Françoise Gilot obituary

In 1943 the artist Françoise Gilot, who has died aged 101, accompanied her teacher, the surrealist painter Endre Rozsda, to the Gare de l’Est in Paris. Rozsda was Jewish and Hungarian; the occupying Germans had begun rounding up foreign Jewish people, and he was leaving for the apparent safety of Budapest. As his train steamed out of the station, the 21-year-old Gilot wailed: “But what am I to do?” Her teacher, laughing, shouted: “Don’t worry! Who knows? Three months from now, you may meet Picasso!”

Seven decades later Gilot was to recall those words as both prophecy and curse. Two months after Rozsda’s departure she was having dinner at Le Catalan, a Paris restaurant patronised by Left Bank artists. Halfway through the meal a short, bull-necked man approached her table proffering a bowl of cherries: it was Pablo Picasso. Captivated by the fine-boned Gilot, Picasso, 40 years her senior, invited her to his studio in the Rue des Grands Augustins. By the end of the summer they were lovers.

The mismatched pair were to stay together for a decade, during which time Gilot bore him two children, Paloma and Claude. Picasso remained married to his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, throughout the relationship.

As Gilot was to recall in her bestselling book Life With Picasso (1964), he set out to undermine her from the start. “One day,” she wrote, “we were looking at dust dancing in sunlight … [Picasso] said, ‘Nobody has any real importance to me. As far as I’m concerned, people are like those little grains. It takes only a push of the broom and out they go.’” Later, angry at her lack of attention to him, he burned her cheek with a cigarette.

From the early 1950s, Gilot had begun to exhibit with members of the French réalités nouvelles school and when, finally, she was given a show of her own at Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris in 1952, Picasso refused to go to the opening. He had, he said, seen all the paintings already. “Pablo wanted me continually pregnant, because then I was weaker,” Gilot recalled. “After the second child, I said enough was enough. Picasso made this sculpture of a pregnant woman and when I told him I didn’t like it, he hacked her feet off.” By her own telling, Gilot retorted: “I can walk with my own feet,” and in September 1953, she did.

All this and a great deal more was revealed in Life With Picasso, ensuring the book’s huge and immediate success: it sold a million copies in the first year. Enraged, Picasso tried to prevent publication. When he failed to do that, he set about destroying his ex-partner’s career, refusing to show his work at any gallery that showed hers, and cutting contact with their children. Already, in 1955, following Gilot’s marriage to the artist Luc Simon, the Leiris gallery had quietly dropped her.

That, at least, was her story. Whether the gallery would have taken her on in the first place without Picasso’s cachet is a moot point. Although she would later insist that she had been attracted to the older man only because all the men of her own age were off at war, Gilot enjoyed the trappings of being the partner of Picasso.

It was through him that she met Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Gertrude Stein and Paul Éluard. Shortly before she decided to move in with Picasso, he had taken her to stay with Henri Matisse at the latter’s villa, Le Rêve. In 1990, with her ex-lover dead, Gilot published another book about him, Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art. This, too, was a financially rewarding bestseller. “I was capable of understanding the whole problem of money,” Gilot said, blithely. “You might say that I am a little bit hard-boiled. I have to admit that I was never so much in love with anyone that I could not consider my own plan.”

After her separation from Picasso, Gilot kept their villa, La Galloise, using the profits from sales of her books to extend it. Summers in the early 60s were spent cruising the Greek islands with Paloma and Claude on a chartered yacht with a crew of three.

From these trips came what was to be perhaps Gilot’s most coherent body of artwork, the Labyrinth series. Untitled (Red and Yellow) (1963) is typical of this, being powerful if compositionally unresolved. Inevitably critics descried Picasso in its southern colours and anguished forms. This was unfair. Untitled (Red and Yellow) was, generically, a work of its time, neither more nor less Picasso-esque than many other French paintings of the day.

In return, some of Picasso’s best portraits had been of Gilot: his biographer, John Richardson, was of the view that: “Picasso took from her rather more than she took from him.” Nonetheless, Gilot remained dogged by his shadow, and not just as an artist.

She was divorced from Simon in 1962, and in 1969, in California, was introduced to the American virologist Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine. Salk was instantly taken by the elegant Frenchwoman. Pursuing her to Paris, he asked her to marry him. Gilot, by now wary of powerful men, replied that she would, provided they spend six months a year apart. Salk agreed.

For the 25 years of their marriage Gilot would divide half her time between Paris and Manhattan, spending the other half with her husband in La Jolla, California. This seemed to suit both well enough, although there were raised eyebrows among Salk’s friends and colleagues.

In its report of their wedding, the Philadelphia Inquirer described Gilot as “mistress of the late Pablo Picasso”, but she was, apparently, untouched by such barbs. Asked by an interviewer how she had managed to end up with two of the world’s most eminent men, Gilot replied baldly: “Lions mate with lions.”

She was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, an exclusive suburb of Paris. Her father, Emile, a rich manufacturer, was an authoritarian figure, forcing his left-handed only child to write with her right hand and insisting that she study law rather than art. Françoise’s lessons with Rozsda were a secret between herself and her mother, Madeleine (nee Renoult), a keen amateur artist. Scandalised at his daughter’s mésalliance with Picasso, Emile cut all ties with her for a decade.

Free of her father, Gilot signed up to study at the Académie Julian, but if Emile had been autocratic, his tyranny paled beside that of Picasso. She was, though, unique among his women in having survived him: his first wife was deeply affected by his treatment of her, as was another lover, Dora Maar. The model Marie-Thérèse Walter hanged herself; his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, shot herself. Gilot lived on, painting every day, increasingly in her vast, barrel-vaulted flat in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and working on projects for the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2021, her 1965 portrait of her daughter, Paloma à la Guitare, sold for $1.3m, and a retrospective of her work was held at the Musée Estrine, Saint Remy de Provence.

She was made a member of the Légion d’Honneur in France in 1990, promoted to an officer of the order in 2009.

Afflicted by growing blindness, she was as unsentimental about herself as she was the world at large. In her mid 90s she said: “I’m done with life. When I was 86, I thought, this is the end, because this is the age my mother died. Eighty-nine seemed impossible, and 90 was really the last straw. I thought, ‘You are going to have to take your own life if you ever want to die.’” As to her critics, she remained philosophical: “You have to admit that most women who do something with their lives have been disliked by almost everyone.”

Salk died in 1995. Gilot is survived by Paloma, Claude and a daughter, Aurelia, from her marriage to Simon.

• Françoise Gilot, artist and writer, born 26 November 1921; died 6 June 2023