Controlling the Narrative
Françoise Gilot
“No one is indispensable to anyone else. You imagine you're necessary to him or that he will be very unhappy if you leave him, but I'm sure that if you do, within three months he will have fitted another face into your role and you'll see that no one is suffering because of your absence. You must feel free to do whatever feels best to you. Being someone's nurse is no way to live unless you're unable to do anything else. You have to say something on your own and you ought to be thinking, first and foremost, about that.” — Françoise Gilot, Life With Picasso
In 1943 as occupying German forces began rounding up foreign Jewish people in Paris, Cambridge and Sorbonne-educated Françoise Gilot (1921-2023) accompanied her art teacher, Hungarian-French Surrealist painter Endre Rozsda (1933-1999) to the Gare de l’Est, to wave him off for the perceived safety of Budapest. As his train chugged out of the station, Gilot ran along the platform, calling out after him: “But what am I to do?” Rozsda laughed: “Don’t worry! Who knows? Three months from now, you may meet Picasso!” In her later years, Gilot would come to regard those Delphian words as both a prophecy and a curse. Just weeks later, the 21-year-old Gilot was on a date with actor Alain Cuny (1908-1994), chaperoned by friend and fellow artist Geneviève Aliquot, at Le Catalan on the rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris, a black-market bistro patronised by the Left-Bank avant-garde. Gilot was an arresting presence, fine-boned with intense green eyes and cropped hair, she would often wear red “as a kind of protection, an affirmation of character. It allows me to show myself the way I want to be seen”. Their meal was unexpectedly and abruptly interrupted by a bull-necked Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) (who was, at the time, still married to his first wife, Ballets Russes dancer Olga Khokhlova (1891-1955), and would remain so until her death, just over a decade later), proffering a bowl of cherries by means of an icebreaker; enraptured by Gilot from the moment he first laid eyes on her, the love-struck Spaniard entreated an abashed and bewildered Cuny to introduce them. Typically dismissive and misogynistic, when she told him she was a painter he burst out laughing: “That is the funniest thing I’ve heard all day,” scoffed the ageing Casanova. “Girls who look like you can’t be painters.” At 62, Picasso was old enough to be her father, but the attraction was more than skin deep, as somewhat uncharacteristically, he was charmed by Gilot’s unapologetic manner and unyielding intellect (he would later describe her as the “The Woman Who Says No”). Gilot’s initial ambivalence might be attributable to the fact that she wasn’t in any way intimidated by Picasso’s reputation as an artist; preferring instead the work of Georges Braque (1882-1963), whose constantly evolving and complex geometries left a visible and lasting impression, with much of her oeuvre having distinctly cubist undertones. Somewhat awkwardly, throughout this flirtatious exchange, across the room, at a table with collector and patron of the arts Marie-Laure de Noailles (1902-1970), sat Surrealist photographer and painter Dora Maar (1907-1997), who was not only Picasso’s dinner date for the evening, but also his lover, seething as she sized up the woman who would soon replace her as paramour and muse.
Away from Maar’s reproachful gaze, Gilot accepted an invitation to visit Picasso at his studio in the seventeenth century Hôtel de Savoie, and, a few days later, the Spaniard attended a vernissage at Madame Decre’s gallery where Gilot’s first exhibition was being held. Their burgeoning romance was, to a large extent, down to circumstance; the catalyst, as Gilot would later recall in her memoir, being the happenstance of the Second World War, and the absence of any eligible young men her own age, as opposed to some instant and unquenchable attraction to a man 40 years her senior. Despite warnings from friends and family alike, Gilot felt driven by a breathless sense of urgency that pervaded wartime Paris: “The men who could’ve been interested in me, and me in them, just disappeared. It was not a time like any other,” she opined. “It was a time when everything was lost; a time of death. So: do I want to do something before I die or not? You have to seize it.” As such, from the get-go, it was an unusual relationship, which Gilot matter-of-factly described as “a catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid”. There was very little in terms of sentiment, rather, it was a meeting of the minds, creative, intellectually stimulating, and in terms of artistic output, mutually beneficial to both of their careers. As a founding father of the twentieth-century avant-garde, Picasso encouraged Gilot to study cubism, sharing his influences and inspirations (such as ethnographic and indigenous art) to the extent that, as time went by, his style gradually began to permeate her paintings. On the flip side, Picasso produced, quite literally, thousands of works inspired by his young muse, including not only direct references, in portraits such as Femme dans un fauteuil (1948), Le Coup de Telephone (1952) and Femme Assise en Costume Vert (1953), but also multiple indirect references; for example, she appears as a bowl of cherries, a knight in armour, “and when there’s a lobster,” she said, “that’s me, too, because he always said I had the bones outside to protect myself.” In these early years of their relationship, in stark contrast to the three-quarter views and duelling profiles often seen in his portraiture, seemingly lost in the wilderness of romance, Picasso took pleasure in gazing upon Gilot straight-on, eye-to-eye, face-to-face, her visage becoming the radiant sun, or luminous moon. These works have a Madonna-like appearance, entirely removed from the tormented figures he had been painting prior to their relationship.
