Françoise Gilot

Françoise Gaime Gilot (26 November 1921 – 6 June 2023) was a French painter. Gilot first made her mark in the post-war milieu of artists who redefined the European artistic landscape. With a career that spanned more than seven decades, her work was largely produced in watercolors and ceramics, and combined elements of abstraction, figuration, and symbolism, often drawing on mythology, personal experience, and themes of transformation. Gilot exhibited widely in Europe and the United States and was represented by major galleries, with her paintings held in numerous public and private collections.

Gilot was also known for her relationship with artist Pablo Picasso, with whom she shared a decade-long partnership and had two children. Unlike many of Picasso's other companions, she left him and later became the only one to publicly recount her experiences in the memoir Life with Picasso (1964), which became an international bestseller despite Picasso's opposition. In the decades following their separation, Gilot deliberately established an independent artistic identity, gaining increasing institutional recognition late in life, including major retrospectives and permanent museum installations that affirmed her significance as an artist in her own right. In 2021, her painting Paloma à la Guitare, a 1965 portrait of her daughter, sold for $1.3 million at Sotheby's in London.

Early life and education Gilot was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, to Émile Gilot and Madeleine Gilot (née Renoult). Her father was a businessman and agronomist, and her mother was a watercolor artist. Her father was a strict, well-educated man. Gilot began writing with her left hand as a young child, but at the age of four, her father forced her to write with her right hand. As a result, Gilot became ambidextrous. She decided at the age of 5 to become a painter. The following year, her mother tutored her in art, beginning with watercolors and India ink. Gilot was then taught by her mother's art teacher, Mademoiselle Meuge, for six years. While training to be a lawyer, Gilot was known to skip her morning law classes to study art with Monsieur Gerber, a retired artist living in Paris. Gilot had her first exhibition of paintings in Paris in 1943.

Gilot was introduced to art at a young age by her mother and grandmother. Her grandmother had held a party when Françoise was about five years old. A certain man caught Gilot's eye as being interesting, and she asked her grandmother who the man was. He turned out to be a painter, Emile Mairet. Gilot's father became close friends with the painter, and Françoise would often tag along to visit his studio. While her father had hoped she would go to school to become a scientist or lawyer, Gilot was frequenting museums in Europe to understand and gain an appreciation for the masters.

In 1939 she attended the British Institute in Paris and received a certificate in English proficiency issued by the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. During 1939, Gilot's father still wanted her to complete a degree in international law, and out of fear that Paris would be bombed during the war, Gilot was sent to Rennes, France, to begin law school.

Career At the age of 19, she abandoned her studies in law to devote her life to art. She began private lessons with a fugitive Hungarian Jewish painter, Endre Rozsda, and attended classes at the Académie Julian. In 1942, after abandoning law several times and returning on the insistence of her father, Gilot studied law for a second year and passed her written exams, but failed her oral exams. Her first exhibit with Kahnweiler's famed Galerie Louise Leiris took place in 1952 in Paris, which became a critical moment in her life and career.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Gilot designed costumes, stage sets, and masks for productions at the Guggenheim in New York City.

In 1973, Gilot was appointed art director of the scholarly journal Virginia Woolf Quarterly. In 1976, she joined the board of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, where she taught summer courses and took on organizational responsibilities until 1983.

Gilot split her time between New York and Paris, working on behalf of the Salk Institute.

In August 2018, Gilot released three sketchbooks that documented the journeys she made in Venice, India, and Senegal.

Art work Francoise Gilot's career lasted eight decades, amassing a body of work comprising 1,600 paintings and 3,600 works on paper. Gilot explained, "I always knew what I wanted to say, it was how to say it."

Her provocative 1946 work Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple re-examined the Biblical tale, taking a fresh look at temptation, punishment and the blaming of women. At Christie's in Hong Kong, her artwork entitled "Living Forest", an abstract canvas created in 1977, also sold for $1.3 million.

Relationship with Pablo Picasso At 21, Gilot met Pablo Picasso, then 61. Picasso first saw Gilot in a restaurant in the spring of 1943, during the German occupation of France.

Gilot said of her relationship with Picasso:

He did not know me well at all. I am very secretive. I smile and I'm polite, but that doesn't mean that I am in agreement, or that I will do as I said I would do. It's just a screen. He thought I would react like all his other women. That was a completely wrong opinion. I had other ideas. I did not put my narcissism in being represented by him. I couldn't care less.

Picasso and Gilot never married, but had two children together because he promised to love and care for them. Their son, Claude, was born in 1947, and their daughter, Paloma, was born in 1949. After Gilot left Picasso, the following happened according to Gilot's biographer Sacha Llewelyn:

In 1964, 11 years after their separation, Gilot wrote Life with Picasso (with the art critic Carlton Lake), a book that sold over one million copies in dozens of languages, despite an unsuccessful legal challenge from Picasso attempting to stop its publication. From then on, Picasso refused to see Claude or Paloma again. All the profits from the book were used to help Claude and Paloma mount a case to become Picasso's legal heirs.

Marriages Gilot married artist Luc Simon in 1955. Their daughter Aurélia was born the following year.

In 1969, Gilot was introduced to the American inventor Jonas Salk at the home of mutual friends in La Jolla, California. During their marriage, which lasted until Salk's death in 1995, the couple lived apart for half of every year as Gilot continued to paint in New York City, La Jolla, and Paris.

Awards and honors

Gilot was appointed a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1990.

In 2024, the Musée Picasso in Paris reinstalled its permanent collection to include a dedicated gallery highlighting Françoise Gilot's work and career, recognizing her as an artist in her own right rather than solely Picasso's former partner.

In 2025, a public square in the 18th arrondissement of Paris was named Rue Françoise Gilot in her memory.

In popular culture Gilot was played by Natascha McElhone in the 1996 film Surviving Picasso, and by Clémence Poésy in the 2018 season of Genius, which focuses on the life and art of Pablo Picasso.

Books Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, McGraw-Hill, 1964; Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1989, Françoise Gilot, Le regard et son Masque, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1975, – focuses on her development as an artist. Françoise Gilot, Interface: The Painter and the Mask, Press at California State University, Fresno, 1983, Barbara Haskell, Françoise Gilot: An Artist's Journey 1943–1987, California State Univ, 1987, ; Little, Brown, 1989. Françoise Gilot, Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art, Doubleday, 1990, ; New York: Anchor Books, 1992,