In 1946, not long after she fell in love with Pablo Picasso, Françoise Gilot made a painting called: Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple. Two flat, angular figures sit at a table. The woman placidly clasps her hands in front of her as the man—bald, blocky, with one dark, piercing eye shown in profile—thrusts the fruit into her mouth. Temptation, knowledge, punishment, exile: these are things, in Gilot’s version of Genesis, that come from man, even if it is woman who will be blamed. It is interesting to note, that in the painting Françoise Gilot mirrors her relationship with Picasso. The characters in the painting are Picasso and Gilot.
The artist Françoise Gilot was only 21 years old when she first met Pablo Picasso in 1943. One evening, in Paris, the two happened to be dining at the same restaurant. Picasso was there with his then partner Dora Maar and friends; Gilot with hers. At the end of the meal, Picasso walked over to Gilot’s table, offering a bowl of cherries and an invitation to visit his studio on Rue des Grands-Augustins. Picasso had already become an internationally famous artist, and Gilot observed that he no longer seemed like the “handsome animal” captured in Man Ray’s famous photographs from the 1920s and 1930s. Yet she was captivated. He was 61.
The same year, Gilot moved in with Picasso. A friend warned that she was headed for catastrophe. “I told her she was probably right, but I felt it was the kind of catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid,” Gilot recalls in her remarkable 1964 memoir: Life with Picasso, written with the art critic Carlton Lake. In it, Gilot describes a decade-long love affair with Picasso. She, too, was a serious painter, with ambitions to make a name for herself. Picasso eventually persuaded her to abandon her family and move in with him. At once, she became his student, partner, assistant, and then the mother of their two children, Claude and Paloma.
The book focuses more on Picasso than her own progression as a painter and mother. Gilot was there to witness Picasso’s explorations with ceramics while living in Vallauris in the South of France, as well as his pioneering sculpture, lithography and assemblages. Gilot was also his subject, famously depicted in his 1946 painting “La Femme-Fleur,” inspired by a visit to Henri Matisse’s home. Teasingly, Matisse suggested to the competitive Picasso that if he were ever to paint Gilot, he would paint her hair green. In “La Femme-Fleur,” Gilot’s hair resembles leaves, her stemlike body sprouting abstract limbs and breasts.
By the early 1950s, their relationship began to fray. “I think I loved Pablo as much as anyone can love someone else, but the thing he reproached me with later … was that I never trusted him. He may have been right, but it would have been hard for me to feel otherwise, since I came onstage with an unavoidably clear vision of three other actresses who had tried to play the same role, all of whom had fallen into the prompter’s box,” Gilot writes. She is alluding to Picasso’s previous wife Olga Khokhlova, as well as two other longtime mistresses: Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter. Of them all, Gilot was the only woman to ever walk away from Picasso.
Decades later, however, the book reads as surprisingly contemporary. Picasso is portrayed as both brilliant and tyrannical — possessive of Gilot but also careless with her desires and needs. As Picasso told Gilot, there are only two types of women: goddesses and doormats. The book does not diminish his art, but in its own way, it presents a man who could be remarkably self-absorbed and cruel to those closest to him. The myth of his genius must now contend with a frank depiction of his entitlement, immaturity and ego.
Most importantly, Gilot was more of an influence on Picasso than the other way around which Picasso never owed up.