Françoise Gilot, who died on Tuesday at the age of 101 and who was Pablo Picasso's companion from 1946 to 1953, established herself as a renowned painter after their separation, definitively drawing a line on this turbulent past.

Once Picasso's muse, she was an artist in her own right for more than 60 years. In June 2021, one of his paintings, Paloma à la Guitare (1965), for example, sold for $1.3 million at auction at Sotheby's. She was the link between the Paris School of the 1950s and the American scene, exhibiting her paintings, drawings or prints in many museums and private collections, in Europe and the United States. She had also illustrated books by Eluard and Prévert.

Picasso, his hero

Recalling her seven years of life together with the painter, she compared herself to Joan of Arc: "You had to wear armor from morning to night, prove your strength 24 hours a day. We were very mismatched." Having become an American citizen, she had not attended his funeral in 24.

Born on November 26, 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine (west of Paris) in a bourgeois family, she followed in the footsteps of her mother, a watercolorist, to turn to drawing and painting. Brunette, slender, thoughtful, she was 22 years old when she met Picasso, then 61 years old and lover of Dora Maar. He invited her to visit his studio in May 1943 and made her a hurried courtship. The man who painted Guernica is a hero to her. She also finds him courageous to have remained in Paris when he could have gone into exile in the United States.

Perhaps more fascinated by his extraordinary presence than truly in love, Françoise Gilot followed him to Paris and Vallauris, living with him from 1946. The couple has two children, Claude (born 1947) and Paloma (born 1949). During their life together, the artist represents her in the guise of the "Flower Woman", radiant, solar, haughty.

"Not mean but cruel"

In 1953, she decided to leave it – a first among Picasso's companions – and to resume her painting, opting for an increasingly colorful minimalism. It will take him a lot of character to devote himself to his own work when Picasso could only have made a mouthful of his artistic pretensions.

In 1964, she published Living with Picasso, a relatively intimate book about her life with the artist, which met with enormous success (translated into 16 languages, more than a million copies sold). She portrays him as a tyrannical, superstitious and selfish being. For her, this relationship was "a prelude to (her) life. Not life."

"Intellectually," she says, "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 changed too."

The painter's entourage then spoke of opportunism and Picasso's friends distanced themselves from her. The latter tries to ban the work but the justice refuses the seizure. Furious, he stopped seeing his children.

Later life in New York

Françoise Gilot has also written a book on the relations, not simple, between Matisse and Picasso (1991). Matisse, who, unlike Picasso, made his entourage happy, called her "Sainte Françoise".

She then married the painter Luc Simon, with whom she had a daughter, Aurélia. In 1970, she married the eminent Dr. Jonas Salk, a pioneer in polio vaccination, with whom she lived until his death in 1995 in California.

Beyond the vicissitudes of life, Françoise Gilot never sacrificed her artistic work, which she pursued with passion until old age. She spent the last years of her life in New York.

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