Françoise Gilot, the painter who had two children with Pablo Picasso (Paloma and Claude), died yesterday at the age of 101 in New York, where she lived. She was enough to see how the world recognized her as an artist, especially the US, a country that has dedicated several anthologies to her, through which tens of thousands of visitors have passed.
Although today her paintings are in museums such as the MoMA, the Met or the Pompidou, and some of them have been auctioned for a million euros, she lived eclipsed by the weight of her ten years living with Picasso, whom she abandoned in 1954 and who portrayed her in several works (one of them was sold last April for 9.4 million euros) although she never accepted the role of muse but rather had her own artistic and intellectual ambitions. “I have never heard anyone say no to Picasso. In fact, he called me ‘the woman who says no’, because when she had to say no, she said itâ€, Gilot once stated, who was a friend of, among others, Malraux or Matisse.
Gilot and Picasso met in Nazi-occupied Paris (specifically, at the Le Catalan restaurant). As a painter, she did not adhere to cubism but instead developed her own style, more symbolic, less angular and with a greater presence of organic figures, cultivating self-portraits, still life or landscapes. She practiced abstraction, then returned to figuration and finally merged both. In 1964, with the help of art critic Carlton Lake, she wrote the world bestseller Life with Picasso, the publication of which she tried in vain to prevent the painter from publishing. After Picasso, Gilot hung out with the painter Luc Simon and the medical researcher Jonas Salk.
In a recent interview, Gilot had declared: “At my age, sometimes I get tired of life, but I never get tired of painting.”
