Françoise Landowski-Caillet


Françoise Landowski-Caillet was a French pianist and painter.

Biography

Born in Boulogne-Billancourt, Landowski-Caillet was the daughter of the sculptor of Polish origin Paul Landowski and by her mother great-granddaughter of the composer Henri Vieuxtemps, the sister of the composer Marcel Landowski, of the painter Nadine Landowski and of Jean-Maximilien Landowski, who died for France. Born in 1917, having spent a long time in Italy in the 1920s when her father directed the Villa Médicis, she was a pupil of Marguerite Long and pursued a career as an international virtuoso pianist after the war and until the 1970s. She then became a piano teacher at the Conservatoire de Saint-Denis while beginning a second career as a painter. She merged her two artistic expressions in the 1980s by creating concert exhibitions where she played works by composers who had inspired paintings exhibited and projected during concerts - notably around Debussy, Ravel and Mussorgsky. Her repertoire included an important religious dimension, since she began with the Way of the Cross in St. Peter's Church in Brusc and ends, in the early 2000s, with the Way of the Cross of the Church of Lônes, still in Six-Fours-les-Plages. She died in 2007.
She was the wife of Gérard Caillet, French writer, author of several booklets for Marcel Landowski. She was also the mother of the ethnologist Laurence Caillet-Tchang, a Japan specialist, and Elisabeth Caillet-Durieu, a philosopher.