Prolific French artist Françoise Gilot died at the age of 101 on Tuesday June 6, her daughter Aurelia Engel confirmed. Gilot was suffering from heart and lung problems when she died at Mount Sinai West Hospital in Manhattan. In addition to her widely celebrated artistic practice, Gilot is well known for her decade-long relationship with Pablo Picasso – and is even more revered for leaving him.
Gilot was born in Paris in 1921 to businessman and agronomist Emile Gilot and watercolourist Madeleine Renault-Gilot. She grew up in Neuilly-sur-Seine with her family, and against her father’s wishes she decided at the age of five that she would become an artist, starting art lessons with her mother two years later. . Gilot became estranged from her father during her college years, replacing her international law class with art classes behind her back in the late 1930s before World War II. By 1941, she had completely left the path of law to devote herself to her artistic practice and was introduced to Picasso by a friend in 1943, when she was 22 years old. Gilot gave birth to their son, Claude, in 1947, and their daughter, Paloma, in 1949 – both of whom made frequent appearances in his and Picasso’s work in later years.
Throughout her life, Gilot strongly advocated for her work and legacy to be considered independent of her relationship with male artists, lamenting being called “Picasso’s lover” or “a friend of Matisse”.
“In art, subjectivity is everything; I accepted what [Picasso] did but that didn’t mean I wanted to do the same,” she told the Guardian in a 2016 interview. In 1953, Gilot had left Picasso, who had made little effort to conceal his affairs or tones down his explosive attitude.
Gilot spent much of the 1940s moving from mentor to mentor, dissatisfied with rigid traditionalism but not entirely convinced to give up figuration. During the summer of 1945, Gilot worked exclusively with graphite for its flexibility and depth of development. According Gilot’s archiveswhich were directed by Engel, Gilot’s work shifted in the late 1940s from minimalist pencil-incised gouaches to oil paintings on cardboard, retaining the same intaglio effect as with his additions of graphite.
In the mid-1950s, Gilot began to focus on establishing a recognizable identity throughout his practice. She married French artist Luc Simon and gave birth to her third and last child, Aurelia, in 1956. Gilot had honed her mastery of figurative line drawing and abstract landscapes, securing an exhibition at Galerie Coard in Paris in 1959 and opening the doors internationally. showcases across Europe and North America in the following decade.
Throughout the 1960s, Gilot shuttled between the two continents with multiple opportunities to exhibit or participate in various printmaking workshops, spending time in Greece to consider ancient mythologies in his practice before returning to his roots. in figuration and landscape work. She published her first memoirs, Life with Picassoin 1964 despite Picasso’s Three Attempts to prevent the printing of the manuscript. (A reissue of the book, published in 2019 by the New York Book Reviewdo Hyperallergic‘s list of the ten best books that year.) In 1969, Gilot was introduced to polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk during a visit to La Jolla, California, and the two bonded over a shared love of architecture. Salk and Gilot married in 1970 as she divided her time between Europe and the United States, expanding her practice with additional workshops and exhibitions.
Gilot enjoyed supreme success throughout the 1970s, publishing his second novel, exhibiting his work across the United States in galleries and museums, and teaching studio art classes as a visiting professor at the Department of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California. In the early 70s, Gilot began to explore the abstraction of movement in his work through enlarged canvases and vibrant color fields. His first major retrospective was held at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California in 1979, followed by another retrospective in 1987 at the Picasso Museum in Antibes, France.
After Salk’s death in 1995, Gilot moved to New York, but continued to pursue her passion of seeking inspiration in travel. in 2018, she published a series of sketchbooks documenting his travels to Venice, India and Senegal. She produced work until a few years before her death, producing over eight decades of art, if you consider her childhood endeavors. She was awarded the title Officer of the Legion of Honor by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2010, and his works are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of ArtTHE modern Art Museumand the El Paso Art Museumamong others.
In her introduction to the 2019 reissue of Gilot’s memoirs, American novelist Lisa Alther, a close friend of the artist for many years, recalled Picasso’s threatening words to Gilot when she left him. He suggested that she would never find recognition for her work.
“Fortunately, this grim prediction turned out to be incorrect,” Alther wrote. “Gilot has lived a full life, both professionally and personally. His oeuvre includes over six thousand pieces which are highly sought after when they appear in galleries and at auction… Contrary to Picasso’s grim prediction of Gilot’s dismal future without him, she enjoyed a long life and a successful career, surrounded by children, grandchildren, collectors, dealers, admirers and friends.
