Françoise Gilot walked out on Picasso, then painted for another seven decades
Most of Picasso's partners were left by him. Françoise Gilot did the leaving, then published a bestselling memoir of their decade together over his objections. She went on painting until she was past 100, leaving roughly 1,600 canvases and 3,600 works on paper when she died in 2023.
Gilot was born on 26 November 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine to Émile Gilot, a businessman and agronomist, and Madeleine Renoult, who painted in watercolour. Her father forced the left-handed four-year-old to write with her right hand, and she grew up ambidextrous. At five she settled on becoming a painter, and her mother began teaching her the following year. A home education gave her a grasp of Greek mythology by six, and by fourteen she was reading Poe, Baudelaire and Jarry.
Her father wanted a lawyer. In 1939 she was sent to Rennes to study law, partly for fear that Paris would be bombed, but at 19 she dropped it for art, taking private lessons with the Hungarian Jewish refugee painter Endre Rozsda and classes at the Académie Julian. She failed her oral law exams in 1942. During the war a truck carrying the family's valuables was bombed, destroying her early drawings and watercolours.
She met Picasso at 21. Their partnership lasted ten years and produced two children, and while cubism left its mark, she steered away from his hard angles towards organic shapes. After a first major Paris show in 1943 she was signed by the dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, one of only two women he ever took on, and exhibited at his Galerie Louise Leiris in 1952. Her Labyrinth Series of 1961 to 1963, mixing Greek myth, private symbolism and circus imagery, was painted while she wrote Life with Picasso (1964).
Later decades took her abroad. She became art director of the Virginia Woolf Quarterly in 1973, taught at the University of Southern California from 1976 to 1983, and designed costumes, sets and masks for Guggenheim productions in the 1980s and 1990s. Prices climbed: a 1965 portrait of her daughter, Paloma à la Guitare, fetched $1.3 million at Sotheby's in London in 2021. The Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College holds more than 270 of her works. She died in New York on 6 June 2023, aged 101.
Source: Françoise Gilot
