2023-06-11 11:14:50
- Santiago Vanegas Maldonado
- BBC News World
image source, Getty Images
Gilot and Picasso had a loving relationship for a decade.
The painter and writer Françoise Gilot died on Tuesday June 6 in a New York hospital. She was 101 years old.
Some of his paintings are hanging on the walls of renowned Big Apple institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as the Center d’Art Pompidou in Paris.
The French Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, described it as “one of the most amazing artists of her generationabout his death.
But, before gaining such prominence, her life and career were overshadowed by her romantic relationship with one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso.
“Pablo (Picasso) was the greatest love of my life, but you had to take steps to protect yourself,” Gilot said in the book. Artists in Conversationby Janet Hawley. “I did. I left before it destroyed me“.
image source, Getty Images
Aurelia Engel, Gilot’s youngest daughter, confirmed his death, telling the New York Times that he had been dealing with heart and lung problems.
Gilot and Picasso were together for 10 years and had two children, Paloma and Claude.
From that relationship came “My life with Picasso”, a memoir published in 1964 in which he generously and kindly described the artistic side of the Spanish artist, but also opened the door to his personal life.
Although timidly, he sowed the seeds of a critical look at Picasso’s notorious egocentrism and his cruelty to those around him.
One million copies were sold in the first year alone..
The book upset Picasso so much that he never spoke to her or their children again.
Today, 50 years after the death of the famous artist, art history has questioned the division between his life and his work, and various critics have argued that the artistic feat for which he is praised is inseparable from the misogyny that women like Gilot suffered.
“Women are suffering machinesPicasso once said.
The relationship
Françoise Gilot was born in the wealthy city of Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. She was 5 years old when she first said that she wanted to be a painter.
When she met Picasso, at 21, she had already rebelled against her father, who had made her study law, and devoted herself entirely to art. She was also involved in the French resistance on occasion and had been briefly detained at a protest against the Nazi occupation of Paris.
Picasso was 40 years older than her.
“Girls who look like you could never be painters,” he told her that first afternoon in a Paris cafe.
image source, Getty Images
Their relationship blossomed in Picasso’s studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris during World War II.
Gilot was his partner, his assistant, his apprentice, and the mother of his children. Picasso portrayed her in “The flower-woman“.
During the 10 years of their relationship, Picasso remained married to Olga Khokhlova, a Russian dancer.
About her love with Picasso, Gilot told the newspaper in 2016 The Guardian that “it was perhaps an intellectual love, or a physical love, but certainly not sentimental love. It was love because we had good reason, each of us, to admire the other.”
It is well known that Gilot was the only one of Picasso’s wives who made the decision to leave him. The relationship had become untenable.
On one occasion they had ended up in a physical fight, a moment that Picasso later described as one of his fondest memories.
At the end of their relationship, Picasso told him: “Do you think that someone is going to be interested in you? They will never be interested only for you. Even the people who you think appreciate you will only have a kind of curiosity for a person whose life touched mine so intimately.”
Gilot took it upon himself to prove him wrong.
As a painter, she developed her own style, more organic and less angular than Picasso’s. She cultivated the self-portrait, still life and landscapes.
At the end of the relationship, Picasso tried to close the gallery doors on him. Gilot moved to the United States to escape his orbit, and was able to continue exhibiting and selling his work.
He also redid his personal life. She was married twice and gave birth to another daughter. She toured the world and published several books.
image source, Getty Images
In 1970, Gilot married Jonas Salk, one of the minds behind the polio vaccine.
She was the art director of the magazine Virgina Woolf Quartertly and chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California.
A portrait of his daughter from 1965, Paloma on Guitarwas sold for US$1.3 million at auction in 2021.
Meanwhile, Picasso’s leading role in the history of art has been reviewed, regarding the evidence of abuse and mistreatment of his multiple partners.
Four days before Gilot’s death, a controversial exhibition curated by Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby (famous for her Netflix show “Nanette”) opened at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, which recontextualizes, from a feminist perspective, Picasso’s work.
Picasso’s own granddaughter wrote of her grandfather’s relationship with women: “He subjected them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them and he squashed them on his canvas“.
Gilot was the only one who escaped from there and painted her own.
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