The painter and writer Françoise Gilot has died at the age of 101. © Wolfgang Thieme/dpa
Françoise Gilot was Picasso's muse, lover and supposedly the only woman ever to leave the art giant of the 20th century. But she was also a renowned painter and writer herself.
New York/Paris - The painter Françoise Gilot, who was also the partner and muse of the artist Pablo Picasso for many years, has died. Gilot died at the age of 101, US media reported, citing her daughter Aurelia Engel. Gilot had been suffering from heart and lung problems for a long time and died in a hospital in Manhattan, it said.
Born in 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a middle-class suburb west of Paris, Gilot set up a studio with her grandmother as a young woman and organized her first exhibitions. Her mother was a watercolor painter, her father a successful and authoritarian businessman who had actually wanted his daughter to study law.
She left the Picasso
In 1943 Gilot met Picasso, who was about 40 years his senior. The first three years with Picasso were the best, because they only saw each other twice a month, the painter once told the weekly newspaper "Paris Match". The couple had children Claude and Paloma. But Picasso was always more decisive, dominant and capricious, made life difficult for the people around him and wanted to limit them, Gilot later described.
Gilot left Picasso in 1953 - she is considered the only woman who has ever left the art giant of the 20th century. "Do you think people will be interested in you?" Picasso asked her. "They never will be, just because of you."
Leaving Picasso was tantamount to an insult to majesty, said the literary scholar and biographer of Gilot, Annie Maïllis, who made the documentary "Pablo Picasso & Françoise Gilot - The Woman Who Says No" together with Sylvie Blum, in an interview.
Bestseller: "Life with Picasso"
Gilot later had a brief marriage to the painter Luc Simon, from whom daughter Aurelia came. She then moved to New York and in 1970 married Jonas Salk, the discoverer of the polio polio vaccine, with whom she remained together until his death in 1995.
About her relationship with Picasso, Gilot wrote the book "Life with Picasso" in the 60s. Picasso is said to have raged because, despite numerous efforts, he could not have it banned. The work became a bestseller, accompanied by a legal feud - which also led to numerous galleries, allegedly under pressure from Picasso, taking his side, which damaged Gilot's artistic career.
But the painter worked until the end of her life - and eventually managed to gain recognition in the art world. In recent years, there have been several exhibitions of her work and expensive sales of individual pieces. On the occasion of her 100th birthday, the US media even celebrated her as an "It-Girl". But Gilot was always modest. "I'm not going to make a big deal out of it and make myself more than I am," she told the New York Times last year. "Or to less." dpa