Françoise Gilot: How Picasso's former muse became a force of her own in the art world

Known as the only woman to ever leave Picasso, Gilot has rubbed shoulders with the likes of Henri Matisse and Georges Braque – but she claims her art is not influenced by anyone

When Gilot and Picasso met, he was 61 and she was 21 (Keystone/Getty)

The 96-year-old French painter and author Françoise Gilot – famously known as the former lover and muse to Pablo Picasso, and the mother of two of his children, Claude and Paloma – published a book of sketches last month that she completed during her travels to India, Senegal and Venice between 1974 and 1981.

While most artists use sketchbooks to harness their impressions into material for their work – to help them remember – Gilot has used hers to forget.

“Things I have seen, I want to take them out of my mind,” she tells me as we sat in her brightly lit living room on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. (Gilot’s home doubles as a studio in which she paints nearly every day. Canvases are hung on the two-storey-high walls, stacked on the floor and displayed on easels.) “Art doesn’t come from what is around you, but from what is inside of you.”

This philosophical approach is unmistakable in the new monograph (published by Taschen) Françoise Gilot: Three Travel Sketchbooks, which includes drawings and watercolours that bear little stylistic resemblance to her public work. Instead, they offer an intimate glimpse into Gilot’s inner life.

Her distinctly whimsical sensibility permeated our conversation. When asked about her years with Picasso and the comparisons that have been made between their work, she replies with a sly grin: “Sometimes you need an umbrella when it rains.”

But Gilot has hardly lived her life under the shelter of that umbrella. Dorothea Elkon, her New York gallery owner and long-time friend, stresses Gilot’s fierce independence. While the legacy of her relationship with Picasso has endured as an undeniable presence in her life (Paloma Picasso calls it a “nuisance” to her mother), Gilot has worked hard to maintain her autonomous presence in the art world. “It’s a dedication that’s essential in her life,” says Paloma Picasso, who vividly recalls being a child, sitting on the balcony outside her mother’s studio and watching her paint for hours.

Gilot was born in a suburb of Paris in 1921. Her mother was an artist, and her father, an agronomist, insisted that his daughter pursue a law degree after she graduated from the Sorbonne in 1938 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. But while enrolled in law school, Gilot studied art in her free time – entering into the tutelage of Hungarian painter Endre Rozsda, who would become a lifelong mentor and friend – and she eventually abandoned the legal track.

Gilot with Picasso in November 1948 (AFP/Getty)

She met Picasso at Le Catalan restaurant in Paris, in 1943. She was 21; he was 61. During their roughly 10 years together (a period described at length in her best-selling 1964 memoir Life with Picasso), Gilot mingled in a group that included Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, though today she claims her art is not influenced by anyone. “I don’t believe in influences,” she says. (Picasso’s biographer John Richardson agreed: “Picasso took from her rather more than she took from him.”)

By the autumn of 1953, Gilot had ended the relationship. Picasso was displeased; after all, she was allegedly the only woman ever to have left him. He ran her out of town and turned the Paris art world against her, Elkon said. In 1955, she married French artist Luc Simon. Their marriage lasted only a few years and produced one daughter, Aurelia. In 1970, Gilot married virologist Jonas Salk; they were together until his death in 1995.

The sketches in this latest book are a stylistic departure from her body of work, and she considers them deliberately unfinished, completed as they were in notebooks she kept while travelling with Salk when he was collecting research for the polio vaccine he would go on to develop (except for the sketches from Venice, a city that has captivated her since childhood). They contain watercolour drawings but also words, written in careful, beautiful script. For Gilot, colours, text and shapes are used interchangeably – synesthetically.

“If you can think of something in words, then you can see it in images too,” she says.

Narrative has always been paramount to Gilot. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that line the walls of her apartment, which is just down the block from the Hotel des Artistes, are a testament to her literary mind. Visual monographs on Claude Monet, Francis Bacon and, yes, Picasso are shelved alongside volumes of TS Eliot, Shakespeare and Evelyn Waugh. She has published collections of her own verse, and even these sketchbooks contain full pages devoted solely to her handwritten text. “I was always good with poetry and letters,” she says.

Gilot’s friend, actor and playwright Thérèse Crémieux, who interviewed her for the pamphlet that is included in Three Travel Sketchbooks, is the one who convinced her to publish this book. Gilot was hesitant. “Françoise said, ‘No, it’s not going to interest anyone,’” says Crémieux, who argues that readers would like to see what Gilot calls “the process”.

Interest in Gilot’s work has surged recently (AFP/Getty)

Completed mostly on tiny, bumpy plane rides between remote corners of the world after she had taken time to reflect on the moments she had encountered, the sketches favour figures over scenes: “A landscape is always there and the people are not,” Gilot says.

“You can call it a diary,” she adds. “What I draw has meaning. In my mind, I notice what I feel, and not what is there.”

Aurelia Simon – who, in addition to being Gilot’s daughter, is also her archivist – notes that if you look through her body of work, “you can see all of the people in her life coming through, all of the friends, the men in her life, the children growing up, the places she went. You can really feel the emotion she is going through and how she reacts, and what catches her eye or memory.”

Intimacy aside, the sketches in this book also betray a remarkable raw talent. “Her draftsmanship is exquisite,” says Jill McGaughey, owner of the Mac-Gryder Gallery in New Orleans, who has represented her for the last 10 years. “She has such great control and economy of her lines. Everything has a purpose. She’s got a great sense of movement in her lines and in her figures. They’re lyrical.”

The publication coincides with a period of particular commercial success for Gilot. “In the last 10 years, there’s been a tremendous snowball of interest in her work,” McGaughey says. “Pieces that sold for $10,000 (£7620) 10-15 years ago are twice that or more now. The market can’t get enough of her.”

A few weeks after I met with Gilot, I visited the Elkon Gallery on the Upper East Side where several of her works are held. Two of those works had been viewed by a potential buyer that week: a painting of herself with Paloma, Protection, from 1954, and a drawing, Self-Portrait by the Sea, from 1946, which she completed when she was 25 – the year she began living with Picasso.

In the 1946 drawing, she is looking upward and there is a man in the background walking towards her. It reminded me of something she said about her art when we met: “In the work of all the generations of painters who were like Picasso, the figure is so huge, it’s all over the painting,” she explained. “Whereas me, I have turned it the other way around. The figure is lost in a universe that is very much bigger.” One could say the same about her personal outlook on life, too.

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