Announced as a publishing project in 2022, Histoire de l’art et lutte des sexes (Art History and the Battle of the Sexes) has been published. In the meantime, it has undergone considerable critical analysis and significant iconographic enrichment. Les Presses du Réel, which specializes in art books, has turned it into a beautiful object with high-quality pictorial representations.

If the essayist who coined the neologism ecofeminism is now regularly cited, large parts of her work remain in the shadows, including her reflections on painting and its role in society. Thanks to Fabienne Dumont, art historian, author and/or editor of seven books, numerous articles and exhibition catalogs, art critic, and professor of contemporary art history at the university, this gap has been filled.

Because she is convinced that the paint analyses carried out by Françoise 50 years ago are as serious as they are original. Fabienne confirms how visionary she was, once again: ” This book is groundbreaking” (in her day), she says, in that it shows how women’s bodies are all the more represented in works of art because women are erased as creators. A pioneer, therefore, but ignored and even erased until very recently, this ” a “milestone” in the history of feminist art that “has no equivalent” in France.

Françoise’s early interest in the arts emerged from the fertile ground of a family where artistic vocations left their mark, such as the paintings of Lucien d’Eaubonne and the work of set designer Jean d’Eaubonne, who collaborated with a host of famous filmmakers. Françoise, for her part, made painting her secret garden, so secret that very few people can claim to have had access to it during her lifetime. Using pencils, watercolors, gouaches, and felt-tip pens, on scraps of paper as well as on high-quality media, she produced probably hundreds of small works.

Histoire de l’art et lutte des sexes marks a turning point in her literary output. The style foreshadows the great mastery she would demonstrate, particularly in La Liseuse et la Lyre and L’Évangile selon Véronique, her penultimate novel published in 2003.

Françoise’s seventieth work strikes a chord with our times. Under neoliberalism, in the name of “the crisis,” the brief period when institutional culture was a space for reinvention has given way to “profitable” art, which is therefore required to be commodified. Major public museums are being swallowed up by specialists in cultural market analysis, and everyone is working hard on their “segment,” relegating works of art to the role of interchangeable supports for promoting the luxury industry, or as a showcase for the great families of finance and arms manufacturing, who see their patronage as a way to restore their tarnished image.

As Paul B. Preciado so aptly puts it, in these “necromuseums, archives of our global destruction,” exchange value and the rewriting of history have devoured the work. Françoise, for her part, would have preferred “public ruin to private profitability” and would have invited people to occupy these ruins in order to “erect barricades of meaning,” because, as she wrote, “Every struggle that goes to its logical conclusion encounters others.”

*** Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator ***