‘As long as I am breathing,” Françoise Gilot once said, “I am painting.” It is no surprise then that the artist, who died earlier this month at the age of 101, has left behind a remarkable body of work: paintings, collages, ceramics, drawings and lithographs as well as poetry and prose – the fruits of a brilliant, 80-year career. Tributes poured out across the globe, as commentators seized the opportunity to reflect on Gilot’s achievements. But it turns out celebrating Gilot’s legacy is a bit of a Pandora’s box because, for 10 years, she was Pablo Picasso’s muse, his lover, the mother of two of his children and – let’s not forget – his artistic companion and intellectual equal. She was also, as Picasso liked to characterise her, “the woman who says no”.
And therein lies the problem: many of the articles have defined her life as inescapably entwined with his, as if the gold dust emanating from Picasso should be more than enough for any woman artist. Writing in the Guardian, Katy Hessel rightly asked: “Why is a great painter who lived to 101 still defined by a man she left in the 1950s?” This, thankfully, is part of a growing awareness, a desire to nurture a different kind of art history, one entirely more nuanced and inclusive. The Brooklyn Museum in New York is currently making waves with It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby, a show co-curated by the Australian standup who has attacked the artist in her routine.
After Gilot left Picasso in 1953, he ensured she paid a heavy price. When she dared to write her proto-feminist 1964 memoir Life With Picasso, which sold a million copies and was translated into 16 languages, the French establishment waded in on what Gilot referred to as “Picasso’s war on me”. Today, some 70 years after Gilot ended their relationship, the shadow he cast over her career is still in evidence in France, the country of her birth. That is why, to understand Gilot and her remarkable achievements, we first need to unpack the consequences of that relationship and debunk the myths that have grown up around it – not by chance, but as a byproduct of the never-ending burnishing of the Picasso brand.
When Gilot met Picasso in a Parisian cafe in 1943, at the height of the Nazi occupation, she was 21 and he was 61. Her nascent talents as a painter and ceramicist were already beginning to bloom, with her first successful exhibition already behind her. After a long courtship, she entered Picasso’s life as an artist – conscious, inevitably, of their difference in age but not lacking confidence in her own ability. She described how, over the next decade, she would lock herself away in her studio and paint for hours, shutting out Picasso’s world and building her own. “I accepted what [he] did,” she told the Guardian in 2016, “but that did not mean I wanted to do the same.”
Yet, in most accounts of the years Gilot spent with Picasso, if any reference is made to the fact that she was also an artist, it is only to suggest that she worked in his style. As early as 1952, the renowned French art critic George Besson went out of his way to refute this: “Françoise Gilot is no more Picasso’s double than Renoir is Courbet’s!”
And, to set the record straight, Gilot was never especially drawn to Picasso’s art. In fact, in her 1990 book Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art, she maintained that it was Matisse who fuelled her journey to abstraction. Even more crucially, what is rarely talked about is the way Gilot influenced Picasso. She was certainly the catalyst for one of his most fertile postwar ventures: his interest in ceramics. Having already mastered the medium – her mother was a ceramicist – Gilot accompanied Picasso to the Madura Pottery Workshop in Vallauris in 1946.
During their time together, Picasso personified Gilot as a radiant flower-woman or a symphonious dove of peace in a huge variety of two and three-dimensional works, but Gilot refused to be subsumed. “In what way was this me?” she once said. “It was me because I was simply there. It was part of what Picasso was doing at the time.” In reaction to this, she produced what amounts to a diary of resistance, repossessing her image through a series of powerful self-portraits. In these, she presents herself as a vital source of creativity and a rebuke to Picasso’s myth of the passive woman. Few of her paintings incorporated Picasso’s likeness. Tellingly, in one that did, called Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple I, he is portrayed as the angry figure of Adam ramming the fruit down Eve’s throat.
Gilot called Picasso Bluebeard, not out of affection but because, in her own words, “he wanted to cut off all the heads of the women he collected”. Subjected to Picasso’s cruel and abusive behaviour, in 1953 she became the only one of his partners to ever walk away, taking their two children, Claude and Paloma (aged six and four respectively). They went to live in her apartment on Paris’s Left Bank.
