The painter Françoise Gilot, companion of Pablo Picasso from 1946 to 1953, who had pursued a career as a renowned artist after leaving it, died at the age of 101, we learned Tuesday from the Picasso Museum, confirming information from the New York Times. According to the American daily, to which the death was confirmed by Aurelia Engel, daughter of the artist, the latter had recently suffered from "heart and lung diseases."
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Born on November 26, 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine (west of Paris) in a bourgeois family, Françoise Gilot follows in the footsteps of her mother, a watercolorist, to move towards drawing and painting. Once a muse of Pablo Picasso, she was an artist in her own right for more than 60 years, establishing herself as a renowned painter after their separation from works in the collections of the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York.
Brunette, slender, thoughtful, she was only in her twenties when she met the 1943-year-old Spanish painter in 61. The couple had two children, Claude (born 1947) and Paloma (born 1949). She left him in 1953, a first among Picasso's companions. During their life together, the Spanish artist represented her in the guise of the "Flower Woman", radiant, solar, haughty.
"He was not mean but cruel"
In 1964, the publication of his book "Living with Picasso", retracing his life with the artist, met with enormous success (translated into 16 languages, more than a million copies sold). She portrays him as a tyrannical, superstitious and selfish being. "Intellectually, we got along well, humanly, it was hell. He was not mean but cruel, he was masochistic sadism. (...) In the end, my youth became unbearable, and I also changed, "she writes in particular. For her, this relationship was "a prelude to (her) life. Not life." Picasso then tried to ban the work but the justice refused the seizure. Furious, he stops seeing his children. Having become an American citizen, she did not attend his funeral in 1973.
Spending the last years of her life in New York, she was the link between the Paris School of the 1950s and the American scene, exhibiting her paintings, drawings and prints in many museums and private collections in Europe and the United States. In June 2021, one of his paintings, "Paloma à la Guitare" (1965), sold for $1.3 million at auction at Sotheby's.
