior.
At the time of her visit, the museum had some of her works on view. The Bermans donated a significant amount of artwork when they founded the museum, and being close to Gilot, they included a few of her works, like Study for a Portrait for Muriel Berman. After chatting with the museum’s founding director, Lisa Tremper Hanover, Gilot agreed to consider an exhibition of her works at the Berman.
Fast forward to 1995. The Berman hosted a successful exhibition focusing on Gilot’s printmaking and lithographs titled Stone Echoes: Original Prints by Françoise Gilot. The published catalogue for that show became one of the leading pieces of scholarship on Gilot’s work, and the show received great acclaim.
Following the praise, Gilot donated some of her pieces to the museum. Her friend and archivist, Mel Yoakum, Ph.D., also donated pieces. And other individuals who lent artworks donated works in honor of the exhibition. So in 1995 the collection of Gilot’s works significantly grew.
On left: Françoise Gilot, Study for a Portrait of Muriel Berman, 1970. Charcoal on paper. Gift of Muriel and Philip Berman. BAM1992.069. On right: Françoise Gilot, Orange Chrysanthemums (Study for a Portrait of Muriel Berman), 1970. Oil on canvas. Gift of Muriel and Philip Berman. BAM1992.102.
Then, about fifteen years later in 2010, the Berman built an expansion, including a Works on Paper Study Room with flat file drawers. Gilot was thrilled that the museum could store her works appropriately. Knowing her works would be well preserved and protected, she donated many more works on paper in 2008 in anticipation of the expansion. The Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation and Yoakum also contributed several works in 2013 to support the project. These gifts led to the Berman having the largest collection of Gilot lithographs outside of the artist’s estate.
In 2021, Yoakum donated Gilot’s archives to the museum. It consists of early drafts of her books, photographs, newspaper clippings, exhibition ephemera, and written correspondence. The archives needed a new home and, since the Berman had such a strong institutional history with her, it was a natural fit.
Building an archive–a work in progress
A few years later, and the Berman continues to catalog and digitize materials from the expansive archive. With many eager student interns, they’ve made considerable headway, but as many collection specialists know, there are challenges along the way.
Collections manager Catherine Sirizzotti says, “There are so many diverse documents in our Gilot Archives, and some are quite fragile. We knew we wanted a way to make them more accessible, as well as keep them safe from overhandling.
“By digitizing this collection (and the added ability to manage and share them through Artwork Archive!), we can reach more diverse audiences, from K-12 classrooms to scholars around the world. We are also able to better support our campus community, as these archival materials and artworks can continue being a visual part of class discussion without the risk of overhandling.”
Currently, the archives are accessible by request. The Berman team can provide scholars select access to archival materials directly from their Artwork Archive account.
Artwork Archive Tip:
Don’t be limited by on-site visits. Easily share information from your collection with Artwork Archive Private Rooms or beautiful Catalog Pages – all of which can be shared with students, professors, scholars and interested community members.
Rooted in campus life, Gilot’s collection becomes a laboratory for interdisciplinary ideas and exploration.
The Gilot collection is part of what makes Ursinus College so unique. It leads to a lot of experiential learning for students. Sirizzotti regularly pulls unframed pieces for classes and individual students visiting the Works on Paper Study Room. It makes for a powerful experience where students can get closer look at an artwork than they ever could if it was hanging on the wall.
Students examining an unframed piece in the Works on Paper Study Room, facilitated by their professor Dr. Deborah Barkun. Photo by the Berman Museum of Art, 2024.
“I love pulling works for students that closely relate to what they have been studying in class,” Sirizzotti shares. “It allows those lessons to become tangible, linking them to a physical object that has weight, texture, and character. It sparks new questions and conversations that are informed by observation of physical details, such as impression lines from a printmaking process, brush stroke textures, or notes along an edge written by the artist.
She continues: “These behind-the-scenes access points provide an opportunity to bridge the gap between students and museum objects in a really meaningful way, giving them personal reflections and tools to inform what they do both in and out of the classroom.”
The Berman Museum of Art Uses Artwork Archive to Make Gilot’s Work Accessible
The Berman Museum of Art also digitized the artworks in their Gilot collection. The collections team wrapped up photographing her art in November and spent the winter putting those images into Artwork Archive. Once in the system, it was a straightforward process for communications assistant SanyaGrace Kunicki to build audience access using Artwork Archive’s tools.
Kunicki says, “I’ve spent the past year or so expanding the information we share about the artist on our website. From the project’s early conceptual stages, I knew Artwork Archive’s integration feature would play a critical role.”
Kunicki organized the Françoise Gilot Collection pages into five periods of the artist’s life, including biographical information and archival photographs. In Artwork Archive, she sorted the digitized works into five collections to mirror the organization of the pages. Then, she embedded each into their corresponding pages, making the works instantly viewable for public access.
Screenshot of “The Françoise Gilot Collection, Pushing the Envelope: 1965 to 1990,” The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College.
“Using Artwork Archive makes everything on our website attractive automatically and makes me so happy,” gushes Kunicki. “We're excited for audiences to experience our Gilot Collection in a way that so clearly depicts how life events impacted her work and how her work evolved.”
“Artwork Archive is vital to our strategic goal of digitizing the Gilot collection and sharing it with our audience,” echoes Sirizzotti.
Boosting discoverability with an online presence
It’s not just Gilot’s collection online. The Berman also organizes their permanent collection by medium, date range, and artist, and syncs them to their website with the Artwork Archive integrations.
“It's a simple copy-and-paste to embed a gallery view of that work into a webpage. It’s the best,” explains Kunicki.
“Our audience can get a sense of a topic, period, or artist by scrolling through a beautiful presentation of images from our collection. Even better, every image is clickable. The enlarged view provides a closer examination of the work and a full account of the piece's artist, year of creation, attribution, dimensions, and accession number. Students, faculty, K-12 educators, and members of the general public can explore our permanent collection holdings in-depth directly on our website.”
Screenshot of “Permanent Collection, Contemporary: 1950 to Today,” The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College.
No longer a hidden gem with an online presence.
The Berman is an academic museum on a small liberal arts campus about 30 miles outside of Philadelphia.
“The words 'hidden gem' get used a lot, but we're working to shift that perspective,” says executive director Lauren McCardel. “Our collections, exhibitions, and programs are engaging communities in our immediate geographic area and beyond. Creating more visibility around what we're doing and who we're serving is an important part of our plan for the future.”
The Berman Museum of Art is working hard to rightly insert itself in the narrative of Gilot’s legacy. When the New York Times published an article about Gilot’s passing, the Berman was not mentioned.
McCardel explains:
“Right now we're building awareness, among peer arts organizations and educational institutions, about Gilot's history with the Berman Museum and Ursinus College. Digitization and online accessibility for the collection is key to those efforts. Over the last year, since we began digitizing the collection and archives, we've seen a significant uptick in interest from galleries and scholars who didn't previously know we had such an extensive collection of the artist's work. We're excited to see that tide continue to rise, and to take part in ensuring that Gilot's place in the canon garners the recognition she deserves."
Thanks to Artwork Archive’s public portal, the Berman’s collection of Gilot works and the extensive research accompanying it will be discoverable and accessible online for years to come.
Exterior view of The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College. Margo Reed Studio, 2022.
What’s next?
The Berman Museum of Art has also developed oral history recordings with Yoakum to further preserve Gilot’s legacy. With the ability to share audio files online, the Berman will be able to bring these recordings and insights into the hands and ears of students and invested art enthusiasts around the globe.