Françoise Gilot in her Manhattan atelier (2011), Photograph c/o Sotheby's © Piotr Redlinski
Le Coup de Telephone (1952) by Françoise Gilot, a self-portrait depicting her two children, Claude and Paloma
Over the course of their decade-long affair, Gilot was continually harassed by a jealous Khokhlova, and suffered at the hands of Picasso, who was both emotionally and physically abusive. Indeed despite his relentless and successful pursuit of Gilot, he set out to undermine her at almost every opportunity. “One day,” she wrote, “we were looking at dust dancing in sunlight … [Picasso] said, ‘Nobody has any real importance to me. As far as I’m concerned, people are like those little grains. It takes only a push of the broom and out they go.’” There was one particularly troubling occasion when Gilot went on a trip to Golfe-Juan, near Cannes on the Côte d’Azur, where she remained for over a month, inviting Aliquot to join her. On hearing of her plans to visit the studio of Nabis painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) at Le Cannet, Picasso exploded with rage. “It provoked a great argument between us,” Gilot lamented. “Pablo said he hated Bonnard — hated him! — and did not want me to visit. I replied that I could, of course, do what I liked without his permission, but the argument was heated, and in the end I declined to go.” As soon as Picasso arrived from Paris, friction erupted between him and Aliquot, both vying for Gilot’s affection and jealous of each other’s advances. In one of their more heated exchanges, “[Picasso] took the cigarette he was smoking and touched it to my right cheek and held it there,” Gilot wrote in her memoir. “He must have expected me to pull away, but I was determined not to give him the satisfaction.” Picasso, somewhat sadistically, would go on to memorialise the event his Femme au collier jaune (Woman With Yellow Necklace, 1946), in which, what appears to be a beauty mark on Gilot’s right cheek, is, in actuality, a scar left by the cigarette. By means of apology, which presumably made some sense to him, Picasso introduced Gilot to one of her greatest inspirations, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) at Villa le Rêve in Vence, a short drive away. Gilot wore almond green trousers and a mauve top, in deference to Matisse’s favourite colours. “When we arrived, Picasso introduced me to Matisse, and Matisse answered right away that he would be pleased to make my portrait,” Gilot recalled. “That shocked Picasso, because Picasso had not made any portrait of me as yet. And Matisse added, ‘Yes, I would make her skin a pale blue, and her reddish hair would have to be green.’ That was amusing: they like to provoke each other a little bit. It was a competition as well as a friendship.” The meeting stimulated Picasso later that year to use a palette of cool blues and mossy greens in his iconic La femme-fleur (Woman-Flower, 1946), his quintessential portrait of Gilot; an uncharacteristically sweet metaphor, in which she appears as a solitary, un-plucked, flower, her face, poised and luminous representing her independent spirit.
Le Tribut De Minos, oil on canvas (1962), part of the Labyrinth series by Françoise Gilot, inspired by Classical Greek myths and legends, image c/o Sotheby’s
Étude Bleue (1953) by Françoise Gilot, painted only a few months before she left Pablo Picasso, image c/o Christie’s
Toward the end of the decade, trapped in a fractious relationship, Gilot found herself increasingly restless and unhappy and somehow, Picasso persuaded her motherhood was the answer. “I still thought that maybe in him love and tenderness would come to dominate the other parts of himself,” she recalled. “I wanted to give him everything he could possibly want, because I loved him very much.” In 1947 she gave birth to a son, Claude (b. 1947), followed two years later by a daughter, Paloma (b. 1949), but Picasso became frustrated, chafing loudly against the domesticity he once craved, complaining their lives had become bourgeois and predictable. “Pablo wanted me continually pregnant, because then I was weaker,” Gilot recalled. “After the second child, I said enough was enough. Picasso made this sculpture of a pregnant woman and when I told him I didn’t like it, he hacked her feet off.” She retorted: “I can walk with my own feet.” By the early 1950s, faced with the mundane reality and responsibilities of family life, Picasso’s interest in Gilot waned; he took on other lovers and his cruelty and erratic moods became nigh on unbearable. Gilot had started to exhibit with members of the French réalités nouvelles school, working on paintings depicting herself and her children, drawing on the rich hues of Matisse and the fractured geometries of Braque, with a far more sentimental, less violent portrayal of her subjects than that seen in Picasso’s work. In one such self-portrait, her mesmerising Étude Bleue (1953), painted only a few months before she would pluck up the courage to leave him, Gilot appears confident and self-assured, an evocative expression of her burgeoning autonomy; this is in stark contrast to Picasso’s representations of Gilot, which, by this stage, seem entirely expressionless and devoid of psychology. When finally Gilot was given a solo show at Galerie Louise Leiris in 1952, Picasso, seething with jealousy, refused to attend the opening on the pretence he’d seen the paintings already. “The Woman Who Says No” finally came to her senses and in September 1953 she upped sticks and left for pastures new. Gilot reiterated a conversation she had with the Spaniard before making her decision: “I said watch out, because I came when I wanted to, but I will leave when I want. He said, ‘nobody leaves a man like me.’ I said, ‘we’ll see.’’” True to misogynistic form, Picasso made a concerted and deliberate effort to cut Gilot from the Paris art world, doing all he could to prevent dealers from buying her work. “You imagine people will be interested in you?” he sneered. “They won’t ever, really, just for yourself. Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life has touched mine so intimately.”
