Life With Picasso, Gilot, Fran?oise

Fran oise Gilot was in her early twenties when she met the sixty-one-year-old Pablo Picasso in 1943. Brought up in a well-to-do upper-middle-class family, who had sent her to Cambridge and the Sorbonne and hoped that she would go into law, the young woman defied their wishes and set her sights on being an artist. Her introduction to Picasso led to a friendship, a love affair, and a relationship of ten years, during which Gilot gave birth to Picassos two children, Paloma and Claude. Gilot was one of Picassos muses; she was also very much her own woman, determined to make herself into the remarkable painter she did indeed become.

Life with Picasso, written with Carlton Lake and published in 1961, is about Picasso the artist and Picasso the man. We hear him talking about painting and sculpture, his life, his career, as well as other artists, both contemporaries and old masters. We glimpse Picasso in his many and volatile moods, dismissing his work, exultant over his work, entertaining his various superstitions, being an anxious father. We also get a larger picture of literary and artistic Paris, including sketches of Matisse, Stein, luard, Gide, Cocteau, Mir , and Chaplin, along with an inside view of the workings of Picassos house and studio, meeting his right-hand man, Sabart s, his chauffeur, Marcel, and his housekeeper, In s. We witness Picasso tangling with dealers and, under the German occupation, the Nazi official who, after Hitlers denunciation, were given the task of suppressing Picassos work--and somehow always came up short.