MILAN – Francoise Gilot avenges the others. She was the only one, in fact, to survive the “Picasso fury”. In her youth Francoise, also a painter, was the subject and model of some artists including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso (at the center of her painting Joie de vivre) of whom she was the companion and muse from 1943 to 1953 and from which relationship had two children, Paloma and Claude. THE PICASSO CURSE – Many women loved Picasso but for most of them ended up in tragedy. Marie Therese Walter hanged herself, Jacqueline Roque shot herself, Olga Chochlova and Dora Maar lost their reason.
READ ALSO Picasso and Dora Maar, when love is morbidLES AMANTS – Paris, Montmartre , art and ateliers, painters and models, this is the scenario in which the love between the whimsical French model and the famous Spanish painter blossoms. For 10 years she was Picasso’s lover and muse, and he was able to tame him, thanks to his temper or perhaps to his dramatic precedents. We will never know why but she was the only one to leave the Spanish teacher alive and healthy. THE SURREALIST GYNECEO – In 1943 the cubist artist met the very young Francoise. Two lovers, a wife who harassed him, 40 years of difference, in short, a relationship that began under the best auspices.Picasso, in fact, was with Dora Maar and despite the woman’s desperation he did not want to leave his wife, Marie-Therese Walter. That is until Gilot arrives to make him dizzy. When, 10 years later, I leave him of her, Picasso predicted that it would be only thanks to him that people would be interested in her but the woman did not give up becoming famous beyond her of the cubist.
Francoise Gilot and Pablo Picasso by Robert Doisneau, 1952 THE FIRE OF PASSION – “Our relationship is written within me with letters of fire”. The most intense love still remembers the Gilot.Despite her strong character, she too often had to submit to Picasso. Wear some kind of dark robe, to begin with, or put up with her shortcomings and whims. One of the most dramatic episodes of her, told by the woman, reveals her nature of her sadistic . About her: Picasso wanted to burn her with a cigarette because the model had defined him as a devil. “And you are an angel who came out of the embers and therefore my submissive, I will mark you” . In the end the “minotaur” did not: “No, I may want to look at you again in the future.” THE END – “Nobody leaves a man like me”. But Gilot did it, for herself and for the children.Even after the end of their relationship there was no shortage of torments. Picasso after she published a book about him cut off contact with her and her children forever, in retaliation. Not only that, I even try to have his book banned by a court. The artist then tries to make a scorched earth around the ex-beloved, threatening to boycott the owners of the Parisian galleries that exhibited his works. Francoise flees to America, where she marries Jonas Salk, the doctor who developed the polio vaccine.
