• Picasso sculptor shows: when the genius discovered that the canvas was not enough
  • Picasso's formative stage in the windy city: the decisive years in A Coruña

The artist Françoise Gilot, who was Pablo Picasso's partner for a decade, died in the last hours in a Manhattan hospital at 101 years of age, according to The New York Times, which cites a daughter of the deceased.

Gilot suffered from lung and heart problems, his daughter Aurelia said.

Author of a book entitled Life with Picasso, published in 1964, Gilot was not only one of the few women who left the Spanish painter by her will, but also rebuilt her sentimental and artistic life and had a remarkable career in the United States as a painter and writer after their separation.

Gilot met Picasso in 1943, when she was 21 and he was 61 and the two were coupled. They never married but maintained a relationship for ten years and had two children together, Claude and Paloma.

At a time when the figure of Picasso is being reinterpreted as a manipulative and macho man, the newspaper recalls an excerpt from the book, when Gilot announced to the painter that he was leaving him and Picasso reacted like this:

"Do you think someone is going to be interested in you? They'll never do it just for you: even the people you think appreciate you, it'll just be a kind of curiosity for a person whose life touched mine so intimately," he told her.

The book was a bestseller and despite its mostly friendly tone with his ex-lover – he even dedicated it "to Pablo" – it infuriated Picasso, who withdrew the word, as well as the two common children.

And although the book and her status as an ex-lover of the genius was what gave her more fame, her career as a painter was successful and several of her paintings are part of the collections of the MET Museum, the MoMA or the Pompidou Center in Paris; even in 2021 a work of hers entitled "Dove with a guitar" sold for 1.3 million dollars at an auction at Sothebys.

  • Paris
  • United States
  • Pablo Picasso
  • New York
  • Painting

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Learn more