Françoise Gilot

Françoise Gaime Gilot (26 November 1921 – 6 June 2023) was a French painter. Gilot was already an accomplished artist, notably in watercolors and ceramics, when she met Pablo Picasso, but her professional career was eclipsed by her social celebrity. After she split from Picasso, he discouraged galleries from buying her work and unsuccessfully tried to block her 1964 memoir, Life with Picasso, from being published. Picasso At 21, Gilot met Pablo Picasso, then 61. Picasso first saw Gilot in a restaurant in the spring of 1943. Dora Maar, the photographer who was his muse and lover at the time, was devastated to learn that Picasso was replacing her with the much younger artist. After Picasso's and Gilot's meeting, she moved in with him in 1946. They spent almost 10 years together, and those years revolved around art. Picasso painted La femme-fleur, and then his old friend Henri Matisse, who liked Gilot, announced that he would create a portrait of her, in which her body would be pale blue and her hair leaf green. It was believed by some art historians that Gilot's relationship with Picasso is what cut short her artistic career. When she left Picasso, he told all art dealers he knew not to purchase her art, whereas Gilot herself noted that continuing to identify her in relation to Picasso "does her a great disservice as an artist." Picasso and Gilot never married, but they did have two children together because he promised to love and care for them. Their son, Claude, was born in 1947, and their daughter, Paloma, was born in 1949. During their 10 years together, Gilot was often harassed on the streets of Paris by Picasso's legal wife, Olga Khokhlova, a Russian former ballet dancer, and Picasso himself physically abused her as well. In 1964, 11 years after their separation, Gilot wrote Life with Picasso (with the art critic Carlton Lake), a book that sold over one million copies in dozens of languages, despite an unsuccessful legal challenge from Picasso attempting to stop its publication. From then on, Picasso refused to see Claude or Paloma ever again. All the profits from the book were used to help Claude and Paloma mount a case to become Picasso's legal heirs. Gilot's work Gilot was introduced to art at a young age by her mother and grandmother. Her grandmother had held a party when Françoise was about five years old. A certain man caught Gilot's eye as being interesting, and she asked her grandmother who the man was. He turned out to be a painter, Emile Mairet. Gilot's father became close friends with the painter, and Françoise would often tag along to visit his studio. At age six, Françoise's mother began teaching her art, with the exception of drawing. Her mother believed artists become too dependent on erasers and instead taught Françoise in watercolor and India ink. If she made a mistake, she would have to make it intentional to her work. By the age of 13, she began to study with Mlle. Meuge, which continued for six years. At the age of 14, she was introduced to ceramics and a year later, she studied with the Post-Impressionist painter Jacques Beurdeley. At the age of 21, she met Picasso. Although Picasso had influenced Gilot's work as a cubist painter, she developed her own style. She avoided the sharp edges and angular forms that Picasso sometimes used. Instead, she used organic figures. During World War 2, Gilot's father attempted to save the most valuable household belongings by moving them, but the truck was bombed by the Nazis, leading to the loss of Gilot's drawings and watercolors. Her stature as an artist and the value of her work have increased over the years. In 2021 her painting Paloma à la Guitare, a 1965 portrait of her daughter, sold for $1.3 million at Sotheby's in London. As of January 2022 her work is on exhibit in multiple leading museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Pompidou. Personal life From 1943 to 1953, Gilot was the lover and artistic muse of Pablo Picasso, with whom she had two children, Claude and Paloma. Gilot married artist Luc Simon in 1955. Their daughter Aurélia was born the following year. The couple divorced in 1962. In 1969, Gilot was introduced to the American polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk at the home of mutual friends in La Jolla, California. Their shared appreciation of architecture led to a brief courtship and a 1970 wedding in Paris. During their marriage, which lasted until Salk's death in 1995, the couple lived apart for half of every year as Gilot continued to paint in New York City, La Jolla, and Paris. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Gilot designed costumes, stage sets, and masks for productions at the Guggenheim in New York City. In 1973, Gilot was appointed art director of the scholarly journal Virginia Woolf Quarterly.