She did what Pablo Picasso's women were not used to doing. She planted it.
“No woman leaves a man like me”, she says that he told her, according to Françoise Gilot in her book 'Life with Picasso'. "Do you imagine that people will be interested in you?" She questioned him after hearing the decision she had made. “They will never really do it just for you. Even if you think they like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity that they will have about a person whose life intimately touched mine, ”insisted the spiteful man, deeply hurt by his self-esteem.
Time takes away and gives reason. Françoise Gilot, the muse who resisted submitting to Picasso and was able to escape her shadow and rebuild her life as an artist and writer, died Tuesday in a Manhattan hospital at the age of 101. Her death was confirmed by her daughter Aurelia Engel, who pointed out that her mother had had heart and lung ailments.
Unlike the two wives and various lovers of the brilliant artist and inveterate chauvinist, Gilot rebuilt her career as a painter and her work was exhibited in museums such as the Metropolitan, the MOMA, in New York, or the Pompiduo in Paris. Some of her paintings were auctioned for more than a million euros, such as 'Paloma à la guitare', sold in 2021 at Sotheby's, and she brought out books that became super sales.
The relationship ended in 1953, after almost a decade, despite a 40-year age difference. They had two children, Paloma and Claude.
Her particular story began in Paris, in May 1943, as she explains in her memoirs. That first meeting, in the middle of World War II and with the French capital occupied, occurred accidentally. She dined with her friend Geneviève Aliquot and the actor Alain Cuny at Le Catalan, a small restaurant on Rue des Grands-Augustins, near where Picasso had her studio. The Spaniard was at his table accompanied by his lover at the time, the surrealist photographer Dora Maar.
Picasso, who knew the actor, approached Cuny and asked him to introduce his two young friends. Knowing that they were both painters, he invited them to visit her workshop. The two went together the next day and several more times, until Aliquot returned to her house in the south of France. But Gilot continued to visit, apparently unafraid of the host's growing attraction.
She spent a good part of the winter in Provence with her friend Aliquot, but in the spring of 1944 her relationship with the man from Malaga blossomed. She was 22 years old and he was 62. She kept the memory of being naked, next to her. "She was very kind and that impression remains with me, the extraordinary kindness of her," she confessed.
Once the liberation of Paris took place, Picasso regained his role as an international star. Meanwhile, Dora Maar was still present, as was his longtime lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Maar began to worry that Gilot would take her place, as happened in May 1946, when she agreed to move in with Picasso.
Emmanuel Guigon, director of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, remarked that Gilot was not the only one who left the author of Guernica contrary to what some maintain. He cited that Fernande Olivier, the painter's first significant sentimental relationship and inspiration for one of 'The Ladies of Avignon', did the same.
However, Gilot was present at a key period in Picasso's career. "He was already famous, but it was from 1944 that he ripped the myth out of him," says Guigon. And Gilot was her partner throughout that period, very volatile for her.
According to the accounts, that time became an era of new happiness for Picasso, in which he portrayed Gilot. And, in turn, that created the feeling that he had won another trophy and started seeing other women.
Claude was born in May 1947 and Paloma in April 1949. Gilot continued to paint, in a colorful abstract style. In April 1952 he opened an exhibition in Paris that was well received by critics. But Picasso was traveling to the south of France without her and didn't keep many secrets about her new lovers. On September 20, 1953, she told him that he was leaving.
When he told her that she couldn't leave him, she wrote her response in her memoirs. “I told him that maybe he saw it that way, but I was a woman who would do it and I was about to do it. A man as famous and rich as him? He couldn't believe it."
The final break came, however, with the writing of 'Life with Picasso', in collaboration with the art critic Carlton Lake, published in 1964, a publishing bombshell. That memoir book provoked an attack by friends and the Communist Party in which the artist was a member.
Picasso himself made three unsuccessful attempts to prevent this volume from seeing the light of day in France. He then refused to see Claude and Paloma again, always from this version, a word that he apparently kept until his death in 1973.
Gilot, born into a prosperous family on November 26, 1921, in Paris, was soon drawn to art, prompted by her mother, Madeleine Renoult. Instead, she remembered her father, Emile Gilot, as an authoritarian who forced her to write with her right hand despite being left-handed. A brilliant student, in 1939 her father sent her to the north of the country to study law.
She participated in anti-German demonstrations and against the French occupation government, and was even arrested. In 1941 she dropped out of law school and concentrated on art. This caused clashes with her father on a regular basis with her father, until she went to live with her grandmother.
Then came “the Picassian period”. After its conclusion, Gilot had a brief affair with the Greek philosopher Kostas Axelos. During those years she maintained contact with the painter, to whom she communicated in 1955 her decision to marry a childhood friend, Luc Simon, a French artist. Her daughter Aurelia is the result of that marriage, which ended in divorce in 1962.
Once the matter of her memoirs occurred, Gilot married Jonas Salk, so her life was divided between her home in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego (California) and her studio in the south of France.
She published a book about her life as an artist in 1975 and became chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, a position she held until 1983.
When Salk passed away in 1995, Gilot took up residence on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but maintained a small studio in Paris, where he continued to work and hold exhibitions in Europe and the United States until 2021. In 2018, he published a book on drawings he did in his travels between 1974 and 1981.
Once he moved to the United States and at the age of more than 40, Gilot refounded his artistic career, remarks Emmanuel Guigon, because his work had a different character from his previous stage, far from the influence of Picasso. In a recent interview, he stated a vital principle: "At my age, sometimes I get tired of life, but I never get tired of painting."
