Francoise Woimant was a French librarian, archivist and art historian who spent thirty five years at the Cabinet des estampes, the prints department of the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris. As the curator responsible for twentieth century prints, she built up one of the great public collections of modern and contemporary printmaking and did much to make the art of the print better known in France during the second half of the century.
She was born Francoise Adam in Paris on 29 October 1929 and was sometimes known as Francette. She studied at the Ecole nationale des chartes, the French school for archivists and historians, and in 1955 qualified as an archivist palaeographer with a thesis on French trade in Spain during the embassy of the Marquis de Vaureal between 1741 and 1746. Her research took her to the national historical archive in Madrid and the archive of the Indies in Seville in 1958 and 1959.
At the Bibliotheque nationale she took charge of the twentieth century collections of the prints department. She developed those holdings, helped keep the legal deposit of prints alive, and promoted contemporary printmaking through exhibitions, catalogues and lectures. In 1963, still under her maiden name, she catalogued the exhibition La gravure francaise contemporaine. Under her married name she wrote the catalogue of L'estampe contemporaine a la Bibliotheque nationale in 1973, and with Marie-Cecile Miessner she prepared L'estampe aujourd'hui, a 1978 exhibition of five years of new acquisitions.
Her best known work came in 1992 with De Bonnard a Baselitz, estampes et livres d'artistes, an exhibition and a catalogue of more than 450 pages written with Marie-Cecile Miessner and Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and prefaced by the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. It recorded the 40,000 works by some 300 twentieth century artists that had entered the Cabinet des estampes between 1978 and 1988, and it charted the rise of the artist's book as a form in its own right.
She was promoted to chief curator in 1982 and to curator general in October 1993, and she retired the following year. In 1994 the journal Nouvelles de l'estampe marked her departure with a tribute by Laure Beaumont-Maillet entitled Trente-cinq ans au service du Cabinet des Estampes. She was a member of the Comite national de l'estampe, and she was made a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1994. She was also a knight of the Legion of Honour and of the Palmes academiques.
Francoise Woimant died on 7 November 2026 at the age of 97. Her death was announced in Le Figaro by her sister, Anne Petit, together with her nephews and nieces. Her funeral was set for 17 November at the church of Saint-Germain in Compiegne, followed by burial in Soissons.
