2023-06-07 15:42:00
The woman who dumped Picasso
The painter Françoise Gilot (1921–2023)
Source: dpa
Françoise Gilot became famous because she separated from the self-proclaimed heartthrob – and wrote a bestseller about the time they spent together. But she was also an artist in her own right. Now she has died at the age of 101.
Dhe entry in the history books is due to Françoise Gilot simply because she was the one who left Picasso. That Pablo Picasso who usually discarded his numerous muses, lovers and wives and replaced them with new, younger women at his side. In Gilot’s now 101-year-old life, Picasso, the decade with him, is only one episode left.
Françoise Gilot, too, once came across the painter, sculptor, artist of the century, bon vivant and macho as a so-called “muse”. She succeeded Dora Maar, who in turn succeeded Marie-Thérèse Walter, who in turn competed with Picasso’s first wife Olga Khokhlova. She was followed in 1953 by Picasso’s later and last wife Jacqueline Roque – this is noted for the sake of chronology.
Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, west of Paris, in 1921, Françoise Gilot entered the scene in 1943 and endured it for a decade. Then she actually dumped him. Who would have dared before and after? (To put it soberly, Picasso ended up being a good match too.) Gilot, however, holds a curious record: She is even considered the only woman ever to have actively ended a love affair with the artist.
Their children, Claude (born 1947) and Paloma (born 1949), came from the ten years of togetherness. Ultimately, Gilot emerged from the toxic relationship as the stronger. She described her “life with Picasso” in a book that was first published in 1964 and republished in 2019, which did not exactly help to improve the mood between the escaped and the abandoned. “Do you think people will be interested in you?” Picasso is said to have asked her. “They never will be, just because of you.”
Picasso raged because he couldn’t get the book banned. It became a bestseller, accompanied by a legal war – which also led to numerous galleries, allegedly under pressure from Picasso, taking his side. It didn’t hurt Gilot’s career. Luckily Gilot was an artist herself, even before she went to the side of a man who was forty years her senior. Not just out of inclination, but trained at the Nouvelle École de Paris. She soon set up a studio and organized her first exhibitions. However, she left drawing and painting – mainly with watercolors – in favor of the family. And when she started doing it again after the breakup, Picasso is said to have done everything in her power to prevent her from getting exhibitions in any art gallery in Paris. That’s the legend.
Almost until the end of her long life, Gilot worked, achieved considerable success in the art market and left behind an oeuvre of her own: in the form of drawings, watercolours, gouaches, also oil paintings – and a series of enchanting sketchbooks. She discovered the format on her travels from New York around the world. In 1970, Gilot had married New York virologist Jonas Salk, who had discovered the polio vaccine for polio, and they remained together until his death in 1995.
During many trips together (Gilot particularly liked to draw on the plane) in the 1970s and 1980s, the travel diaries “La Salute, Venice”, “Music in Senegal” and “Indian Soul” were created. The Venetian book is the largest and most comprehensive of the three and includes typical Venice motifs – drawings of gondolas, colored poles, Gothic tracery, musicians on St. Mark’s Square. Mixed in between are poems, sayings, words and scraps of words as well as diary entries. “Venice sinks into the lagoon, so the beauty is extinguished like a reflection of light in the rays of the setting sun,” it says at the end of the notebook. The first in a series of direct and personal artist books. “I think sketchbooks are perfect in themselves,” said Françoise Gilot, summing up this art genre, to which she had a particular passion. “For me, these little books are like steps to freedom.”
In 1990, Françoise Gilot was admitted to the French Legion d’honneur and has been honored with many exhibitions since 2000. She owes her fame to the persistence with which she told her story with her life partner. A feminist company that has been instrumental in critically evaluating Picasso. Gilot died in Manhattan on June 6th.
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