When Françoise Gilot’s memoir about her relationship with Picasso first came out, in 1964, his supporters denounced her as a spiteful ingrate—they believed that his genius justified the harm he did to others. Now the popular view is at the opposite pole.
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.
The Bluebeard story is one of escape: just as he is about to behead yet another wife, her brothers swoop in and save her. So is Gilot’s, but she did the saving herself. After ten years and two children with Picasso—Claude, born in 1947, and Paloma, born in 1949—she left him, becoming, in the Picasso mythology, the only one of “his” women to do so of her own accord. That distinction conferred on her a morbid celebrity, as if she were the sole survivor of a plane crash.
Her book ends with an act of rupture, but it begins with one, too. Gilot was the only child of a wealthy agronomist who, like other disappointed haut-bourgeois fathers of the time , compensated for having a daughter by raising her as a son. He decided that she would become a lawyer, but she had a sense of calling.
Her appeal to Picasso seems obvious. She was young, unattached, beautiful. But so were many girls. More unusual, she was confident, opinionated, unafraid. “I knew that here was something larger than life, something to match myself against,” she writes, like a scrawny prizefighter training to take on the champ.
Then there is Gilot’s private Picasso. He is superstitious, terrified of flying and of getting his hair cut, and must be coaxed, like a child, through trivial decisions: how many tickets to get for the bullfight? Should he take a little trip? When Gilot is pregnant with Claude, Picasso doesn’t want her to see a doctor, which he is sure will bring “bad luck.” Instead, he sends her to be analyzed by Lacan.
Critics like these readily acknowledged that Picasso did harm to those around him, but their feeling was that genius ultimately justified transgression. Art demanded sacrifice—particularly with someone like Picasso, whose life fed his work. Now the popular view is at the opposite pole.
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How Picasso’s Muse Became a MasterWhen Françoise Gilot’s memoir about her relationship with Picasso first came out, in 1964, his supporters denounced her as a spiteful ingrate—they believed that his genius justified the harm he did to others. Now the popular view is at the opposite pole.
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