Françoise Gilot, acclaimed artist who loved and then left Pablo Picasso, died at 101

NEW YORK (AP) — Françoise Gilot, a prolific and acclaimed painter who produced art for more than half a century but was nevertheless most famous for her tumultuous relationship with Pablo Picasso — and for leaving him — died Tuesday in New York, where she had lived for decades. She was 101 years old.

Gilot’s daughter, Aurelia Engel, told The Associated Press that her mother died at Mount Sinai West Hospital after suffering from lung and heart problems. “She was an extremely talented artist, and we will be working on her legacy and the incredible paintings and works she leaves us,” Engel said.

French-born Gilot had long expressed frustration that despite the praise for her art, which she produced from her teenage years until five years ago, she would still be best known for her relationship with the elder Picasso, whom she met in 1943 at age 21, four decades her junior.

The union produced two children – Claude and Paloma Picasso. But unlike the other key women in Picasso’s life – wives or lovers – Gilot ended up getting out.

“He never saw it coming,” Engel said of his mother’s departure. “She was there because she loved him and because she really believed in this incredible passion for art that they both shared. (But) she came as a free person, although very, very young, but very independent.

Gilot herself told The Guardian newspaper in 2016 that “I was not a prisoner” in the relationship.

“I went there of my own free will, and I left of my own free will,” she said, then 94. “That’s what I told him once, before I left. I said: ‘Careful, because I came when I wanted, but I’ll leave when I wanted.’ He said: ‘No one leaves a man like me.’ I said, ‘We’ll see.’ ”

Gilot wrote several books, the most famous of which is “Life with Picasso”, written in 1964 with Carlton Lake. An angry Picasso sought in vain to ban its publication. “He attacked her in court and he lost three times,” said Engel, 66, a trained architect who now manages his mother’s archive. But, she says, “after the third loss, he called her and said his congratulations. He fought, but at the same time, I think he was proud to have been with a woman who had as much guts as he did.”

Born on November 26, 1921 in the leafy Neuilly-sur-Seine in the Paris suburbs, Gilot was an only child. “She knew at the age of five that she wanted to be a painter,” Engel said. In accordance with her parents’ wishes, she nevertheless studied law, while keeping art as her true passion. She exhibited her paintings for the first time in 1943.

It was the year she met Picasso, by chance, when she and a friend visited a restaurant on the Left Bank, in the midst of a gathering that included his then partner, Dora Maar.

“I was 21 and I felt that painting was already my whole life”, she writes in “Life with Picasso”. When Picasso asked Gilot and his friend what they did, the friend replied that they were painters, to which Picasso replied, Gilot wrote, “It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard all day. Girls who look like that can’t be painters. The two were invited to visit Picasso in his studio and the relationship quickly began.

Shortly after leaving Picasso in 1953, Gilot reunited with an old friend, the artist Luc Simon, and married him in 1955. They had a daughter – Engel – and divorced in 1962. In 1970 Gilot married married Jonas Salk, the American virologist and researcher. famous for his work on the poliomyelitis vaccine, and began living between California and Paris, then New York. Upon his death in 1995, Gilot moved full-time to New York and spent his final years on the Upper West Side.

His art has only increased in value over the years. In 2021, his “Paloma à la Guitare” (1965) sold for $1.3 million at a Sotheby’s auction. His work has been exhibited in many important museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. His life with Picasso was illustrated in the 1996 film “Surviving Picasso”, directed by James Ivory.

Simon Shaw, Sotheby’s Vice President for Global Fine Art, said it had been gratifying to see Gilot’s paintings over the past decade “gain the recognition they truly deserved”.

“To see Françoise as a muse (for Picasso) is to miss the point,” Shaw wrote in an email. “She was established in her journey as a painter when she first met Pablo. While her work entered into a natural dialogue with his, Françoise pursued a path fiercely her own — her art, like her character, was filled with color, energy and joy.

Engel noted that although the relationship with Picasso was clearly difficult, it gave his mother a certain freedom from her parents and the constraints of a bourgeois life – and perhaps allowed her to pursue her true dream of being a professional painter, a passion she shared with Picasso above all.

“They both believed that art was the only thing worth doing in life,” she said. “And she was able to be herself, even though it wasn’t an easy life with him. But she was still able to be herself.

And for Engel, his mother’s key legacy was not just her creativity but her courage, reflected in her art, which was always changing, never remaining secure.

“She wasn’t fearless. But she would always face her fears and jump into the void and take risks no matter what,” Engel said.