Françoise Gilot Has Died At 101. Her Ex-Lover Picasso’s Ongoing Brooklyn Museum Show Challenges His Morals.

“You imagine people will be interested in you?,” Françoise Gilot paraphrased her scorned lover Pablo Picasso, quoted most recently in the New York Times. “They won’t ever, really, just for yourself. Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life touched mine so intimately.”

Gilot met the famous artist when she was 22 and he was 62. She gave birth to two of his children, Claude and celebrated Tiffany & Co. jewelry designer Paloma Picasso, but he cut ties with them after Gilot published a commercially successful book about their relationship in 1964. Pablo Picasso would be dead nine years later, while Gilot had 59 more years to go. She died today, June 6, 2023, at 101 years old.

In the lifetime since the decade in her youth she spent squabbling with a narcissist, Gilot remarried twice: first to her childhood friend Luc Simon, with whom she had a third child, Aurelia, and then she remarried Jonas Salk, the Belarusian Jewish American scientist credited with inventing and disseminating the polio vaccine. Salk created a template for vaccination that proved beneficial during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in his moral selflessness that allowed the technology in his groundbreaking discovery to be used internationally and eradicate a fatal disease in many corners of the world, saving millions of children and adults. Salk and Gilot were married for 25 years until his dead in 1995.

Gilot also stood strong in her artistic convictions, creating works that had little to do with Picasso…even as the world continued to deify his creations long after his death. Today, Picasso works sell into the hundreds of millions, while Gilot’s, despite modest success, have only approached $1.3 million in 2021.

Indisputably, Picasso was absolutely terrible to women. He adamantly pursued his first wife, a Russian dancer named Olga Khokhlova, with whom he married and had a son Paolo (who later became an alcoholic and bigamist himself under the pressures of his father’s harsh treatment). Picasso refused to divorce Khokhlova when his longstanding, initially teenaged mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter became pregnant in 1935, because it would have forced him to divide his assets. Walter and Picasso broke up in 1940, and four years later, 22-year-old Françoise Gilot would claim was abusive.

In a 21st century context of #MeToo and #TimeUp, it seems hard to believe the womanizing, pedophilia, and harassment Picasso proliferated in his lifetime has never led to his cancelation, or at the very least, devaluation. Rather, in the upper echelons of blue-chip circles of today’s art world, male-dominated galleries and dealing families continue to profit of higher and higher sums for his works.

In a sadly fitting irony, just four days before Gilot’s death, the Brooklyn Museum opened It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby. Gadsby (they/them) is an Australian queer comedian who radically called out Picasso’s bad behavior and its ability to overshadow his art in 2018. The Brooklyn Museum showcase includes Gadsby’s voice in a female-led show of artists Cecily Brown, Renee Cox, Käthe Kollwitz, Dindga McCannon, Ana Mendieta, Marilyn Minter, Joan Semmel, Kiki Smith, May Stevens, and Mickalene Thomas, in direct response to Picasso’s misbehavior.

The show has been panned by the art world: the New York Times sent a male art critic to review the female artist show and he left “sad and embarrassed”. A male art critic at ARTnews called it “disingenuous” and “disastrous,” noting the “show’s disregard for art history”, even that it ‘contorted’ it.

But, as ever, Françoise Gilot gets the last laugh, making headlines with her passing after a long and healthy life. It seems, at least for today, in death she has managed her ultimate wish: to overshadow the toxic legacy of the menacing chauvinist who threatened her unbreakable spirit.