Françoise Gilot y Pablo Picasso

 

Françoise Gilot y Picasso

Françoise Gilot and Pablo Picasso

Françoise Gilot y Picasso

Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe review – artist as lothario

 

 Picasso and Françoise Gilot

REVIEW

Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe review – artist as lothario

This article is more than 2 months old

Françoise Gilot is the most compelling figure in this biography of the painter’s lovers – but you get the feeling she would have loathed this book

Rachel Cooke
Monday 24 March 2025

“No woman leaves a man like me,” Pablo Picasso is supposed to have declared to Françoise Gilot, his partner and the mother of two of his children, in the spring of 1953. The couple had by this point been together for a decade, their first encounter having taken place in 1943 in a black market cafe in Paris (Picasso, who was then 61, had approached the 21-year-old Gilot bearing a bowl of cherries). But now he’d become involved with Jacqueline Roque, the woman with whom he’d go on to spend the final years of his life.

What to do about this? Gilot would not confront him. Better simply to call his bluff. “I am very secretive,” she said in an interview in 2016. “I smile and I’m polite, but that doesn’t mean that… I will do as I said I will do… He thought I would react like all his other women. That was a completely wrong opinion.” The following year, the question of her relationship with Picasso was resolved when she married a painter called Luc Simon.

Jacqueline Picasso, 1977. Photograph: Andre SAS/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Gilot, clever and hard working, was an artist in her own right whose relationship to Picasso even in later life was vexed. In 1964, she published a brilliant, bestselling memoir of her time with him (he was enraged, and so was the French establishment on his behalf), but thereafter, she often disdained to talk of him. She preferred to discuss her work, which is held by, among other institutions, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. If Picasso’s influence on her art was clear, she was adamant that it had made its mark before she met him (she had studied his pictures). Leaving him hadn’t been liberating, she insisted, for the simple reason that she hadn’t been a prisoner in the first place.

Self-containment is tricky given that Picasso usually began his next relationship before he had ended his last

Gilot appears on the cover of Sue Roe’s new book, Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso, in a famous photograph by Robert Doisneau, and from the moment you look at it – her famous lover reclines on a divan in the background, wearing a Breton shirt – the feeling grows that there’s something wrong here. She would surely have loathed this book, and not only because it defines all its subjects only in relation to Picasso; try as Roe might to insist that each of her women is equally worthy of attention, there’s no getting away from the fact that this is not the case. Several books have been written about Gilot, and I’d be happy to read any of them (I recommend About Women, a collection of conversations between her and the American writer Lisa Alther). But about other of Picasso’s lovers there is, I’m afraid, somewhat less to be said.

Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, c1920s. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

The book comprises six biographical essays, though self-containment is tricky given that Picasso usually began his next relationship before he had ended his last (the book’s structure isn’t always fit for the time frames involved). It begins with Fernande Olivier, the artist’s model who lived with him in Montmartre between 1905 and 1912, and who appears, in various guises, in many of the Rose Period portraits. She is succeeded by the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, and she, in turn, by the model Marie-Thérèse Walter. Next comes Dora Maar, the photographer and painter, to be followed by Gilot and Roque, a saleswoman in a pottery shop. After Gilot, Maar is the most interesting, not least for her influence on Picasso’s Guernica (she first caught Picasso’s attention in a cafe by peeling off her gloves and stabbing between her fingers with a penknife).

Sometimes, there’s light relief. The scene – possibly unreliable, since several different accounts of it exist – in which Walter and Maar physically fight as Picasso looks on is straight out of a film by François Ozon. But mostly – Gilot being the exception – Picasso leaves these women devastated. It’s not only his restlessness and unthinking cruelty; while once they were living in Technicolor, now they’re back in black and white. Roe tells her stories straightforwardly, though she can be both repetitive and a touch Mills & Boon (“We can only imagine the chemistry between the charismatic, seductive, black-eyed painter, who by all accounts exuded charisma even when standing still; and the poised, serious dancer…”). If this territory is new to you, the book won’t be without interest. But as a feminist project, however well-intentioned, it misfires badly.

 Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe is published by Faber (£25). 

THE GUARDIAN

Françoise Gilot / La Marionette, 1955

 

La Marionette (Claude and Paloma Picasso with Germaine Brooks), 1955. Oil on canvas.

Françoise Gilot. 

Françoise Gilot

La Marionette (Claude and Paloma Picasso with Germaine Brooks), 1955.

Françoise Gilot (French, b. 1921)
La Marionette (Claude and Paloma Picasso with Germaine Brooks), 1955
Oil on canvas
46 x 28-1/2 inches (116.8 x 72.4 cm)
Signed lower left: F. Gilot.
Titled and dated on the stretcher bar: La Marionette 1955

PROVENANCE:
Collection of the artist;
Vincent Mann Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana;
Acquired by the present owner from the above, February 20, 2010.

EXHIBITED:
Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, n.d..;
New Orleans, Louisiana, Collection Privée: Early Works by Françoise Gilot 1940-1960," February-May, 2010.

