The scene: a cloudless sky, a smooth sandy beach, a calm sea. A vibrant young woman walks toward the camera, straw hat framing her face like a rustic nimbus, a chunky necklace around her slender neck. Head thrown back she is grinning. Behind her, a stocky, bald man with hairy torso walks barefoot in the center of the frame, gazing into the photographer’s lens. He is holding a giant white parasol aloft, sheltering her from the sun. The photograph[1] was captured in 1948, halfway through their relationship.
The woman is French artist and memoirist, Françoise Gilot (1921-2023), who died last year at the age of 101. The man holding the parasol is Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Their relationship began when she was 21 and he was 61. She is perhaps best known as Picasso’s muse, and for leaving him.
Gilot was an artist in her own right. She had studied art since early childhood and painting seriously from the age of 17. When she met Picasso, her work was figurative and experimental. Under his influence, it became non-figurative, and, at his suggestion, she studied cubism in depth. She painted into her 90s and while the work from the decade she spent with Picasso shows his influence (how could it not?), as their relationship receded, she came into her own, with paintings commanding upwards of a million dollars in recent years. Of her work, the simple planes, rich colors, and mysterious atmosphere of 1982’s Red Door in India, captivate me.
Her obituary was carried in the New York Times, The Guardian, and the usual art outlets: only one did not mention Picasso in the headline. In a sense, it was her own undoing, she wrote – and dedicated to him – a memoir in 1964, Life with Picasso.[2] He tried, and failed, to block the publication of the memoir three times. In retaliation, he cut off all contact with Gilot and their children Claude and Paloma.
In the memoir, she paints a portrait of a vain, capricious man, who could dish out criticism and petty cruelties but could not take them. With prose as vivid and precise as her brush strokes — consider her description of how Picasso’s first wife, Olga Khoklova, “walked with short stiff steps like a little circus pony” — she holds up a mirror to the artist, and with stunning recall, documents his work, and his relationships with women, fellow artists, and dealers.
Twice she quotes Picasso’s famous proclamation that a woman could be either a “goddess or a doormat.” She proved that she was no doormat. Even after he railed, “No one leaves a man like me,” she did. She left him and forged a career and identity of her own. He tried to sabotage her career.
Her work is included in the collections of the Met, MOMA, Centre Georges Pompidou among others.
[1] taken by photographer Robert Capa (1913-1954)
[2] She wrote two other memoirs.: Interface: The Painter and the Mask, about her artistic life (1975) and Matisse and Picasso: a Friendship in Art (1990).
BAALM 