Françoise Gilot, artist in the shadow of Picasso, dead at 101
FRANÇOISE Gilot, an accomplished painter whose art was eclipsed by her long and stormy romantic relationship with a much older Pablo Picasso, and who alone among his many mistresses walked out on him, died on Tuesday (Jun 6) at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 101.
The death was confirmed by her daughter Aurelia Engel, who said Gilot had recently been dealing with heart and lung ailments.
“You imagine people will be interested in you?” Gilot quoted a surprised Picasso as saying after she told him that she was leaving him. “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 touched mine so intimately.”
But unlike his two wives and other mistresses, Gilot rebuilt her life after she ended the relationship, in 1953, almost a decade after it had begun despite an age difference of 40 years. She continued painting and exhibiting her work and wrote books.
In 1970, she married Jonas Salk, the American medical researcher who developed the first safe polio vaccine, and lived part of the time in California. Still, it was for her romance with Picasso that the public knew her best, particularly after her memoir, Life with Picasso, written with Carlton Lake, was published in 1964. It became an international bestseller, and so infuriated Picasso that he broke off all contact with Gilot and their two children, Claude and Paloma Picasso.
Gilot’s frank and often-sympathetic account of their relationship – she dedicated the book “to Pablo” – provided much of the material for the 1996 Merchant-Ivory movie, Surviving Picasso, in which she was played by Natascha McElhone, with Anthony Hopkins as Picasso.
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If Gilot’s book sold well, so has her art. With her work in more than a dozen museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, her paintings fetched increasingly higher prices well into her later years.
Marie Françoise Gilot was born into a prosperous family on Nov 26, 1921, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, the only child of Emile Gilot, an agronomist and chemical manufacturer, and Madeleine Renoult-Gilot. Her 19th-century ancestors had owned a couturier house of fashion, whose clientele included Eugenia, the wife of Emperor Napoleon III.
As Gilot described it in Life With Picasso, her first encounter with Picasso, in May 1943, was accidental. She was dining with her closest friend, Geneviève Aliquot, and an actor, Alain Cuny, in Le Catalan, a small restaurant on the rue des Grands-Augustins, near Picasso’s Left Bank studio. Picasso was at another table accompanied by his mistress at the time, the Surrealist photographer Dora Maar.
Picasso asked Cuny to introduce him to the two young women. Learning that both were painters, he invited them to visit his studio. They did so together the following day and several more times before Geneviève returned to her home in southern France. Gilot continued to visit Picasso, seemingly fearless of his growing attraction to her.
She spent much of that summer with Geneviève in Provence. But in the winter of 1944 her relationship with Picasso blossomed. She was 22; he was 62. She later recalled lying naked by his side. “He was very gentle,” she wrote, “and that is the impression that remains with me to this day – his extraordinary gentleness.”
She gave birth to Claude in May 1947 and Paloma in April 1949. She also continued painting, adopting a colorful abstract style associated with the postwar School of Paris rather than imitating Picasso. In April 1952, she had a well received exhibition in Paris. But by then Picasso had been traveling to southern France without her and made little secret of his new affairs.
Finally, on Sept 20, 1953, unwell and unhappy, Gilot told Picasso that she was going to leave him.
“No woman leaves a man like me,” he replied, according to her account in “Life With Picasso.” She wrote: “I told him maybe that was the way it looked to him, but I was one woman who would, and was about to. A man as famous and as rich as he? He couldn’t believe it, he said.”
Gilot had a brief affair with a Greek philosopher, Kostas Axelos, but remained in contact with Picasso, even informing him of her decision in 1955 to marry a childhood friend, Luc Simon, a French artist. Her daughter Aurelia was a product of that marriage before it ended in divorce in 1962, a year after Picasso married Jacqueline Roque, his second wife.
Gilot’s final rupture with the artist was over Life With Picasso. His friends attacked her over the memoir, and so did the French Communist Party. Picasso himself made three vain attempts to prevent the book from being published in France. Then he refused to see Claude and Paloma again, apparently keeping his word until his death in 1973.
By then, Gilot had married Salk, shuttling between a home in the La Jolla section of San Diego and her studio in southern France. In 1975, she published a new book, Interface: The Painter and the Mask, a memoir of her life as an artist. The next year she became chairwoman of the fine arts department at the University of Southern California, a post she held until 1983.
In addition to Engel, she is survived by Claude Picasso, the director of Picasso Administration, which manages the artist’s estate; by Paloma Picasso, the fashion and jewelry designer best known for her perfumes; and four grandchildren.
After Salk’s death in 1995, Gilot made her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in an apartment that doubled as a studio – “an airy refuge with barrel-vaulted ceilings, towering bookcases and an outsize window that bathes her canvases in a cool north light,” Ruth La Ferla wrote in the 2022 Times profile.
Asked by La Ferla if she had ever felt competitive with Picasso or his friends – among them Chagall, Braque, Matisse and Giacometti – Gilot replied: “That never entered my mind. I started painting, after all, at 3 years old. As a child, you aren’t thinking in terms of me, me, me. You are not capable of that.”
But she acknowledged that those 20th century masters had an inevitable impact. They “helped me grow,” she said, and by their very attention instilled in her a measure of self-confidence.
“I realised,” she said, “if they are so great, then I am not so small.” NYTIMES
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