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.
Greek mythology is relevant today not because it depicts the ancient world, but because it illuminates human nature. That conviction animates this collaboration between Arianna Huffington and Françoise Gilot. Huffington retells the stories of gods, heroes, and monsters with an eye toward their enduring relevance, while Gilot’s vibrant paintings transform familiar myths into something at once timeless and deeply personal. Many of the works reproduced here grew out of Gilot’s travels through the Aegean during the 1960s, where legends of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur became, in her words, part of a process of “self-analysis and catharsis.” Huffington approaches the myths from a literary perspective, drawing connections between antiquity and the worlds of Shakespeare, Freud, and modern life. The result is neither a conventional mythology nor a traditional art book, but a meditation on the persistence of certain human dramas across the centuries. In this copy, Gilot’s inscription and original drawing bring the artist’s hand directly onto the page.
“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