When the artist Françoise Gilot published Life with Picasso (McGraw-Hill, 1964), galleries and collectors shut her out, blocking her career for years. Reissued in 2019, it was hailed both as art history and a feminist manifesto. Until then, Picasso’s women were pliant, abused, and objectified—visible only in his paintings, in the way he chose to present them.
Gilot, who had lived with him for a decade and borne two of his children, refused that role. Her memoir, co-written with the American literary critic Carlton Lake, sold more than a million copies and tore open the myth of the untouchable genius. For the first time, Picasso appeared both as master of twentieth-century art and as an abuser.
Picasso’s greatness was never in doubt. Born in Málaga in 1881, he co-founded Cubism, reinvented classical figuration, and painted Guernica (1937)—twisted bodies and a shrieking horse, his searing cry against the German-Italian bombing of the Basque town during Spain’s civil war. By mid-century, he was revered as “the greatest living artist”. But as the women in his life discovered, to live with him was to orbit the sun of modernism itself—and to risk being consumed by its heat.
To understand Gilot’s memoir, we look at his women. Olga Khokhlova, his first wife: a ballerina with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, she married him in 1918, gave up her stage career, bore him a son, and inspired his stately neoclassical portraits. Then came the inevitable devaluation. He grew restless, flaunting affairs—most cruelly with the teenage Marie-Thérèse Walter—until Olga left in despair in 1935. Picasso refused divorce; she drifted from hotels to sanatoria, still legally Madame Picasso when she died in 1955.
Dora Maar, the gifted Surrealist photographer who followed, unravelled under the strain, descending into breakdown and seclusion. Marie-Thérèse, the youthful muse, lived as his shadow and, after his death, took her own life. The blueprint was marked in stone: women who gave everything to Picasso’s genius were left broken, bereft, silenced, or dead.
Gilot, already an artist and just 21, stepped into Picasso’s orbit in 1943. Picasso, then 61, greeted her ambition with a sneer: “Girls who look like you could never be painters” (The Guardian). A classically poised beauty, she ignored him. She kept painting, already exhibiting her canvases, and entered his life not as a muse but as an artist. Yet, unable to resist his brilliance, she moved in with him. She knew what she was risking. As she told CBS News, “If you are intimidated, then you don’t go there. Either you have courage, or you don’t in life. If you have courage, you receive a few bumps here and there.” The courage was in living with him; the greater courage was in leaving.
For a decade, she inhabited the peculiar intimacy of his household, where past lovers were never dismissed but arranged in orbit. “Picasso always kept the past alive,” she remembered; Marie-Thérèse’s letters were read aloud, Dora Maar’s presence palpable. No woman could live only in the present with him.
Her memoir is startling in its candour. Picasso once told her, as she recalled in CBS News, that “women are either goddesses or doormats”. Unlike his previous women, Gilot was no doormat. Her memoir captured both the magnetism of his presence and the menace of his power. In The Irish Times, she admitted, “I knew that here was something larger than life, something to match myself against. I had the feeling that … I ran the risk of resounding failure; it was a challenge I could not turn down.” That mixture of attraction and foreboding defined their decade together.
In those years, he belittled her, warning her she would never be known on her own terms. Picasso reportedly told her (The Guardian): “You imagine people will be interested in you? They won’t ever, really, just for yourself … It will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life touched mine so intimately.”
His contempt, sudden rages, and physical intimidation made life unbearable. To stay meant living as a subordinate, a shadow, a possession. In 1953, at 31, Gilot walked out with her children, Claude and Paloma, leaving behind the volatility and violence that threatened both her self-hood and their safety. She was the only woman ever to leave Picasso of her own accord.
Picasso’s fury was immediate: he sabotaged her exhibitions, cut her off from dealers, and sued repeatedly to suppress her book. He lost in every court. But he severed contact with her and with their children, never speaking to them again.
The publication of Life with Picasso was an act of survival and self-definition. In one of Gilot’s most memorable retrospective lines, she declared, “Picasso was the prelude to my life. But not my life.” The phrasing is simple but devastating, repositioning herself as the main character of her own story.
Where Olga had faded into obscurity, Dora into collapse, and Marie-Thérèse into despair, Gilot transformed her experience into testimony. She took control of the narrative that he believed belonged only to him.
Gilot’s later life vindicated her decision. In 1970, she married Jonas Salk, the scientist who developed the polio vaccine. She painted prolifically, moving toward luminous abstraction that carried her far from the portraits of the 1940s. She exhibited in Paris, New York, California, and beyond. For decades, Gilot was introduced as “Picasso’s former lover”, but she lived long enough to outlast the epithet.
The final reversal came after her death at 101 in 2023. In 2024, the Musée Picasso in Paris mounted a landmark exhibition that for the first time dedicated a gallery to her work alone. There were no portraits he had made of her, no photographs of their life together—only Françoise Gilot, artist. Paintings, ceramics, and works on paper were displayed chronologically, charting her evolution from figuration to abstraction.
As Smithsonian Magazine reported, curators admitted it was “absolutely insane” she had been sidelined so long and noted pointedly: “There are none of the pictures he did of her or photographs; instead, it concentrates on Françoise Gilot as an artist.” The exhibition even included her memoir as a central object, acknowledging that writing was as much a part of her legacy as painting.
This gesture was monumental. Picasso had once used his influence to blacklist her from the French art world. Yet six decades later, the museum that bears his name presented her as an equal voice in modern art. She had outlived him by half a century and outlasted the legend he tried to impose upon her.
What allowed her to resist when others could not? Courage, certainly, but also her dedication to art. She preserved her creative identity where others surrendered theirs. She painted, and she wrote, using both brush and pen to secure her place in history. She refused to be either muse or victim. She remained herself.
She left, she wrote, she rebuilt. Picasso told her no one leaves a man like him. With Life with Picasso and with the career and recognition that followed, Françoise Gilot proved him wrong.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir Love The Dark Days.
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