Françoise Gilot, artist and lover of Picasso who shook off his dominance and developed a style of her own – obituary

Françoise Gilot, the artist who has died aged 101, was for 10 years the lover and muse of Pablo Picasso, and she took some pride in being the only one of the painter’s sundry wives and mistresses to have left him of her own accord, rather than being discarded by him.

Françoise Gilot came to regard the association with Picasso as a wearisome burden, insisting that she was much more than simply a chapter in his life, and she established a reputation as a painter in her own right, her work being held in museum collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.

She was just 21 and a struggling artist when in 1943 she met Picasso in a Left Bank restaurant, Le Catalan, where she was dining with her friend and fellow artist Geneviève Aliquot and the film actor Alain Cuny. Picasso, who was 40 years her senior, was with his companion, the photographer Dora Maar; he approached the table carrying a bowl of cherries and entreated Alain Cuny to introduce him to the two young women.

When Geneviève Aliquot explained that she and Françoise were both painters, Picasso replied: “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day. Girls who look like that can’t be painters.”

Piqued, Françoise Gilot invited Picasso to a joint exhibition of her and Aliquot’s work. “I’m a painter too,” he responded – and invited them to his studio. It was the beginning of a tempestuous relationship that Gilot would later describe as “a catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid”. She would remain with Picasso for a decade, bearing him a son, Claude, and a daughter, Paloma, before finally leaving, tired of his domineering personality and philandering. His last word to her as she departed in a taxi was “Merde.”

Marie Françoise Gilot was born on November 26 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, the only child of Emile Gilot, an agronomist and chemical manufacturer, and Madeleine Renoult-Gilot. Encouraged by her mother, a ceramicist, from an early age, Françoise expressed a desire to be an artist, but she faced resistance from her father, a strict disciplinarian who closely supervised her upbringing, pushing her to excel academically and urging her to study law, first at the University of Rennes and then at the Sorbonne.

In June 1940 the German army occupied Paris. Five months later, shortly before her 19th birthday, Françoise Gilot joined a spontaneous gathering with other students at the Arc de Triomphe to place flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in commemoration of the Armistice of 1918. She avoided arrest, but her involvement was reported to the police.

Within days she was notified that her name had been added to a list kept by the Abwehr (German intelligence) of young “hostages” – citizens under the age of 21 who, as retribution for any German soldiers killed by the French, would be taken and executed. She had to report each morning to the Kommandantur at the local Neuilly police station, knowing that attempting to flee to the Free Zone in the south would lead to the immediate arrest of her parents.

“At that time our lives were not worth three pennies, you know?” she later told Mick Brown of the Telegraph. “We knew we could die at any moment. In a sense it’s not bad: you count for zero, so to speak, because you are so young. But for myself, I made up my mind that I would always be free in my life, whatever happened.”

Françoise Gilot’s father subsequently negotiated to pay a substantial sum to have his daughter’s name erased from the hostage list, but it was deemed unsafe for her to pursue her law studies, and so, free to pursue her passion for art, in 1942 she enrolled at the Académie Ranson, a well-established art school on the Left Bank where Bonnard and Vuillard had once taught.

After their initial meeting, Picasso courted Françoise Gilot assiduously over the following months, causing Dora Maar to remark acidly: “I imagine you need to lean on youth … About 15 minutes ought to do it, I would think.” Their relationship took Françoise Gilot to the heart of Parisian arts and letters.

She became friends with Matisse and Cocteau, and took morning walks with Gertrude Stein along the Rue de Buci. On her first meeting with Matisse, the elderly painter annoyed Picasso by immediately declaring his desire to paint Françoise Gilot. “Pablo did not like that at all,” she recalled, “because he had not yet made a portrait of me himself.”

Picasso went on to make several studies of Françoise Gilot, among them Femme au Collier Jaune (1946), a striking geometric work in which a black mark is conspicuous on Gilot’s right cheek; sometimes described as a beauty mark, it was in fact a burn from Picasso stubbing out his cigarette on her face during a heated argument.

