The Picasso Museum in Paris has a dedicated gallery space for Franoise Gilot, who walked out on Picasso.
Franoise Gilot was the only woman to dump Picasso and he promised to ruin her career. Gilot's achievements have been overshadowed by her relationship with Picasso, who used his power and influence within France's art scene to blacklist her following their split. The Picasso Museum hopes to correct the wrongs with a gallery dedicated to Gilot, who died last year at the age of 101. There are no pictures of Franoise Gilot in the museum, instead they focus on her as an artist. Francoise Gilot was interviewed about her memoir.
Gilot was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1921 and knew from a young age that she wanted to be a painter. She met Picasso at a cafe at the age of 21 and they were together for a decade. Gilot described the mental and physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her ex- partner in her 1964 memoir. She wrote that he held the cigarette to her right cheek and that she was determined not to give him the satisfaction.
Gilot walked out on Picasso in 1953 because he said people would be interested in him. It will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life touched mine so deeply.
Gilot described Picasso's rage as a "war" on her that he used to rally his artistic and intellectual circles to ostracize her. She relocated to the United States in the 1970s because she became hated by France as a whole after the memoir's publication. She continued to paint until her death in 2023, one of which sold for over a million dollars at an auction.
The Picasso Museum is looking to give Gilot the recognition that she deserves and will feature an exhibition room dedicated to her works. Gilot's career spans from her early works with the Réalités nouvelles group, an association of Paris-based abstract artists founded in the late 1930s to her large totemic compositions of the 1980s. The museum wants to show that Gilot was more than Picasso's ex- partner, she was an artist who achieved success for herself. The president of the Picasso Museum said in a statement that Gilot was being given her rightful place as an artist.
The Franoise Gilot gallery room is one of the 22 rooms that make up the rest of the exhibition.