{"id":4289,"date":"2025-06-22T04:11:18","date_gmt":"2025-06-22T04:11:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/4289\/"},"modified":"2025-06-22T04:11:18","modified_gmt":"2025-06-22T04:11:18","slug":"at-94-isabella-ducrot-is-gaining-overdue-recognition-for-her-tender-paintings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/4289\/","title":{"rendered":"At 94, Isabella Ducrot Is Gaining Overdue Recognition for Her Tender Paintings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Maxwell Rabb<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Portrait of Isabella Ducrot in her studio. Photo by Claire de Virieu. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York.<\/p>\n

Portrait of Isabella Ducrot in her studio. Photo by Claire de Virieu. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York.<\/p>\n

Isabella Ducrot<\/a> turned 94 this year, and she hasn\u2019t let age interrupt her daily ritual of painting. Every day she walks from her Rome apartment atop the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj to a quiet studio tucked behind a colonnaded courtyard. After writing in the morning, she spends her day painting on Japanese paper with a brush tied to a stick, often closing her eyes and allowing the line to move freely, creating what she calls a \u201ctender image.\u201d \u201cI almost close my eyes, and let the hand go,\u201d she said in an interview with Artsy. \u201cThe result that comes out is a representation of that particular experience: \u2018tenderness.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Ducrot has become one of the art world\u2019s most beloved late bloomers<\/a>\u2014only beginning to make art seriously in her fifties and finding international recognition in the past two years. Her paintings are light-filled, lyrical compositions, featuring motifs like flowers, grids, and entwined figures. Often stitched with old textiles or fragments of handwriting, they feel both fragile and emotionally resonant. In July 2024, the Consortium Museum in Dijon mounted her first solo museum exhibition outside of Italy, and dealers like Sadie Coles in London and Petzel Gallery<\/a> in New York mounted solo shows that drew attention to her soft, collage-based compositions. Her work even appeared alongside Dior\u2019s spring\/summer 2024 collection<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Isabella Ducrot, installation view of \u201cVisited Lands\u201d at Petzel, 2025. Photos by Jason Mandella. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.<\/p>\n

Her age hasn\u2019t slowed her down. If anything, it has sharpened her sense of urgency and delight. At Petzel\u2019s Chelsea gallery, Ducrot is presenting a new body of works in \u201cVisited Lands<\/a>,\u201d including eight large-scale paintings of ethereal landscapes that use pigment ground from meteorites on her favorite Gampi paper. The exhibition also features her \u201cProfusion\u201d (year) series of floral still-lifes. \u201cThe Japanese paper I used is very symbolic; it looks very frail, but in reality, it is strong,\u201d she said. \u201cLet\u2019s hope that our bella terra [\u201cbeautiful land\u201d] should have similar qualities to the marvelous Gampi paper.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ducrot\u2019s life story proves the maxim that it\u2019s never too late. The artist herself is a model of persistence. Over the past four decades, Ducrot has created a body of work that invites us to examine the world more closely: how it moves, recurs, and affects us. That sustained attention, without recognition, takes nerve. \u201cCourage has been a kind of trance,\u201d she said. \u201cI transformed things, and the things were mostly textiles, and textiles were interesting.\u201d It was only through that slow, deliberate transformation\u2014of materials and of herself\u2014that she came to a realization: \u201cThe result was that I had to admit to being an artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Early life in Naples<\/p>\n

\"Isabella\"Isabella<\/p>\n

Ducrot was born in Naples in 1931 and spent her childhood in a city shaped by the chaos of World War II. During the Fascist era, before Allied bombings tore through the city, she lived in a palazzo with her family\u2014her father, a lawyer, and her mother, a stylish and enigmatic figure. When the bombs came, they fled to nearby Sorrento and lived in the servants\u2019 quarters of a villa owned by an exiled Russian princess. Reflecting on her wartime experiences, Ducrot explained, \u201cGenerally speaking, we Neapolitans live as we will die one day\u201d\u2014not recklessly, but with the understanding that life is always lived in the shadow of its eventual end. \u201cThe brutality of life\u2019s style was my university,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

As a teenager, Ducrot was diagnosed with tuberculosis. In midcentury Naples, the illness was both feared and stigmatized, and she was kept from many of the social rites of girlhood\u2014dancing, swimming, flirtation. For nearly eight years, she lived with the illness as a secret, immersing herself in books and solitude. \u201cTuberculosis has been a medium for an experience that changed my destiny,\u201d she recalled, noting that it \u201cforced a different routine: rest, solitude, and books.\u201d <\/p>\n

