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CULTURE

French artist and Picasso’s one-time muse Françoise Gilot dies aged 101

French-born artist Françoise Gilot was a rising star of the art scene in Paris when she met Picasso in 1943

French artist and Picasso's one-time muse Françoise Gilot dies aged 101
Artist Françoise Gilot in 2004. AFP PHOTO JEAN-PIERRE MULLER (Photo by JEAN-PIERRE MULLER / AFP)

The Picasso Museum in Paris confirmed her death at the age of 101 to AFP, after the New York Times reported Gilot had passed away following recent heart and lung ailments.

“Pablo was the greatest love of my life, but you had to take steps to protect yourself. I did, I left before I was destroyed,” she confided in Janet Hawley’s 2021 book Artists and Conversation, in which she explained why she had walked out on him with their two children after a 10-year relationship.

“The others didn’t. They clung on to the mighty Minotaur and paid a heavy price,” she said, referring to Picasso’s first wife, dancer Olga Khokhlova, who lapsed into depression after he left her; his former teen lover, Marie-Therese Walter, who hanged herself; his second wife Jacqueline Roque, who shot herself; and his best-known muse, artist Dora Maar, who had a nervous
breakdown.

She described the painter of Guernica as, “astonishingly creative, a magician, so intelligent and seductive … But he was also very cruel, sadistic and merciless to others, as well as to himself.”

Gilot was 21 and a rising star of the Parisian art scene when she first met Picasso, 40 years her senior and married to Russian dancer Khokhlova, in occupied France during World War II. At the time of the meeting he was also the lover of French photographer, painter and poet Maar.

The meeting took place in a Paris restaurant in the spring of 1943 when he brought a bowl of cherries to her table and invited her to visit his studio.

They never married but had two children, a son, Claude, born in 1947, and a daughter, Paloma, in 1949.

He often painted her, portraying her as the radiant and haughty Woman-Flower in 1946. In Femme assise (1949), which sold for £8.5million ($9.6 million) at auction in London in 2012, he depicted her while heavily pregnant with Paloma.

When she walked out on him in 1953 and resumed her own artistic career, he told her she was headed “straight for the desert”. From that time on, his entourage snubbed her and her work.

“In France things had got rather difficult for me… leaving Picasso was seen as a big crime and I was no longer welcome,” she was quoted as saying by Sotheby’s in 2021.

She became a US citizen and did not attend his funeral in 1973.

Respected artist
Born on November 26, 1921, at Neuilly-sur-Seine to the west of Paris to a well-to-do family, she followed in her mother’s footsteps starting out as a watercolour artist, before moving on to drawing and painting.

Her parents wanted her to become a lawyer, but she abandoned her studies at the age of 19. By 21 she was already one of the most respected artists of the emerging School of Paris, which grouped French and emigre artists in the capital during the first half of the 20th century.

As she developed, she increasingly produced minimalist, colourful works and over her career signed at least 1,600 canvasses and 3,600 works on paper.

In her 1964 book Life with Picasso she portrayed him as a tyrant. Picasso failed in a legal bid to get the book banned, and retaliated by refusing to see her and their children.

She also wrote a book in 1991 on Picasso’s complicated love-hate relationship with the other giant of modern art, Matisse, with whom she was friends.

The two other men in her life were painter Luc Simon, with whom she had a daughter Aurelia, and American virologist Jonas Salk, inventor of the first polio vaccine, whom she married in 1970 and lived with in California until his death in 1995.

Gilot spent the last years of her life in New York, where she continued painting into her nineties.

In 2021 her painting Paloma a la Guitare, a 1965 portrait of her daughter, sold for $1.3million at Sotheby’s in London.

Her work graced the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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CULTURE

Paris museum takes visitors back 150 years to Impressionism’s birth

The Orsay Museum in Paris is marking 150 years of Impressionism from Tuesday with an unprecedented reassembling of the masterpieces that launched the movement, and a virtual reality experience that takes visitors back in time.

Paris museum takes visitors back 150 years to Impressionism's birth

Using VR technology, visitors to “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism” can take a plunge into the streets, salons and beauty spots that marked a revolution in art.

Through VR helmets, they can walk alongside the likes of Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Paul Cezanne on April 15, 1874, when, tired of being rejected by the conservative gatekeepers of the official art Salon, these rebellious young painters put on their own independent show, later seen as the birth of Impressionism.

The Orsay has brought together 160 paintings from that year, including dozens of masterpieces from that show, including the blood-red sun of Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise”, credited with giving the movement its name, and his “Boulevard des Capucines” where the exhibition took place.

READ MORE: Places to visit and things to do in France in Spring 2024

In rapid, spontaneous brushstrokes, the Impressionists captured everyday scenes of modern life, from Degas’s ballet dancers to Camille Pissaro’s countryside idylls to Auguste Renoir’s riverside party in “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”.

They came to define the excitement and restlessness of a new, modern age emerging out of a devastating war with Prussia and a short-lived Parisian revolt a few years earlier.

“The Impressionists wanted to paint the world as it is, one in the midst of major change,” said Sylvie Patry, co-curator of the exhibition.

“They were interested in new subjects: railways, tourism, the world of entertainment… They wanted to put sensations, impressions, the immediate moment at the heart of their painting,” she added.

‘Nuanced’

Thanks to loans from the National Gallery in Washington and other museums, it is the first time that many of the paintings — including Renoir’s “The Parisian Girl” and “The Dancer” — have hung together in 150 years.

The exhibition also includes works from that year’s official Salon, showing how the Impressionists rejected the stiff formalism of traditionalists and their obsession with great battles and mythological tales, but also how there was some cross-over, as all sorts of painters gradually adopted new styles.

“The story of that exhibition is more nuanced than we think,” said Patry.

“The artists all knew each other and had begun painting in this different style from the 1860s.”

Impressionism did not take off immediately: only some 3,500 people came to the first show, compared with 300,000 to the Salon, and only four paintings were sold out of some 200 works.

It would take several more exhibitions in the following years for the movement to make its mark.

The Orsay exhibition runs to July 14th and moves to Washington from September.

The virtual reality experience has been extended to the end of the Paris Olympics on August 11th.

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