Opinion Express View on Françoise Gilot’s Paris exhibition: Life after Picasso

In life as in art, few archetypes are as enduring as that of a lover scorned. The tumultuous affair between artist Camille Claudel, muse and lover to French sculptor Auguste Rodin, ended with Rodin’s refusal to leave his partner Rose Beuret for her. Claudel destroyed most of her work and had to be institutionalised in the twilight of her life. When her relationship with the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso ended, photographer Dora Maar found refuge in Roman Catholicism, proclaiming famously, “After Picasso, only God”. Writer and painter Françoise Gilot, though, the woman who replaced Maar in Picasso’s affections, bucked the trend — against considerable odds. In 1953, when she walked out of her relationship with Picasso, with whom she had two children, the artist reportedly told her, “One doesn’t leave a man like me.” What followed could only be termed as an early example of “cancel culture”: Picasso and his influential cohort went out of their way to sabotage her career in France, forcing her to move eventually to the US.

The news of the Picasso Museum in Paris dedicating an entire room to Gilot’s art for a year-long exhibition, therefore, comes with a sense of posthumous vindication — Gilot, who died last year, is finally being recognised in France not in terms of a decade-long relationship she decided to forego but for her prodigious work that include Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple (1946), Paloma à la Guitare (1965) and the Labyrinth series (1961–1963). In the aftermath of their relationship — the two had met when Gilot was 21 and Picasso 61 — Picasso had ensured that she lost invitations to prestigious exhibitions and representation by galleries in France. Even the publication of her 1964 biography, Life with Picasso, had been stalled.

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In her refusal to submit to a jilted ex’s malice, Gilot showed that there is life — and success — after love. Now, in giving her her due in France, the country that had forsaken her in favour of her iconic paramour, Picasso Museum is only validating her indomitable spirit.