Picasso, enraged, destroyed her possessions, including artworks, books and her treasured letters from Matisse. Telling her she was “headed straight for the desert”, he then set out to destroy her career. Mobilising all his networks, he demanded that the Louise Leiris Gallery stop representing Gilot and that she no longer be invited to exhibit at the Salon de Mai. Explained away as the unfortunate behaviour of a moody genius, today this aggressive intervention is finally being seen for what it was: the devastating actions of a bully.
After Gilot published Life With Picasso (co-written with journalist Carlton Lake), the road ahead was even more perilous. Picasso launched three lawsuits to try to stop it, while 80 prominent intellectuals and artists – including Louis Aragon, Jacques Prévert, Anna-Eva Bergman and Pierre Soulages – rallied to his support, signing a petition in the communist paper Les Lettres Françaises, calling for the book to be banned.
“Gilot described this action, which led to a boycott of her work, as ‘civil death’,” Didier Ottinger, deputy director of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, recently told me. The narrative then becomes gallingly familiar: Picasso was exposed but Gilot suffered. Forced to abandon the country of her birth and the extensive support networks she had so carefully created – including a recent contract to design sets for the Champs Elysées theatre – she slowly rebuilt her life, exhibiting in London before moving to the US, where she established a successful career. Whether in works like her searing abstract and semi-abstract 1960s Labyrinth series, or again in 1993’s monochrome The Sleepwalker, the theme of the wanderer is ever-present, a reflection of her own displacement.
The 2020 documentary Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot: The Woman Who Says No includes a heartbreaking declaration by the then 99-year-old Gilot. “You can’t believe how much people dislike me in France,” she says. While Gilot’s reputation prospered in the US and elsewhere in Europe, with exhibitions in numerous galleries, in her native France the cold shoulder lasted right up to her death.
To mark Gilot turning 100 in 2021, one institution, the Musée Estrine in St Rémy de Provence, broke rank with a small exhibition showing around 50 works. Yet astonishingly, to this day Gilot has never been given a major retrospective in France. The Musée National d’Art Moderne, housed in the Pompidou, only purchased one work, Evier et Tomates, in 1952, while Gilot was still living with Picasso. (A second work was accepted as a gift in 1981). No less astonishingly, as recently as 2021, Gilot was excluded from Elles Font l’Abstraction, the Pompidou’s blockbuster exhibition of women abstract artists. Gilot does not even appear among the 1,000-plus artists on the database of the French initiative Aware: Archives of Women Artists.
The world still loves Picasso. Each year, books and exhibitions reaffirm his reputation as one of the world’s greatest ever artists. This year alone, 50 global exhibitions and events are marking the 50th anniversary of his death. Each bolsters the longstanding premise: if there is anything too challenging about the backstory, don’t forget Picasso was a genius. Men are given free passes, women are not.
The decade Gilot spent with Picasso does not define her as an artist. In 1984, she told Paris Match: “Picasso was the prelude to my life. But not my life.” There are those who believe she is only remembered because of her relationship with him, despite the fact that his impact on her career was quantifiably devastating. This, sadly, is why we must mention Picasso when talking of Gilot – and by that we mean the real Picasso, not the myth.
Yes, Gilot was so much more than her relationship with Picasso, but until France wakes up to the damage caused by his war on her, and the incalculably powerful influence wielded by his entourage, it will remain impossible to do justice to her life and work. “In France,” wrote Philippe Dagen in Le Monde after her death, “it would be an understatement to say that interest in Gilot’s work was late in coming and minimal.” Dagen suggested that “a retrospective at the Picasso Museum in Paris is surely imperative”.
If we are finally to give Gilot her due, then we need to be able to see her work on show and in all its glory. And then, when it comes to any assessment of Gilot’s extraordinary art and life, Picasso will be confined to her shadow.
• Sacha Llewellyn runs RAW (Rediscovering Art by Women) and is co-writing a biography of Françoise Gilot
