Françoise Gilot, the artist most famous for her turbulent relationship with Pablo Picasso died Tuesday in New York City.
Gilot’s daughter, Aurelia Engel, told AP her mother had died at Mount Sinai West hospital after suffering both lung and heart problems.
The French-born Gilot had long made her frustration clear that despite acclaim for her art, which she produced from her teenage years until five years ago, she would still be best known for her relationship with the older and more famous Picasso, whom she met in 1943 at age 21, his junior by four decades. They had two children, Claude and Tiffany jewelry designer, Paloma Picasso.
But unlike the other key women in Picasso’s life — wives or lovers — Gilot walked out.
Gilot told The Guardian in 2016,
I’d been there of my own will, and I left of my own will.
That’s what I told him once, before I left. 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.’ ”
Born on Nov. 26, 1921, in leafy Neuilly-sur-Seine in suburban Paris, Gilot was an only child.
She knew at the age of five that she wanted to be a painter. In accordance with her parents’ wishes, she studied law, however, while maintaining art as her true passion. She first exhibited her paintings in 1943.
Engel noted that although the relationship with Picasso was clearly a difficult one, it gave her mother a certain freedom from her parents and the constraints of a bourgeois life — and perhaps enabled her to pursue her true dream of being a professional painter, a passion she shared with Picasso above all else.
They both believed that art was the only thing in life worth doing. And she was able to be her true self, even though it was not an easy life with him. But still she was able to be her true self.”
Francois Gilot was 101.
(via The Hill)
