According to the American daily, with which the death was confirmed by Aurélia Engel, his daughter Françoise Gilot had recently suffered from "heart and lung diseases."
Born on November 26, 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris in a bourgeois family, François Gilot followed in the footsteps of his watercolorist mother to move towards drawing and painting.
Once a muse of Pablo Picasso, she was an artist in her own right for more than 60 years, establishing herself as a renowned painter after their separation from works in the collections of the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York.
In June 2021, one of his paintings, "Paloma à la Guitare" (1965), sold for $1.3 million at auction at Sotheby's.
Her mentors included the surrealist Endre Rozsda and her first exhibition in a Parisian gallery was in 1943, the year she met Picasso. She was then in her twenties, he was 61 years old. The couple had two children, Claude (born 1947) and Paloma (born 1949).
In 1964, the publication of "Living with Picasso", a relatively intimate book about his life with the artist, met with enormous success (translated into 16 languages, more than a million copies sold). She portrays him as a tyrannical, superstitious and selfish being. For her, this relationship was "a prelude to (her) life. Not life."
Having become an American citizen, she did not attend his funeral in 1973.
Spending the last years of her life in New York, she was the link between the Paris School of the 1950s and the American scene, exhibiting her paintings, drawings and prints in many museums and private collections in Europe and the United States.
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© 2023 AFP