Françoise Gilot and Pablo Picasso on the beach, Golfe-Juan, France (1948), photograph by Robert Capa
Gilot continued producing works she knew many would see as derivative; remembering a fellow artist who remarked in 1952, “Even if Françoise had had some originality, Picasso would have destroyed it. You cannot possibly be original when you live with him.” Yet, much to the Spaniard’s chagrin, Gilot’s paintings continued to sell, and rather than struggling, she very quickly came to see their separation as the beginning of her “real life”. When asked by the New York Times about the comparisons that have been made between their work, she replied simply, “Sometimes you need an umbrella when it rains.” In any event, Gilot was more than merely a muse and companion, she was Picasso’s intellectual equal, exerting a profound and immeasurable influence over his work, and in the opinion of renowned biographer and art historian John Richardson (1924-2019): “Picasso took from her rather more than she took from him.” Despite her resilient nature, Gilot’s relationship with the art world had become increasingly complex. “I knew Paris was no longer the centre but I hesitated between London and New York. My work was with two galleries in London, which were holding it because in France things had got rather difficult for me — Leaving Picasso was seen as a big crime and I was no longer welcome” (quoted in Françoise Gilot: Works on Paper (exhibition catalogue), Elkon Gallery, New York, 2006). Gilot initially bought a studio in Chelsea, London, before moving to America where most of her collectors were based. “When it goes well and it’s good, bravo, tant mieux, and when it goes badly, tant pis: you have to accept this,” she said of her career. “You aren’t completely responsible for what’s going on.” Gilot had kept a villa she shared with Picasso, La Galloise, in Vallauris, and summers in the early 1960s were spent cruising the Greek islands with Paloma and Claude on a chartered yacht with a crew of three. It was there she became fascinated by Classical Greek myths and legends, resulting in her most coherent body of work, the Labyrinth Series, echoing the tale of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur. Comprising some fifty abstract paintings, it highlights Gilot’s unique ability to fuse the Parisian Fauvist and Cubist movements with the then-burgeoning Abstract Expressionism of the later 1950s; a bridge, as it were, between the heroic period of the Paris School and the emergence of New York as the new world centre for post-war contemporary art. Untitled (Red and Yellow) (1963) is a pre-eminent and powerful example of Gilot’s complex compositional structures; critics inevitably descried Picasso in its use of colour and anguished forms, but it was, in essence, merely a work of its time, no more “Picasso-esque” than many other French paintings of the era.
After divorcing her first husband, French artist Luc Simon (1924-2011), Gilot was introduced to Dr Jonas Salk (1914-1995), an American virologist and researcher famed for his work on the polio vaccine. Salk was so immediately taken by Gilot that he pursued her to Paris where he proposed. Ever on the qui vive re powerful men, she initially refused; but not taking no for an answer, Salk handed her a piece of paper. “Write down everything that you don’t want,” he directed. “I’ll give you an hour.” Her list included: “I can’t live more than six months with one person” and “I’m not always in the mood to talk. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” Salk found her reasons “quite congenial”, and they were married in 1970. Reporting on their wedding, the Philadelphia Inquirer dismissively referred to Gilot as “mistress of the late Pablo Picasso”, but unperturbed, when asked by an interviewer how she had managed to bag two of the world’s most eminent men, she replied unflinchingly: “Lions mate with lions.” It was a characteristically witty retort, but her respective relationships with Salk and Picasso were worlds apart, and as she would herself explain, “It was love because I admired [Salk’s] commitment to the human race, his humanity, and he was a fine man. But I can’t say I felt passionately about him. With Pablo it was different.” In the interim, Gilot published her bestselling memoir, Life with Picasso (1964), which caused a stir not only for its frank, no holds barred account of her ten-year relationship with the irascible artist but also for the three lawsuits he lost trying to prevent its publication. Picasso reacted as capriciously as one might expect, and throwing his toys out of the proverbial pram, he cut all ties with Gilot and their two children, and, for a second time, set about destroying her career; bad-mouthing her across the industry and refusing to show his work with any gallery that represented her. Though the book earned Gilot enmity from Picasso’s close-knit group of friends and supporters — with art historian and “fangirl” Douglas Cooper (1911-1984), who regarded Picasso as the only genius of the twentieth century, burning copies of Gilot’s book at a party — it was, on the whole, tremendously well-received, becoming an international bestseller, and serving as inspiration for the 1996 Merchant Ivory film, with Anthony Hopkins (b. 1937) as the title role and Natascha McElhone (b. 1969) playing Gilot. Perhaps tired of fighting, it wasn’t until two decades after Picasso’s death that Gilot would write her second book, A Friendship in Art (1990), another best-seller, this time about the artist’s father and son relationship with Matisse.
