By Fiona Fortunato

“You imagine people will be interested in you? They won’t ever, really, just for yourself … It will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life touched mine so intimately.”

- A recollection of Picasso's words to her from Life with Picasso (1964), by Françoise Gilot

Françoise Gaime Gilot was born on the 26th of November 1921 just west of Paris in  Neuilly-sur-Seine. Characterized by Picasso as “the woman who says no”, she would become the only woman to walk away from him. The daughter of an economist father and an artistic mother, Françoise’s immediate home environment fostered her young creative tendencies. Her artistic ambitions started early on. At the age of five, she already knew that she wanted to become a painter, a goal she would later accomplish while becoming a friend and confidant to some of the most notable artists of the first half of the 20th century. She amassed an oeuvre including over 1,500 oil paintings, more than 4,000 works on paper, in addition to collages, ceramics, lithographs, poetry and prose before her death in 2023.

Though her family never prevented her from making art, her father pushed her to get a law degree. Her stint in the legal field was short-lived, and at the age of 21, she left and fully immersed herself in her art. It was an era of tension and desperation in France, with German occupation during World War II, and while she made it through the war unscathed, the same was not the case for many of her artist friends who worked for the underground resistance movements. Her choice of color and symbolism within her works were able to smuggle hidden meanings into her exhibitions without being under any suspicion by undercover Nazi officers who would frequent artist exhibitions in order to monitor the content of the work being shown. 

Gilot’s inherently bright and analytical mind was greatly cultivated by her father who served as an intellectual mentor for her youth. With her father as the proponent of her intellectual, rational side, it complemented her more uninhibited artistic side with what she described as the “logical delirium [that] artists should have”. At 21, during the height of Nazi occupation, she would meet another mentor who she would serve as a muse to, and with whom she would have two children. Pablo Picasso met the young Françoise, who was 40 years his junior, in May of 1943, at a cafe in Paris where she was sitting with her friends. To make his introduction, Picasso sent over a bowl of cherries to the table and as their relationship unfolded in the following years, cherry motifs could be seen in some of his paintings.

While she is remembered prominently as a muse of Picasso, the young artist herself was a rising star in her own right, well before his influence in her life. Additionally, because they belonged to different generations, they were not competing for the same spot in the limelight. He had already produced most of the work he would ever create, and she was just starting out, not in the shadow of Picasso, but next to him. 

Although her artwork during the time she spent with him was influenced by his style, she preferred painting more organic forms over the rigidity and angularity that is typical of his work. Instead, she acknowledged his concentration as a main influence, not merely his style. She also credits the French artists Georges Braque (who was a collaborator with Picasso in the development of cubism) and Henri Matisse as being artistic influences. 

Even with the formative years Gilot spent with Picasso, from the ages of 21 to 31, their decade long relationship eventually came to an end due to Picasso’s infidelities and verbally abusive tendencies. Gilot left with their children, Claude and Paloma, and immediately was met with Picasso’s wrath. After having destroyed her belongings, artworks, and letters from Matisse left in their home, he set out to dismantle her career by demanding the Louise Leiris Gallery to stop representing her along with rescinding future invitations for her to exhibit at the Salon de Mai. She would eventually leave France and what she called “Picasso’s war on me”. The social exile she faced from the art world was worsened with the publication of her memoir, Life with Picasso, which prompted three lawsuits by Picasso in conjunction with 80 artists and intellectuals signing a petition in the communist paper Les Lettres Françaises to prevent its publication. However, the book would be published, selling over a million copies and being translated into over a dozen languages. In the United States, she would eventually have the opportunity to rebuild her life and a successful career outside of the exile she would continue to face from the artistic community in France. 

Her paintings are rich with themes of mythology, having been enriched with Greek myths as bedtime stories as a young girl. Greek mythology served as a background reference template where she was drawn to the stories of human inventiveness and resourcefulness. While she is not alone in using allegorical and mythological themes in her work, she staunchly denies simply following the tradition of classicism or works of art from the Renaissance where myths and allegories were mostly used to tell a narrative. Rather than merely narrative, the stories she draws inspiration from intend to evoke a particular feeling, or in her own words, a “new meaning to life”, giving “a poetic manner of stating some philosophical truth”. For example, her interpretation of Poseidon appears without his trident and becomes intertwined with the spirituality of water, therefore drawing a connection to the blue god Krishna of Hindu mythology.

Gilot’s work was a manifestation of her own interpretations of the visible world around her and the hidden “divine” aspects in every event and person. The prominence of nature and women centered symbolism/motifs often resemble self-portraits, where she uses her style as an intuitive colorist to lend additional symbolic meaning and structure to a piece. In her later works she would use the thickness of the paint itself to imply curious dimensionality rather than only using perspective lines, where at times she would paint with both hands, a palette knife in her left, and a paintbrush in her right. 

Françoise Gilot was a muse to the one of the most famous painters of the 20th century for a decade but was an artist in her own right for nearly a century, and should be remembered as such. On top of her expansive collection of work, she wrote the bestselling book, Life with Picasso, in 1964, a little over a decade after their separation. Her work continues to be shown, recently having a temporary exhibition at the Musée National Picasso-Paris, where the museum’s curator, Joanne Snrech, wanted to show the diversity of Gilot’s work across her long career: “It’s true that after her book about Picasso was published she was shunned by many people in the artistic community in France. We thought it was important to show not just her place in Picasso’s life but also that she was much more than just his companion. After all, she spent just 10 years with him out of more than 100.”