Françoise Gilot, French painter, writer and ex-girlfriend of Pablo Picasso, died at the age of 101

The painter Françoise Gilot died at the age of 101, AFP learned on Tuesday June 6 from the Picasso museum, confirming information from the New York Times (article in English). According to the American daily, with which the death was confirmed by his daughter Aurélia Engel, the latter had recently suffered from “heart and lung diseases”.

Born November 26, 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine (west of Paris) into a bourgeois family, Françoise Gilot followed in the footsteps of her mother, a watercolourist, to move towards drawing and painting. A time muse to Pablo Picasso, she was an artist in her own right for more than 60 years, establishing herself as a renowned painter after their split with works in the collections of New York’s prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA.

In June 2021, one of his paintings, “Paloma à la Guitare” (1965), sold for $1.3 million at auction at Sotheby’s. She had among her mentors the surrealist Endre Rozsda and her first exhibition in a Parisian gallery took place in 1943, the year she met Picasso. She was then in her twenties, he was 61. The couple will have two children, Claude (born in 1947) and Paloma (born in 1949). But she left him in 1953, a first among Picasso’s companions.

In 1964, the publication of Living with Picasso, a relatively intimate book on his life with the artist, met with enormous success (translated into 16 languages, more than a million copies sold). She depicts him as a tyrannical, superstitious and selfish being. For her, this relationship was “a prelude to (his) life. Not the life”. Having become an American citizen, she had not gone to her funeral in 1973.

Spending the last years of her life in New York, she made the link between the Paris school of the 1950s and the American scene, exhibiting her paintings, drawings or prints in numerous museums and private collections, in Europe and in the United States. -United.