One of Picasso’s muses seems to have had the last laugh. Françoise Gilot famously walked away from the celebrated Spanish artist at the height of his fame (by the mid-1950s, Gilot’s relationship with Picasso had ended—they had two children together, Claude and Paloma Picasso). Gilot died last June in New York at the grand old age of 101. In a surprise twist, her life and art is commemorated in a small, temporary exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris. As we noted in our obituary, she was a tireless artist whose output spanned more than 80 years, defying simple categorisation and efforts to define her merely as a footnote in the story of her former lover.
Her assessment of their ten-year relationship, published in a 1965 memoir written with journalist Carlton Lake entitled Vivre avec Picasso (Life with Picasso), earned Gilot the ire of Picasso’s supporters and, eventually, made her a heroic figure in feminist art history (numerous intellectuals and artists even signed a petition in the communist paper Les Lettres Françaises calling for the book to be banned). “In addition to her famous book Vivre avec Picasso, the exhibition looks at the artist’s career, from her close association with the Réalités nouvelles group to the great totemic compositions of the ‘emblematic paintings’ of the 1980s,” says a press statement. Welcome back Françoise.
