Francoise Gilot

Françoise Gilot was a French painter who formed part of the School of Paris, which flourished in France’s capital after World War II. Her art career spanned eight decades, and her paintings show a constant experiment with colour and form. Gilot also had a 10-year relationship with Pablo Picasso, which she documented in a best-selling memoir from 1964 called Life with Picasso.

She was born in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1921. Her father was an agronomist, and her mother a ceramicist. The former wanted Gilot to take up a career in law, and was furious when she abandoned legal studies to attend the Académie Julian and become an artist instead.

Her first exhibition took place in 1943, the same year she met Picasso. Gilot would go on to describe their tempestuous relationship as ‘a catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid’. The Spaniard had an impact on her early work: in her distortions of the human figure, for example, though Gilot’s tended to be more lyrical and less violent than his.

She also produced many self-portraits during her time with Picasso. These are sometimes interpreted as an attempt to repossess her own image, given that Gilot frequently served as his model and muse.

The saturated colour of Henri Matisse’s art was another influence on Gilot at around this time. Her painting from 1953, Concert on the Green (Le Concert Champêtre), fetched €1.31 million at Christie’s in 2024, setting a record for the highest price ever paid for a work by Gilot at auction.

In the 1960s, she embraced abstraction and produced one of her best-known series, ‘Labyrinth’, comprising 50 canvases inspired by the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In 1970, she married Jonas Salk, the American virologist who had developed the world’s first successful polio vaccine. The pair would remain together until his death 25 years later.

Gilot was a skilled printmaker, regularly working in techniques such as lithography and aquatint. In 1980, she began making her so-called ‘Floating Paintings’, canvases painted on both sides, which hang away from a wall and seem almost to float in mid-air.

In 2009, Gilot was named an Officer of the Legion of Honour by the French state. She died in 2023, aged 101.