2023-06-06 23:02:14
Time.news – Frenchwoman Francoise Gilot, who died at the age of 101, survived what she called the “hell” of having been the lover and muse of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso to later become a renowned artist in her own right. The Picasso Museum in Paris confirmed her death to AFP, after The New York Times reported that Gilot had passed away following recent heart and lung ailments.
Two of the other women in Picasso’s life died by suicide and two others suffered mental breakdowns. Gilot instead opposed the giant of modern art and was the only woman to leave him of her own free will. “Pablo was the greatest love of my life, but you had to take steps to protect yourself. I did, I left before I was destroyed,” she confided in Janet Hawley’s 2021 book “Artists and Conversation.”
“The others didn’t, they clung to the mighty Minotaur and paid a heavy price,” she said, referring to Picasso’s first wife, the ballerina Olga Khokhlova, who fell into depression after he left her; his former teenage lover, Marie-Therese Walter, who hanged herself; his second wife Jacqueline Roque, who shot herself; and his most famous muse, the artist Dora Maar, who suffered a nervous breakdown.
© JEAN-PIERRE MULLER / AFP
Francoise Gilot nel 2004
The painter of “Guernica” was, he said, “amazingly creative, a magician, so intelligent and seductive … But he was also very cruel, sadistic and ruthless to others, as well as to himself.” Gilot was 21 and a budding painter when she first met Picasso, who was 40 years her senior and married to Russian ballerina Khokhlova, in occupied France during World War II.
At the time of the meeting she was also the lover of the French photographer, painter and poet Maar. The meeting took place in a Parisian restaurant in the spring of 1943 when he brought to her table a bowl of cherries and an invitation to visit his studio. Lovers for 10 years, they never married but had two children, a son, Claude, born in 1947, and a daughter, Paloma, in 1949.
Picasso often painted her, portraying her as the radiant and haughty ‘Woman-Flower’ in 1946. In ‘Femme assise’ (1949), sold at auction in London in 2012 for £8.5 million, he portrayed her heavily pregnant with Paloma. In 1948, photographer Robert Capa captured the couple on a beach, with Picasso playing in the sand with his son, dutifully casting a shadow over Gilot’s head.
#muse #survived #Picasso #died