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Françoise Gilot (archive image from 2004)
Photo: JEAN-PIERRE MULLER / AFP
At the age of 101, the French painter and long-time partner of Pablo Picasso, Françoise Gilot, has died. This was confirmed by the Picasso Museum in Paris on Tuesday to the AFP news agency. According to the New York Times, Gilot, who lived with Picasso between 1946 and 1953 and later wrote a bestseller about her time with the painter of the century, died in a hospital in Manhattan.
Her daughter, Aurelia Engel, told the newspaper that Gilot had recently suffered from heart and lung problems. The artist had been living in New York for years.
Gilot was born in 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, west of Paris. Her mother was a watercolor artist, and Gilot also became a painter and had her first exhibition in a Parisian gallery in 1943. In the same year she met Picasso, who was about 40 years her senior. Gilot became the painter's mistress and moved in with him three years later. They had two children together, Claude and Paloma.
In 1953 Gilot left Picasso, she was the first lover of the painter who was able to break away. In her 1964 autobiography, Life with Picasso, she described him as a "tyrannical, superstitious and selfish creature."
Gilot herself had a successful career as a painter. Her works have been exhibited at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, among others. She was married twice.
phw/AFP