How Ducrot started to paint<\/p>\n

\"\"\"Isabella<\/p>\n

Portrait of Isabella Ducrot in her studio. Photo by Claire de Virieu. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York.<\/p>\n

Ducrot moved to Rome in her early thirties, seeking a new life. There, she married Vicky Ducrot, a worldly and pragmatic man. With him, she traveled across India, China, Laos, and Yemen, where she collected antique textiles. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe familiarity with silks, cotton, woolen pieces offered me a kind of knowledge, a dictionary, a grammar to understand the quality and preciousness of old textiles,\u201d said Ducrot. \u201cThe markets of the Eastern countries of the world offered an incredible opportunity to learn more and more.\u201d<\/p>\n

After years of collecting textiles, Ducrot was encouraged to pursue creative endeavors by friends like Italian artists Tatiana Franchetti and Giosetta Fioroni<\/a>. Ducrot\u2019s first large-scale painting came in her fifties: a loose, expressive ink drawing of two reclining lovers, dashed off on an enormous piece of Chinese paper. \u201cI had received a very, very large sheet of Chinese paper, for the first time, and I felt that the sheet required an appropriately large gesture,\u201d she told Artsy. \u201cIn a few minutes, I realized the drawing: surprise, satisfaction, joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Materials, repetition, and tenderness<\/p>\n

\"Isabella\"Isabella<\/p>\n

Ducrot\u2019s materials are modest but specific. Gampi paper, long used to preserve manuscripts, is what she uses for most works, selected for its deceptive delicacy and tensile strength. Onto it she applies swaths of ink, watercolor, and sometimes pigment from pulverized meteorites. Her colors are soft but precise: saffron yellows, moss greens, rust reds.<\/p>\n

Repetition, for Ducrot, is part of her practice. \u201cA kind of familiarity with the same subject is very strong in me\u2014I enjoy fixed habits and I love repetition,\u201d she said. This is evident in her numerous series. For instance, her \u201cProfusion\u201d series features several still lifes of vases exploding with colorful flower arrangements. Meanwhile, her \u201cTendernesses\u201d series, 11 of which were presented at the Consortium Museum, all feature the same motif: two figures embracing.<\/p>\n

\"Isabella<\/p>\n

\u201cRepetition can change the quality of a drawing, the substance of a speech, the charm of music,\u201d she said. \u201cI think of repetition as a powerful kind of meditation, a strong medium in religious and poetic and decorative \u2018oeuvres d\u2019art.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Through this motif of two intimate figures, Ducrot\u2019s \u201cTendernesses\u201d distills her ideas about sensuality and human connection. \u201cTenderness is a much more rare and mysterious way to express the need we have to relate with others,\u201d she said. \u201cI strongly feel that tenderness and erotism are two very different ways of expressing our need to be touched by somebody. In a way, when I approach with a long stick, [it\u2019s] with the intention to represent a tender image,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Isabella Ducrot\u2019s golden years<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Portrait of Isabella Ducrot in her studio. Photo by Gina De Bellis. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York.<\/p>\n

Three years ago, Ducrot\u2019s husband died. Her newfound solitude has shaped a new chapter in her work. While her \u201cBella Terra\u201d works depicted sweeping, idyllic landscapes, her newest paintings tilt skyward. These \u201cVisited Lands\u201d works reference their materials, literal fragments of meteorites. <\/p>\n

\"Isabella<\/p>\n

Each of the eight \u201cVisited Lands\u201d paintings illustrates a gnarled tree set under a crescent moon in the right-hand corner. In Visited Land V<\/a> (2025), a black trunk blooms with red and yellow orchid-like flowers, spectral against the dark. These works evoke an intangible mystery, showing how close we are to the wide unknown.<\/p>\n

But Ducrot has never shied away from what she doesn\u2019t know. Though she didn\u2019t begin painting until midlife, her way of moving through the world\u2014attentive, imaginative, unafraid of silence\u2014was always that of an artist. Today, she has surrendered herself to discovery. At 94, she can\u2019t imagine herself any other way. Simply existing, for her, is entangled with making art: \u201cYou speak of the \u2018role of an artist,\u2019 I do not see the difference with the role \u2018to be.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

MR<\/p>\n

\"MR\"<\/p>\n

Maxwell Rabb<\/p>\n

Maxwell Rabb is Artsy\u2019s Staff Writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Maxwell Rabb Portrait of Isabella Ducrot in her studio. Photo by Claire de Virieu. Courtesy the artist…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[5638,648,1032,1033,171,5639,5641,5640,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-4289","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-artist-profiles","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-isabella-ducrot","14":"tag-maxwell-rabb","15":"tag-petzel-gallery","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114725066062235203","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}