Françoise Gilot, who died on Tuesday at the age of 101 and who was Pablo Picasso’s companion from 1946 to 1953, established herself as a renowned painter after their separation, definitively drawing a line under this turbulent past.
Once Picasso’s muse, she was an artist in her own right for over 60 years. In June 2021, one of his paintings, Paloma on Guitar (1965), for example, sold for $1.3 million at auction at Sotheby’s. She made the link between the Paris school of the 1950s and the American scene, exhibiting her paintings, drawings or prints in many museums and private collections, in Europe and the United States. She had also illustrated books by Eluard or Prévert.
Picasso, his hero
Referring to her seven years of living together with the painter, she compared herself to Joan of Arc: “You had to wear armor from morning to night, prove your strength 24 hours a day. We were very mismatched”. Having become an American citizen, she did not go to her funeral in 1973.
Born November 26, 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine (west of Paris) into a bourgeois family, she followed in the footsteps of her mother, a watercolourist, to move towards drawing and painting. Dark, slender, thoughtful, she was 22 when she met Picasso, then 61 years old and lover of Dora Maar. He invited her to come and see his studio in May 1943 and courted her eagerly. The man who painted Guernica is a hero to her. She also finds him brave to have stayed in Paris when he could have gone into exile in the United States.
Perhaps more fascinated by his extraordinary presence than truly in love, Françoise Gilot followed him to Paris and Vallauris, living with him from 1946. The couple had two children, Claude (born in 1947) and Paloma (born in 1949) . During their life together, the artist represents her under the appearance of the “Flower Woman”, radiant, sunny, haughty.
“Not mean but cruel”
In 1953, she decided to leave him – a first among Picasso’s companions – and resume her painting, opting for an increasingly colorful minimalism. He will need a lot of character to devote himself to his own work when Picasso could have made short work of his artistic pretensions.
In 1964, she published Living with Picasso, a relatively intimate book about his life with the artist, which has met with enormous success (translated into 16 languages, more than a million copies sold). She depicts him as a tyrannical, superstitious and selfish being. For her, this relationship was “a prelude to (her) life. Not life”.
“Intellectually, she says, we got along well, humanly, it was hell. He wasn’t mean but cruel, it was masochistic sadism. (…) In the end, my youth became unbearable to him, and I changed too”.
The painter’s entourage then speaks of opportunism and Picasso’s friends move away from her. The latter tries to have the book banned but the justice refuses the seizure. Furious, he then stops seeing his children.
End of life in New York
Françoise Gilot also wrote a book on the relations, not simple, between Matisse and Picasso (1991). Matisse who, unlike Picasso, made those around him happy, called him “Saint Françoise”.
She then married the painter Luc Simon, with whom she had a daughter, Aurélia. In 1970, she married the eminent doctor Jonas Salk, a pioneer in poliomyelitis vaccination, with whom she lived until his death in 1995, in California.
Beyond the vicissitudes of life, Françoise Gilot never sacrificed her artistic work, which she pursued with passion until very old age. She spent the last years of her life in New York.