| Steve Carlton |
12-12-2025 01:17 PM |
Homme et Femme - 1969 version. Painted when Picasso was 88 years old.
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Warned by friends and family of impending disaster, and yet propelled by a breathless sense of urgency that pervaded Paris in the wartime years, Gilot threw herself into a decade-long relationship with Picasso. “It was a time when everything was lost; a time of death. So: do I want to do something before I die, or not?…It was – let’s do something right away!” A relationship with him, Gilot concluded famously in her 1964 book Life with Picasso, was a “catastrophe I didn't want to avoid.”
Gilot exerted a profound influence on Picasso’s work: much more than merely a muse and companion, Picasso’s biographer John Richardson acknowledged that “Picasso took from her rather more than she took from him” and Picasso produced an impressive body of work testifying to the joy of the years he spent with Gilot and their two children, Claude (b. 1947) and Paloma (b. 1949). Gilot was more than Picasso’s intellectual equal, and she recorded the ups and downs of their life together with a detached and humorous eye that only served to emphasise the unmistakable genius behind the myth, a force of nature whose compulsive, subversive creativity bordered on the magical.
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/picassos-madonna-portraits-of-francoise-gilot |
