Françoise Gilot

French visual artist and designer also known as the author of a candid, humorous and intelligent memoir, Life with Picasso (co-written with art critic Carlton Lake, McGraw-Hill Publishers, 1964). The book about her decade-long relationship with Pablo Picasso and the two children they had together sold over one million copies in dozens of languages.

An only child, she had a cold father who beat her in fury when she dropped out of the Sorbonne to be an artist. She painted from the time she was 17 and was an insomniac and voracious reader.

Gilot had her first exhibition of paintings in Paris in 1943. She met Picasso in May of that year when she was 21 and he was 61. As she had recently left both school and her childhood home, she was living with her grandmother. She and Picasso developed an easy, close camaraderie, involved in the same social group of artists and intellectuals. They became lovers in February 1944 and she moved in with him soon after. Gilot shared Picasso's life for nearly a decade, giving her life to him, taking care of his needs and putting up with his moods, modelling for him as she painted steadily herself.

Their son Claude was born on 15 May 1947 and daughter Paloma on 19 April 1949 "toward eight that evening." Picasso chafed under the domesticity, had affairs with other women and they began to pull apart. Following a period of calm through 1952, Gilot took the kids and left him on 30 September 1953.

She had known painter Luc Simon from the time of her teens and re-met him in Paris in 1954. They married in July 1955 and had a daughter, Aurelia, in 1956. She never saw Picasso again. Gilot and Simon divorced in 1962.

In 1969, Gilot was introduced to the American polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk at the home of mutual friends in La Jolla, California. Their shared appreciation of architecture led to a brief courtship and a 1970 wedding in Paris.