“Femme assise en constume vert” (1953) by Pablo Picasso, depicting Françoise Gilot, image c/o Sotheby’s
“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,” Gilot recalled in Artists and Conversation, a 2021 book by Janet Hawley. “[Picasso was] astonishingly creative, a magician, so intelligent and seductive … But he was also very cruel, sadistic, and merciless to others, as well as to himself.” Gilot held the somewhat dubious accolade of being the only woman to have survived a relationship with Picasso relatively unscathed: Khokhlova was deeply affected by his treatment of her, as was Maar. The model Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-1927) hanged herself and his second wife, Jacqueline Roque (1927-1986), unable to come to terms with his death, shot herself at their villa in Mougins. Writing that Picasso had a “Bluebeard complex,” Gilot says, in her memoir, “he preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who had shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. From time to time they would provide a humorous or dramatic or sometimes tragic side to things, and that was all grist to his mill.” Gilot, meanwhile, carried on painting, in her barrel-vaulted apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, designing costumes and sets for the Guggenheim Museum, and teaching at the University of Southern California.
Her fiery, unwavering character continued to prove a source of fascination for contemporary historians in their quest to reframe and rebalance the canon of twentieth-century art history, by giving due credit to those great female artists of the 1950s and 60s who had been historically overlooked. In language apt for an art critic, Waldemar George (1893-1970) said of her paintings: “They heighten our vital tonicity. They stimulate our energy. They intoxicate like mysterious philtres.” In 2012 Gilot helped curate the first joint exhibition of her and Picasso’s work, Picasso and Françoise Gilot: Paris–Vallauris 1943–1953, at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, and as always, narrative was paramount. “Gilot will talk expansively about Picasso,” observed Emma Brockes, who interviewed her for The Guardian, “but not until she has established him as a single element in a remarkable life.” In her latter years, afflicted by growing blindness, Gilot remained characteristically matter of fact: “I’m done with life. When I was 86, I thought, this is the end, because this is the age my mother died. Eighty-nine seemed impossible, and 90 was really the last straw. I thought, ‘You are going to have to take your own life if you ever want to die.’” Of course, often, with the benefit of hindsight, age confers a certain degree of clarity, and in respect of her critics, she offered wryly: “You have to admit that most women who do something with their lives have been disliked by almost everyone.”
It was this irrepressible spirit and surety of character that led the New York Times to dub Gilot an “‘It Girl’ at 100”. Long dismissed as Picasso’s “muse” or “mistress”, their relationship endured as an undeniable and constant presence — which Paloma called a “nuisance” to her mother — hovering over her life like some sort of malevolent apparition. As such, Gilot had to work all the harder to maintain an autonomous presence in an art world that failed to take women seriously. Steadfast and unencumbered by association, Gilot went on to produce some 6,000 drawings, paintings and ceramics, which now reside in more than a dozen museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Though Gilot’s early paintings show a clear cubist bent, clearing her mind of the past, she would later resolutely declare, “I don’t believe in influences”. Whilst she acknowledged the Spaniard “set a most inspiring example”, she considered herself “more a disciple than a pupil”, and credited Matisse as having a far greater impact on her artistic evolution. Gilot has, thankfully, in recent decades been reappraised as an artist in her own right, but in terms of commercial success, she had to wait until her one-hundredth year to see a work of hers — an affectionate portrait of her daughter, Paloma, dating from 1965 — to break the magical one-million euro barrier at auction; though as Markus Müller writes in his 2022 book, Picasso: Women of His Life. a Tribute, “in an age in which people are more interested in price than in value, this can undoubtedly be read as a kind of material consecration of her life’s work.” The painting in question, titled Paloma à la Guitare, is emblematic of Gilot as an artist, who, whilst undoubtedly drawing on Picasso’s modernist style, carved out her own unique and idiosyncratic territory. “As young women, [my generation] were taught to keep silent,” she told the New York Times in 2022. “We were taught early that taking second place is easier than first. You tell yourself that’s all right,” she said, “but it’s not all right.”