The Gods of Greece, Signed with Original Drawing by Françoise Gilot
[Signed; Original Drawing by Françoise Gilot] Huffington, Arianna. The Gods of Greece. First Edition Thus. 1993. Book is signed by Françoise Gilot, whose art is prominently featured in the book and who has written an artist’s preface. On the half title page, she has inscribed “To Jay and Walter, Françoise Gilot.” Underneath her signature is her original drawing with a Grecian motif in blue ink.
This is coffee table-sized book is the second edition of the book Arianna Huffington first published in 1984. It contained photographs by Rolof Benny. This second edition dropped the photos in favor of Françoise Gilot’s mythological paintings that Huffington had first seen in 1987 and greatly admired. Many of the paintings reproduced in book date back to the 1960s, when Gilot sailed the Aegean, contemplating the legends of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur in a “process of self-analysis and catharsis.” Huffington’s text is as compelling as Gilot’s illustration, as she interposes modern classics and ideas to show the timelessness of the myths. Humankind in the age of antiquity is not so different than that in the age of Old Testament, Shakespeare, or Freud—always fallible … always.
“The more ancient generations of deities were always angry, consistently in need of placation lest they unleash some cruel punishment. For me, the first dawn of a richer culture—a more humanistic vision—coincides with the evolution of these [gods] into the more anthropomorphic forms and attitudes exemplified by the Olympic pantheon. They bespeak the first stirrings of a civilization groping its way toward civic responsibility and the taking of one’s own fate into one’s own hands.”
--Françoise Gilot