LITERATURE:
M. Yoakum and D. Vierny, Françoise Gilot: Monograph 1940-2000, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2000, p. 135.

Famous for her bold, modernist canvases and successful career as a painter in postwar Paris, Françoise Gilot is also renowned for having been the muse and lover of Pablo Picasso. While her story may be inextricably linked to 20th century art's most towering figure, Gilot's remarkable life and vast oeuvre is extremely impressive on its own merits. In a career spanning over seven decades, her distinct artistic language reveals a mastery of modernist concepts, technical skill, and a dual focus on both personal and universal themes. A sort of playful abstraction, Gilot's style lies somewhere between that of Picasso and Henri Matisse, whom she also counted as a close friend and mentor.

Jacqueline Roque y Pablo Picasso

How Pablo Picasso’s Wives and Mistresses Inspired His Art

The Spanish artist had a reputation for breaking the hearts of numerous women whom he used as muses for his work.

EUDIE PAK
MAY 28, 2020
ORIGINAL: JUN 21, 2019

Sex, love and art were interconnected in the world of Pablo Picasso, and while some of his supporters would argue he had a demonstrably tender side towards women, it would be difficult to deny that the serial philanderer, by and large, used his wives and mistresses as a means to a self-serving end — that end being his artistic identity.

"There are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats," Picasso once said.

A Conversation with Françoise Gilot

 

Françoise Gilot

A Conversation with Françoise Gilot

Posted on Sept. 10, 2016

“What makes you smile?” our photographer asks Françoise Gilot. Her serious expression suddenly shifts into a delighted grin. Everyone laughs. We are in the Colas Engel Art Gallery in North Park, where Gilot’s paintings are on exhibit in advance of Symphony at Salk, the annual concert and benefit for the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. The internationally-known artist and author has served as Honorary Chair since the event’s inception in 1994, and her strong, dynamic works have been featured as the event’s signature posters. “I paint for me,” says Gilot who began studying art as a child. “It’s a natural thing. It’s a way of expressing both my ideas and also my passions.”

Françoise Gilot / Blue eyes / Les yeux bleus

 

Françoise Gilot

Françoise Gilot Blue eyes (Les yeux bleus)

By Ted Gott | 20 Dec 18

Inspired by her mother, who was a watercolourist, Françoise Gilot decided to become an artist herself at the age of five. She was tutored first by her mother and then by her mother’s art teacher. In 1938 Gilot attained a Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy) at the University of Paris, and then completed another degree in English literature at Cambridge University in 1939. In order to please her father Gilot enrolled to study law from 1940−42, during the Nazi Occupation of Paris, but eventually decided to pursue a full-time career as an artist, spending her time sketching in Paris subways and cafes. Her art heroes at this time were the masters of the Italian Quattrocento, as well as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. In 1941 at the Salon des Tuileries she met a young Hungarian painter Endre Rozsda, who was an enthusiast of Surrealism and the work of Pablo Picasso, who allowed her to work in his studio. Gilot now developed an interest in the work of Henri Matisse and Georges Braque. In Paris from 1943–45 she studied at the Académie Julian, the Académie Ranson and the École des Beaux-Arts.

In 1943 Gilot held her first exhibition in Paris, showing work alongside another artist friend, Geneviève Aliquot. In this same year, at age twenty-one, she met Pablo Picasso. The two were romantically linked as partners for the next decade, and had two children together, Claude and Paloma. Following the war, the couple lived primarily in the south of France. Gilot continued to work as an independent artist during and after her relationship with Picasso. In 1949 she entered into a contractual arrangement with the Galerie Louise Leiris, becoming the first woman artist to exhibit with this prestigious gallery in 1952. Gilot separated from Picasso in September 1953, leaving the home she shared with him in Vallauris and returning to Paris with their children. In May 2016 Françoise Gilot recalled:

'Life With Picasso' Stands As An Invaluable Work Of Art History

'Life With Picasso' Stands As An Invaluable Work Of Art History

Nightmare at the Picasso Museum

Lily Meyer
June 6, 2019

When the French painter and writer Françoise Gilot was 21, she met an older artist at a Paris restaurant. He invited her to visit his studio, and they quickly fell in love.

She defied her bourgeois family by moving in with him, and they remained together for 10 years. They raised two children, and she slowed her own career to be his muse, manager and support system. But this became untenable, and she left him, becoming a highly successful painter in her own right. As for the older artist — well, he was Pablo Picasso.

Françoise Gilot in Manhattan

Françoise Gilot in Manhattan

Françoise Gilot, October 2011 in her Manhattan atelier. Gilot is a French painter and bestselling author. She is also known as the lover and artistic muse of Pablo Picasso from 1944 to 1953, and the mother of his children, Claude Picasso and Paloma Picasso. She was married to Jonas Salk.

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Françoise Gilot in Paris

Françoise Gilot in Paris

Françoise Gilot in her studio with Paloma and Claude, Paris, 1956.