Françoise Gilot

Françoise Gaime Gilot (English: zhee-LOH, French: [fʁɑ̃swaz ʒilo]; 26 November 1921 – 6 June 2023) was a French painter. Gilot first made her mark in the post-war milieu of artists who redefined the European artistic landscape. With a career that spanned more than seven decades, her work was largely produced in watercolors and ceramics, and combined elements of abstraction, figuration, and symbolism, often drawing on mythology, personal experience, and themes of transformation. Gilot exhibited widely in Europe and the United States and was represented by major galleries, with her paintings held in numerous public and private collections.

Gilot was also known for her relationship with artist Pablo Picasso, with whom she shared a decade-long partnership and had two children. Unlike many of Picasso's other companions, she left him and later became the only one to publicly recount her experiences in the memoir Life with Picasso (1964), which became an international bestseller despite Picasso's opposition. In the decades following their separation, Gilot deliberately established an independent artistic identity, gaining increasing institutional recognition late in life, including major retrospectives and permanent museum installations that affirmed her significance as an artist in her own right. In 2021, her painting Paloma à la Guitare, a 1965 portrait of her daughter, sold for $1.3 million at Sotheby's in London.