The French painter Françoise Gilot is dead. She died at the age of 101, according to US media, citing her daughter Aurelia Engel. Gilot, who was also the partner and muse of artist Pablo Picasso, had long suffered from heart and lung problems and died Tuesday in a Manhattan hospital.
Born in 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a middle-class suburb west of Paris, Gilot set up a studio with her grandmother as a young woman and organized her first exhibitions. Her mother was a watercolor painter, her father a successful and authoritarian businessman who actually wanted his daughter to study law.
In 1943 Gilot met Picasso, who was about 40 years his senior. The first three years with Picasso were the best, because they only saw each other twice a month, the painter once told the weekly newspaper Paris match. The couple had children Claude and Paloma. But Picasso became more and more assertive, dominant and moody, made life difficult for the people around him and wanted to restrict them, Gilot later described the painter.
In 1953 Gilot separated from Picasso – she is considered the only woman who has ever left the art giant of the 20th century. “Do you think people will be interested in you?” Picasso then asked her. “They will never be, only because of you.” The separation was tantamount to an insult to majesty, said the literary scholar and Gilot biographer Annie Maïllis in an interview.
Francoise Gilot poses in her studio in 1953.
(Photo: AFP)
Gilot later had a brief marriage to the painter Luc Simon, who had a daughter, Aurelia. She then moved to New York and in 1970 married Jonas Salk, the discoverer of the polio vaccine against polio. She remained with him until his death in 1995.
Celebrated as an “It Girl” for her 100th birthday
In the 1960s, Gilot wrote the book “Life with Picasso” about her relationship with Picasso. He is said to have raged because, despite numerous efforts, he could not have it banned. The work became a bestseller, accompanied by a small legal war – which also led to numerous galleries, allegedly under pressure from Picasso, taking his side.
This hurt Gilot’s artistic career, but the painter worked until the end of her life – and eventually managed to find recognition in the art world. In recent years there have been several exhibitions of her work and expensive sales of individual pieces. For her 100th birthday, the US media even celebrated her as the “It Girl”. But Gilot was always modest. “I’m not going to make a big deal out of it and I’m going to make myself more than I am,” she said last year New York Times. “Or to less.”