Their relationship was frequently combustible. In a memoir, Life with Picasso, published in 1964, Françoise Gilot recounted how things between them were good only so long as they were living separately and she was able to maintain her independence, but they began to deteriorate in the years after they set up home together.

After the birth of the children (Claude in 1947 and Paloma in 1949), and with Françoise Gilot’s growing reputation as a painter and designer of costumes and stage sets, Picasso’s interest seemed to wane and he became increasingly distant, pursuing affairs with other women.

His domineering personality kept a succession of wives and mistresses in his thrall, leading one – Dora Maar – to madness, and two – Marie-Thérèse Walter and Jacqueline Roque – to take their own lives. But Françoise Gilot demonstrated both a fierce independence and a strong instinct for survival.

“Nobody,” Picasso once told her, “leaves a man like me!” To which she replied: “Wait and see.” In 1953 she left – “I had finally reached the conclusion that my life with Pablo was like a sickness,” she said – and the following year married the painter Luc Simon, whom she had first known as an art student.

Picasso took his revenge by pressuring her Parisian gallery not to exhibit her work, and emptying the house in Vallauris on the Côte d’Azur that Gilot owned and in which they had lived: he took with him the paintings and drawings he had given to her over the years, and even the letters that Matisse had written to her.

They would never meet again. But in 1960 she received a letter from Picasso’s lawyer, with a proposal that she should divorce Simon and marry Picasso, “for the sake of the children”. Torn by this turn of events, and wondering whether to leave her husband and accept Picasso’s proposal, Françoise Gilot’s mind was finally made up when, a few months later, she opened a newspaper to read that Picasso had married Jacqueline Roque. In 1962 Gilot and Simon divorced.

In 1964, and in spite of his attempts to injunct the book, she published Life with Picasso, which gave a candid insight not only into the painter’s obsessive dedication to his art, but also his monumental egocentricity, depicting him as cruel and totally self-absorbed, a man who for all his wives, mistresses and camp followers was essentially alone and incapable of love. The book leapt to the top of the bestseller lists, the English-language version selling more than one million copies in hardback.

Once asked whether she would describe him as a “monstre sacré”, Gilot replied: “Monster, yes. Sacred, maybe.”

After her divorce from Simon, Gilot travelled for the first time to the United States, where she was building a significant following for her work, and where she was to spend much of her life thereafter. In 1969, on a visit to California, she was introduced to Jonas Salk, the medical researcher and virologist who had developed the polio vaccine.

“Almost right away, when he set eyes on me, he wanted to marry me,” she recalled. “I thought that was rather extraordinary. In fact, I thought it was ridiculous! You might say about me that I am a better friend than spouse. So if somebody should be married, it should not be me.”

In attempting to discourage him – or at least test his resolve – she presented Salk with a list of conditions, stipulating that he would not attempt to stop her travelling as and when she wished, or in any way challenge her independence. “It was four pages of very tight script of all the things he could not do,” she remembered. “He said he found it very convenient that I had written it all down. So what could I do?”

They were married for 25 years until Salk’s death in 1995. “And, I must say, he was the perfect husband, the perfect person for me.”

While travelling extensively with Salk, Françoise Gilot concentrated on painting, exhibiting constantly in Europe and America. Though her early work had been strongly influenced by Matisse and Picasso in its line and sensibility, in later years she developed a distinctive, abstract style.

Among her other books were two volumes of poetry and, in 1975, The Painter and the Mask, focusing on her development as an artist. In 1990 she published Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art, a study of the relationship between the two painters, and in the same year was appointed a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur.

Françoise Gilot had taken American citizenship in 1980, and after Salk’s death she divided her time between Paris and New York, where she lived in an elegant apartment-cum-studio a short walk from Central Park, hung with her own paintings, looked after by a uniformed housekeeper who served florentines and tea on a silver tray.

She continued to paint each day and exhibit her work all over the world.

She is survived by three children: Claude and Paloma, and a daughter, Aurelia, from her marriage to Luc Simon.

Françoise Gilot, born November 26 1921, died June 6 2023