ABC
Françoise Gilot, a prolific and acclaimed painter who produced art for well more than a half-century but was nonetheless more famous for her turbulent relationship with Pablo Picasso — and for leaving him — died Tuesday in New York City, where she had lived for decades. She was 101.
Gilot’s daughter, Aurelia Engel, told The Associated Press her mother had died at Mount Sinai West hospital after suffering both lung and heart problems. “She was an extremely talented artist, and we will be working on her legacy and the incredible paintings and works she is leaving us with,” Engel said.
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 Picasso, whom she met in 1943 at age 21, his junior by four decades. The union produced two children — Claude and Paloma Picasso. But unlike the other key women in Picasso’s life — wives or paramours — Gilot eventually walked out.
“He never saw it coming,” Engel said of her mother’s departure. “She was there because she loved him and because she really believed in that incredible passion of art which they both shared. (But) she came as a free, though very, very young, but very independent person.”
Gilot herself told The Guardian newspaper in 2016 that “I was not a prisoner” in the relationship.
“I’d been there of my own will, and I left of my own will,” she said, then 94. “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.’ ”
Gilot wrote several books, the most famous of which was “Life with Picasso,” written in 1964 with Carlton Lake. An angry Picasso sought unsuccessfully to ban its publication. “He attacked her in court, and he lost three times,” said Engel, 66, an architect by training who now manages her mother’s archives. But, she said, “after the third loss he called her and said congratulations. He fought it, but at the same time, I think he was proud to have been with a woman who had such guts like he had.”
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,” Engel said. In accordance with her parents’ wishes, she studied law, however, while maintaining art as her true passion. She first exhibited her paintings in 1943.
That was the year she met Picasso, by chance, when she and a friend visited a restaurant on the Left Bank, amid a…
