The death this week of the painter and writer Françoise Gilot added a full stop to one of the most flamboyant chapters of 20th-century art history. In her youth, Gilot became one of the muses of Pablo Picasso, with whom she had two children. After she walked out on him – reputedly the only woman to do so – he set about sabotaging her career as an artist.
But Gilot was no pushover. In 1964 she published an account of their 10-year affair, which has sold millions of copies. In 2021, her portrait of their daughter, Paloma à la Guitare, sold for $1.3m (£922,500) in the first cross-category sale devoted to female artists, at a Sotheby’s online auction. Though this is small beer compared with the $20.9m paid for one of Picasso’s portraits of Gilot in New York a month earlier, it was seven times the estimate: a clear indication of the growth in her reputation.
