We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of Francine Van Hove on August 5.
Born in 1942, she joined a training class for drawing and visual arts teacher at Lycée Claude Bernard in Paris. After she graduated her teaching diploma in 1963, she was appointed at Lycée de jeunes filles in Strasbourg but she resigned a year and a half later.
Back in Paris, after a few odd jobs, she worked for Haute couture in creating ink patterns for printed fabrics. This technique led her to sharpen her pictorial research by superimposing transparent layers to achieve a result similar to the glazing of the Flemish masters that magnifies the light and material effects. In 1971, the use of her first live model was the ultimate and decisive factor in her working process, always based on the execution of several preparatory drawings in pierre noire or pastel. It was at this time that she began to develop an exclusively feminine and intimist figurative work.
Often found through chance meetings, her models played a key role in the creation of poses and compositions. Understudies of the artist, they are also reminiscent of characters that she admired in the history of art: Ancient Egyptian and Greek statuary, Italian Renaissance, 17th-century Flemish painting, Georges de La Tour, Edgar Degas… These young women staged everyday gestures - waking up, reading, dolling up, daydreaming, dozing off - which they embellished in the enclosed world of the artist's studio, living room or garden, using a repertoire of recurring and familiar accessories.
In her genre painting, between mystery and simplicity, formal perfection and anecdotal register, Francine Van Hove seeked to capture the quintessence of beauty: "The more I try to define or capture beauty, the more its mystery eludes me. But this no longer surprises or despairs me, for I have gradually developed a passion for this very pursuit".
In the early 1980s, she met art dealers Alain and Michèle Blondel with whom she began a long-term collaboration. The galerie Alain Blondel organized many exhibitions of her work, accompanied by catalogs, and regularly showed it in major international fairs, notably at the FIAC for over ten years, in Europe and the United States.
It was at this period that her work began to arouse a growing interest among a diverse audience, regardless of age, gender, or social class. This phenomenon, quite rare for a painter, has continued unabated ever since, amplified by social media: many women post her paintings of young women in calming poses, chilling, or even copying her gestures. Alain Blondel clearly perceived the reasons for this: "Women recognize an essential part of their truth in these drawings and paintings. They discover feelings that have never been so clearly expressed. As for the girls, they can, for a moment, drop their armors, laces, and pieces of string. Fighters and lovers on the outside, they find themselves alone at last in front of magic mirrors of paper and canvas. And they are having a good time like that".
Francine Van Hove will be remembered as a truly gentle woman who recreated in the secrecy of her studio a whole timeless world just like her, discreet and graceful, cultivated without being pretentious. Her name will remain associated with this so feminine way of being of the body and of the gestures, that the artist was able to reveal through her sisterly gaze. And her work will remain too because it will keep on making us feel good.
Our thoughts go out to her family and her models.
