Françoise Gilot was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France and pursued art in her early childhood, beginning with lessons from her mother, a watercolor painter. Her father, who wanted Gilot to be a lawyer, insisted she be highly educated, so she was tutored in the home from an early age. She received a BA in philosophy from the Sarbonne in 1938, and a degree in English from Cambridge in 1939. Despite her father’s pressure to pursue law, she continued to paint and had her first exhibit in Paris in 1943.
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Gilot began law school in 1939, but after several attempts to quit, failed her oral exams and finally dedicated herself completely to her art. In 1943, at the age of 21, she met the 61-year-old Pablo Picasso and moved in with him in 1946. Gilot became Picasso’s new muse and the mother of two children, Claude and Paloma. She also formed a good friendship with Matisse. Gilot stayed with Picasso until 1953 when, no longer willing to endure his temper and abuse, she left him. She was briefly married to painter Luc Simon from 1955-1961, giving birth to a daughter, Aurélia. Picasso took the breakup and her marriage badly and worked actively to undermine her career, even going so far as to pressure her art dealer to cancel her contract. She was able to join a new gallery and continued to exhibit in Paris and increasingly internationally. In 1964 she published Life with Picasso, detailing her time with the artist. The enraged Picasso sued—unsuccessfully—several times to stop publication. Gilot married Jonas Salk in 1969 and split her time between studios in La Jolla, New York, and Paris.
Gilot’s work is heavily influenced by her love of Greek mythology and by her trips to Venice, India, and Senegal. Her modernist style is loosely Cubist, referenced by her flat planes of color and planar shifts. Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, noted that “[Picasso] took from her rather more than she took from him.” Gilot was also a prolific printmaker and draftsperson. The Muskegon Museum of Art holds over 80 of her works on paper, including lithographs, drawings, and gouaches. The artist also visited the MMA on two occasions in the 1990s.