NEW YORK (AP) — Françoise Gilot, a prolific and acclaimed painter who produced art for well more than a half-century but was nonetheless more famous for her turbulent relationship with Pablo Picasso — and for leaving him — died Tuesday in New York City, where she had lived for decades. She was 101.
Gilot’s daughter, Aurelia Engel, told The Associated Press her mother had died at Mount Sinai West hospital after suffering both 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 is leaving us with,” Engel said.
“I’d been there of my own will, and I left of my own will,” she said, then 94. “That’s what I told him once, before I left. I said: ‘Watch out, because I came when I wanted to, but I will leave when I want.’ He said, ‘Nobody leaves a man like me.’ I said, ‘We’ll see.’ ”
Gilot wrote several books, the most famous of which was “Life with Picasso,” written in 1964 with Carlton Lake. An angry Picasso sought unsuccessfully to ban its publication. “He attacked her in court, and he lost three times,” said Engel, 66, an architect by training who now manages her mother’s archives. But, she said, “after the third loss he called her and said congratulations. He fought it, but at the same time, I think he was proud to have been with a woman who had such guts like he had.”
Born on Nov. 26, 1921, in leafy Neuilly-sur-Seine in suburban Paris, 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 studied law, however, while maintaining art as her true passion. She first exhibited her paintings in 1943.
“I was 21 and I felt that painting was already my whole life,” she writes in “Life With Picasso.” When Picasso asked Gilot and her friend what they did, the friend responded that they were painters, to which Picasso responded, Gilot writes: “That’s the funniest thing I’ve 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 soon began.
Not long after leaving Picasso in 1953, Gilot reunited with a former friend, artist Luc Simon, and married him in 1955. They had a daughter — Engel — and divorced in 1962. In 1970, Gilot married Jonas Salk, the American virologist and researcher famed for his work with the polio vaccine, and began living between California and Paris, and later New York. When he died in 1995, Gilot moved full-time to New York and spent her last years on the Upper West Side.
Her art only increased in value over the years. In 2021 her “Paloma à la Guitare” (1965) sold for $1.3 million at a Sotheby’s auction. Her work has shown in many prominent museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Her life with Picasso was illustrated in the 1996 movie “Surviving Picasso,” directed by James Ivory.
“To see Françoise as a muse (to Picasso) is to miss the point,” Shaw wrote in an e-mail. “She was established on her course as a painter when first she met Pablo. While her work naturally entered into dialogue with his, Françoise pursued a course 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 a difficult one, it gave her mother a certain freedom from her parents and the constraints of a bourgeois life — and perhaps enabled her to pursue her true dream of being a professional painter, a passion she shared with Picasso above all else.
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