Francoise Gilot was a young painter in Paris when she first met Picasso – he was sixty-two and she was twenty-one. During the following ten years they were lovers, worked closely together and she became mother to two of his children, Claude and Paloma. Life with Picasso, her account of those extraordinary years, is filled with intimate and astonishing revelations about the man, his work, his thoughts and his friends – Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Giacometti, among others. Francois Gilot paints a compelling portrait of her turbulent life with the temperamental (and even abusive) genius that was Picasso. As one of the few intimate witnesses to Picasso as a human being and as an artist, her account of him is invaluable for assessing him on both counts.
I picked this book up while researching Picasso for the podcast and came to love Françoise Gilot. Her temperament is fascinating, and she looks at everything without rose-colored glasses and also without the anger that would normally accompany such reflections. It’s an intimate look at her life living with Picasso for ten years, where she learned and studied from him while putting up with his shitty (not her words) personality.
I’m obsessed with her now.
That said, it’s a hard read for people who have had relationships like this in the past. I had to take frequent breaks, and god, I hate Picasso. I hated Picasso before this and I hate Picasso more now. But Françoise! She is admirable, she is strong, and I admire her deeply. She left him in her thirties and went on to have a wonderful, fulfilling life afterwards. I’m about to crack open another book about her because I need to know what she did when she left his ass behind.
