Françoise Gilot, a tireless artist whose output has spanned more than 80 years and has defied simple categorization – and efforts to define her simply as a footnote in the story of her former lover Pablo Picasso – died Tuesday (June 6) in New York. She was 101 years old. His death was confirmed to The New York Times by his daughter, Aurelia Engel, who said Gilot had recently suffered from lung and heart problems.
Gilot was born in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on November 26, 1921 and studied philosophy and law before devoting herself fully to art. The early years of his career coincided with World War II and the Nazi occupation of Paris. During this time she had her first exhibition, at dealer Madeleine Decre’s eighth arrondissement gallery in 1943, and met Picasso, who was 40 years her senior. Her assessment of their ensuing decade-long relationship, published in a 1964 memoir written with journalist Carlton Lake titled Life with Picassoearned Gilot the ire of Picasso’s supporters and ultimately made her a heroic figure in feminist art history.
“Sometimes people like you. Sometimes people don’t,” Gilot said in a 2019 interview with The New York Times Style Magazine. “But you’re not going to shape yourself according to other people’s desires, whether negative or positive, you know?” You must be true to yourself and true to the truth. Those are the only two things that are important. I don’t think I have to be true to what the general public thinks, because then why should I say something they’ve already decided on? »
By the mid-1950s Gilot’s relationship with Picasso had ended – they had two children, Claude and Paloma Picasso – she had married Luc Simon. A few years later, she began exhibiting at the Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris and her work continued to evolve from the cubist mode she explored in the early 1950s to a flattened figurative style characterized by strong geometry and bright colors. .
The following decade, despite the outcry caused by his memoirs, Gilot exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States, notably at the David Findley Gallery in New York, the Galleria Santo Stefano in Venice, the Galleria Dantesca in Turin and the Coard Gallery in Paris. In 1962, she and Simon (Engel’s father) divorced.
In 1970, Gilot married her second and last husband, Jonas Salk, a virologist who developed one of the first polio vaccines. That same year she had her first solo exhibitions in a museum, although many more would follow in the following years. In addition to painting, Gilot continued to pursue printmaking and poetry. In 1972, she published her first artist’s book of prints and poems, on the stone (On the stone), with the Parisian printing workshop Mourlot Atelier. By mid-decade, Gilot’s primary residence was with Salk near San Diego, California, although she spent much of her time traveling for exhibitions and other projects.
Gilot had been based in New York since the early 1980s, while a prodigious cadence of exhibitions took her across the United States and Europe. In 1998, an exhibition at the Elkon Gallery in New York highlighted his works from the 1940s. In 2000, Acatos Publishing published a monograph chronicling his work up to 1940. While earlier work had remained rooted in figuration – whether stylized and streamlined or deconstructed in a cubist vein – in the later decades of Gilot’s career, his paintings became increasingly abstract, defined by organic shapes rendered in vibrant color.
In 2012, Gagosian organized the first exhibition of Gilot’s work alongside that of Picasso, Picasso and Françoise Gilot: Paris-Vallauris 1943-1953, centered on works made during their relationship. The exhibit was developed in part through a collaboration between Gilot and Picasso’s biographer John Richardson, a seemingly unlikely partnership given that Richardson had pored over his memoirs in a 1963 journal for the New York Book Review.
“He had never met me, and then he judged me by things he had heard,” Gilot said of his friendship with Richardson, who had died a few months earlierin 2019 Magazine T interview. “Then when he met me, we became very good friends. What can I say ? A lot of people thought that being against me would make Picasso happy. That’s why they did it. When they saw that “
by Francoise Gilot By Aspera and Astra (1987) was offered at Christie’s New York last month with an estimate of $30,000 to $50,000 The arts journal
Gilot’s work is part of the permanent collections of the Picasso Museum in Antibes, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Women’s Museum in Washington, DC, among others.
Although she spent most of the second half of her life in the United States, Gilot repeatedly received national honors in France. In 1978, she was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Minister of Culture. Eighteen years later, French President Jacques Chirac named her an Officer of the Order of National Merit. And in 2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy named her an officer of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest honour.
“What I really learned in this first phase [of my career]: never belong to a group again, because in a group, some are always the leaders and they always want others to conform, and I am a maverick,” said Gilot FOR WHATis Terry Gross in a meeting in 1988, on the occasion of the release of his book The journey of an artist. “I want to conform only to myself and the deep desires that drive me as an artist, and I don’t care if others go down that path or not. In the end, if I have lived my life as an artist well, my work – which I call “the artist’s journey”, which is a kind of pilgrimage towards my own center, my own being – it is the only thing that matters. And after all, I have enough subscribers as it is, so I think I did the right thing.
