When Françoise Gilot first met Pablo Picasso one afternoon in May 1943 — he spotted her at Le Catalan restaurant in Paris and brought her a bowl of cherries — he laughed when she told him that she was a painter, too.
“That is the funniest thing I’ve heard all day,” said the graying demigod of the art world. “Girls who look like you can’t be painters.”
At 21, Gilot indeed exuded youth and a dark beauty, but the 62-year-old Picasso was also attracted by her unapologetic manner and her sharp, independent mind. Across the marbled floor sat the surrealist photographer Dora Maar, Picasso’s dining companion and lover of the moment — he was still married to the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, and would remain so until her death in 1955. Maar glared at the woman who would soon replace her as Picasso’s paramour and muse.
The next week Gilot visited Picasso at his studio at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins and a few days later Picasso dropped in at the gallery where Gilot’s first exhibition was being held. That a romance evolved owed more, Gilot later said, to the Second World War and the absence of any men her age than to any natural attraction to a man 40 years her senior. “It was not a time like any other,” she recalled. “It was a time when everything was lost; a time of death. So: do I want to do something before I die or not? You have to seize it.”
The relationship was never sentimental — she once described it as a “catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid” — but it was creative and intellectually stimulating; Picasso encouraged her to study Cubism and his style permeated her paintings, which used blocks of saturated color. Picasso, in turn, produced thousands of paintings and drawings of his young muse, often depicting Gilot in cool blues and olive greens. She appeared as a bowl of cherries, an inelegant flower, a knight in armor, “and when there’s a lobster,” she said, “that’s me, too, because he always said I had the bones outside to protect myself.”
During the ten-year relationship she was continually harassed by the jealous Khokhlova, and Picasso was emotionally and physically abusive. When Gilot once enjoyed a seaside trip without him, he afterwards held a lit cigarette to her right cheek, later painting the scar in his 1946 portrait of her, Femme au collier jaune. By way of apology he introduced her to one of her greatest inspirations, Matisse. Other acquaintances included Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau and Alice B Toklas, who took a sharp dislike to her.
In the late 1940s Gilot became restless and Picasso persuaded her that a child would settle her down. In 1947 she gave birth to a son, Claude, followed two years later by a daughter, Paloma, but she hated being pregnant and Picasso complained that their lives had become too staid.
“Girls who look like you can’t be painters.”
“I still thought that maybe in him love and tenderness would come to dominate the other parts of himself,” she recalled. “I wanted to give him everything he could possibly want, because I loved him very much.”
By the early 1950s his capricious moods and casual cruelty had become unbearable and he had taken other lovers. When, in September 1953, Gilot decided to leave him, Picasso set about alienating her from Paris’s art world and tried to persuade dealers not to buy her work. “You imagine people will be interested in you?” he told her. “They won’t ever, really, just for yourself. Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life has touched mine so intimately.”
Yet Gilot’s paintings continued to sell. She viewed her break from Picasso as the beginning of her “real life” as a successful artist and went on to produce more than 6,000 drawings, paintings and ceramics. “I said watch out, because I came when I wanted to, but I will leave when I want,” recalled Gilot, the only lover to have voluntarily left Picasso. “He said, nobody leaves a man like me. I said, we’ll see.”
She was born Marie Françoise Gilot in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy Parisian suburb, in 1921, the only child of Émile Gilot, an agronomist and chemical manufacturer, and Madeleine (née Renoult), a ceramicist and watercolor painter. Her father, who longed for a son, was a volatile figure who in the 1940s refused to co-operate with the Nazis. Françoise was homeschooled until the age of ten, and though naturally left-handed, her father forced her to write with her right hand.
Her early years were privileged but lonely, and in art she discovered a world “in which I could express myself in a way that made sense to me”. Her mother taught her to paint and took her on regular trips to the Louvre. Her father, however, wanted her to become a lawyer, and after a degree at the Sorbonne in philosophy followed by a year studying English literature at Cambridge, she enrolled in a law school in Rennes, a city northwest of Paris.
After the Germans invaded Paris she was briefly detained by French police for laying flowers on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which commemorated the 1918 Armistice. Afterwards her name was added to a list of young “hostages”, some of whom were later executed by the Nazis, and for a time she reported to the local police station every day to sign a form.
In 1942 Gilot dropped out of law school and enrolled at the Académie Ranson, an art school on the Left Bank. “Officially” she was her father’s secretary and a fashion designer, a career the Germans considered politically benign, but she began secretly to paint under the tutelage of Endre Rozsda, the Hungarian-French surrealist. When her father found out he beat her and tried to have her committed to a psychiatric ward, and she moved in with her grandmother.
Most of Gilot’s early work was destroyed when a truck of family heirlooms was bombed, but not before she had developed a style partly influenced by the colorful abstractions of Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Léger. Exhibitions were subject to the scrutiny of German officers and if she wanted to make a “statement”, she recalled, she had to do so discreetly, using symbols for the general public to decode.
She viewed her break from Picasso as the beginning of her “real life” as a successful artist.
Gilot was small and slender, with pale, waxy skin, intense green eyes and cropped hair. Often she wore red “as a kind of protection, an affirmation of character”, she said. “It allows me to show myself the way I want to be seen.”
After leaving Picasso and Paris in the 1950s she bought a studio in Chelsea and then moved to America, where most of her collectors were based. In 1962 she divorced her first husband, Luc Simon, a French artist, and in California met Dr Jonas Salk, an American virologist who invented the first polio vaccine. When he proposed she initially refused, and he asked her to write down the reasons why. The list included: “I can’t live more than six months with one person” and “I’m not always in the mood to talk. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” He found the list “quite congenial” and they were married in 1970.
Salk died in 1995 and she is survived by Paloma, a jewelry designer, Claude, a photographer, and a daughter from her first marriage, Aurélia, who manages her archives.
Gilot’s bestselling memoir, Life with Picasso, written with the American journalist Carlton Lake and published in 1964, caused a stir for its frank depiction of the irascible artist (who lost three lawsuits to stop its publication and then cut all ties with their children). In 1990, more than a decade after his death, she wrote another bestseller about Picasso’s relationship with Matisse and was also made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur; in 2012 she helped to curate the first joint exhibition of her and Picasso’s work at the Gagosian gallery in Manhattan. “Gilot will talk expansively about Picasso,” observed Emma Brockes, who interviewed her for The Guardian, “but not until she has established him as a single element in a remarkable life.”
Gilot never stopped painting. In 2021 she celebrated her 100th birthday with a solo exhibition in Hong Kong, and her 1965 painting Paloma à la Guitare, a portrait of her daughter, sold for $1.3 million in an online auction by Sotheby’s. She spent her final years trying to buy back her own paintings, many of which hung proudly in her New York apartment. She never owned a Picasso.
Françoise Gilot, painter and ceramist, was born on November 21, 1921, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. She died on June 6, aged 101
