Françoise Gilot, who made celebrated paintings exhibited at the Met Gala and MoMA, and wrote a best-selling account of her years with Picasso, dies at 101.
“That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day,” Picasso told the two elegant young women upon learning they were artists. “Girls who look like that can’t be painters.”
Those men certainly influenced and inspired her, Ms. Gilot said. But there was no reason to view her as a supporting figure rather than a leading one. “Lions mate with lions,” she told Mirabella magazine. “They don’t mate with mice.” She dropped out of law school at the Sorbonne, an event that marked the beginning of a years-long estrangement from her father, and was studying at the Académie Julian art school when she began visiting Picasso’s studio in 1943 after their initial encounter at the bistro. By then, Picasso had separated from his first wife, Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova, and taken up with photographer Dora Maar. He soon abandoned her for Ms. Gilot.
The latter “acted like a visa on my passport to the realm of art,” Ms. Gilot said. Enchanted by her elegant figure , Matisse said he would be delighted to make a portrait of her, Ms. Gilot recalled, “in which my hair would be olive green, my complexion light blue, and in which of course he could not forget the angle of my eyebrows in relation to my nose.
On another occasion, she said he pointed to a waste pile in his studio and told her, “You don’t count any more for me than that dust there.” She replied: “The difference is that I’m the kind of dust that doesn’t like being swept out — the kind that will leave when it wants to.”When they finally separated, in 1953, Ms. Gilot said Picasso sought to take his revenge by sabotaging her art career, persuading some galleries not to exhibit or sell her paintings.
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