Françoise Gilot, Pablo Picasso’s muse and lover, died Tuesday in Manhattan at the impressive age of 101.
A painter and memoirist in her own right, Gilot spent her life under Picasso’s shadow, and continues to reckon with this complicated legacy after her passing.
Picasso, 40 years her elder, noticed the beautiful Gilot in 1943, at Le Catalan Restaurant, a favorite of Parisian artists, and quickly discarded the older Dora Maar in Gilot’s favor. They were a couple for over a decade – and an extramarital one at that, as Picasso remained legally married to Olga Khokhlova, Charles Darwent notes in his obituary of Gilot for The Guardian.
Gilot’s memoir, Life With Picasso, was published in 1964 and became an international best-seller.
The book contemplates examples of Picasso’s dominant and often stifling personality, and reflects Gilot’s contradictory feelings about Picasso and their relationship – on the one hand, she owed her formation to Picasso – who wanted to subjugate her only as lover and was arguably disinterested in her art. Picasso, infuriated with his portrayal as an abuser in the book, cut ties with Gilot after unsuccessfully attempting to impede the book’s publication, their children (Claude, now director of the Picasso Administration, and Paloma, currently a jewellery and fashion designer), and refused to show in common spaces with her – effectively shutting down her opportunities as a painter, given his formidable influence even during his lifetime.
Some say that Gilot’s version of events negates a reality in which she only gained from Picasso’s influence, before and after their relationship ended. Gilot’s own paintings, characterized by bold lines and playful colors, are striking – and their similarity, or inheritance, from Picasso’s style is difficult to deny. But Gilot was a passionate painter well before meeting Picasso, taking her art to a serious and professional level despite her family’s disapproval, who would have preferred Gilot focus on her Law studies (a discipline she never took to completion, though she graduated from a Philosophy degree at the Sorbonne and read English at Cambridge). Her paintings can now be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Centre Pompidou in Paris, among many other places.
Significantly, she later married Jonas Sark, the American who developed the polio vaccine. As consort of two of the 20th century’s most important men, Gilot quipped: „Lions mate with lions”. Gilot herself seems to have had mixed feelings throughout her life about the public’s focus on the aspects of her social celebrity as opposed to her strictly artistic merits.
A remarkable figure in her own right, interviews with Gilot unsurprisingly lift the veil of legend over a strong personality whose personal charisma remained palpable well into old age.
„You have to admit that most women who do something with their lives have been disliked by almost everyone”, she stated when she was well into her nineties.
Along with Claude and Paloma, Françoise Gilot is survived by her daughter Aurélia, from her marriage to artist Luc Simon before Sark.
