Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Art Newspaper, an editorial partner of CNN Style.
Françoise Gilot, a tireless artist who defied easy categorization – and attempts to define her as merely a footnote in the story of her former lover Pablo Picasso – died in New York on Tuesday. She was 101.
Her death was confirmed to The New York Times by her daughter Aurelia Engel, who said Gilot had recently suffered from lung and heart problems. CNN was unable to reach Engel or Gilot’s other children to confirm these details.
Gilot, whose work spanned more than 80 years, was born on November 26, 1921 in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine and studied philosophy and law before devoting herself entirely to the artist. The early years of her career coincided with World War II and the Nazi occupation of Paris. During this time she had her first exhibition in 1943 at the gallery of the dealer Madeleine Decre in the eighth arrondissement and met Picasso, who was 40 years her senior. Her assessment of their ensuing ten-year relationship, published in a 1964 memoir entitled Life with Picasso, co-authored with journalist Carlton Lake, earned Gilot the ire of Picasso’s supporters and eventually propelled her into a heroic figure in feminist art history.
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Pablo Picasso and Francoise Gillot in 1951.
“Sometimes people like you. Sometimes people don’t,” Gilot said in a 2019 interview with The New York Times’ T Magazine. “But you won’t mold yourself to other people’s desires, whether they’re negative or positive, you know? You have to stay true to yourself and stay true to the truth. Those are the only two things that matter. I don’t think I have to be true to the general opinion of the public, because then why should I say something they’ve already made up their minds about?”
By the mid-1950s Gilot’s relationship with Picasso had ended – they had two children together, Claude and Paloma Picasso – and she had married the artist Luc Simon. A few years later, she began exhibiting at Paris’s Galerie Louise Leiris, and her work continued to evolve from the Cubist style she explored in the early 1950s to a flattened figurative style characterized by strong geometry and bright colors.
Over the next decade, despite the uproar her memoirs provoked, Gilot exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States – including at New York’s David Findley Gallery, Galleria Santo Stefano in Venice, Galleria Dantesca in Turin and Galerie Coard in Paris. In 1962 they divorced Simon (Engel’s father).
In 1970, Gilot married her second husband, Jonas Salk, a virologist who developed one of the first polio vaccines. That same year she had her first solo exhibitions at the museum, but many more were to follow in the years to come. In addition to painting, Gilot continued to devote himself to printmaking and poetry. She published her first artist book of prints and poems, Sur la Pierre (On the Stone), in 1972 at the Paris printing studio Mourlot Atelier. By mid-decade, Gilot’s primary residence was at Salk’s near San Diego, California, although she spent much of her time traveling for exhibitions and other projects.
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Paloma à la Guitare by Francoise Gilot (1965) was included in the Sotheby’s (Women) Artists Sale 2021 in London, England. It sold for $1.3 million.
In a statement, Gerald Joyce, the president of the California-based Salk Institute – a scientific foundation founded by Jonas Salk, said: “Françoise Gilot has been a real inspiration to all of us at Salk, to Jonas throughout his life and to our community through.” her involvement with Symphony at Salk and many other Salk ventures. Her artistic genius can be seen throughout campus in the many artworks she has donated to us. As we mourn her death, we celebrate Françoise’s spirit as we reflect on her art and dedication to the Salk Institute.”
Gilot has been based in New York since the early 1980s, while an astonishing frequency of exhibitions has taken her across the US and Europe. In 1998, an exhibition at New York’s Elkon Gallery highlighted her work from the 1940s. In 2000, Acatos Publishing published a monograph chronicling her work dating back to the 1940s. While her earlier work remained rooted in figuration—whether stylized and streamlined or deconstructed in a Cubist style—in the final decades of Gilot’s career, her paintings became increasingly abstract, defined by organic forms in vibrant colors.
In 2012, Gagosian held the first exhibition of Gilot’s work alongside Picasso’s Picasso and Françoise Gilot: Paris–Vallauris 1943–1953, which focused on works created during their relationship. The show came about in part through a collaboration between Gilot and Picasso biographer John Richardson, a seemingly unlikely partnership considering Richardson had credited her memoirs in a 1964 review for the New York Review of Books.
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Gilot’s artistic work spanned more than 80 years.
“He had never met me and then he judged me by the things he had heard,” Gilot said in a 2019 T Magazine interview of her friendship with Richardson, who had died a few months earlier. “When he met me, we became very good friends. What can I say? A lot of people thought they would like Picasso if they were against me. That’s why they did it.”
Gilot’s work is in the permanent collections of the Musée Picasso in Antibes, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée d’art modern de la ville de Paris, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the National Among others in the Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC
Although she spent most of the second half of her life in the United States, Gilot has repeatedly received national awards in France. In 1978 she was appointed Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. In 1994, French President Jacques Chirac made her an officer of the Order of National Merit. And in 2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy made her an officer in the Legion of Honour, France’s highest order of merit.
“What I really learned in this first phase (of my career): Never belong to a group again, because in a group, some people are always the leaders and they always want the others to conform, and I’m a nonconformist.” Gilot Terry Gross told WHYY in a 1988 interview on the occasion of the publication of her book “An Artist’s Journey”.
“I just want to conform to myself and the deep desires that drive me as an artist, and I don’t give a damn if other people follow that path or not. Ultimately, my work – which I call “the artist’s journey” and a kind of pilgrimage to my own center, my own being – is the only thing that matters if I have lived my life properly as an artist. And finally, I have enough following anyway, so I think I did the right thing.”