“I’ve never heard anyone say no to Picasso. In fact, he called me “the woman who says no”, because when I had to say no, I said it”, sums up the painter Françoise Gilot of her ten-year relationship with Pablo Picasso, the man with whom she had two children. But then she decided to leave him to avoid being “devoured” by the great artist. She was the only woman who could bear to live with the Spanish artist once he was recognized for his work and talent.

Françoise Gilot met Picasso in wartime Paris during the Nazi occupation. At the time, she was an aspiring young artist. As she recounts in her book Living with Picasso, which she wrote in 1964 with the literary critic Carlton Lake, their paths first crossed at the restaurant Le Catalan, a meeting place for artists. “I was with a friend and actor, Alain Cuny, who was having dinner with us. Picasso came to talk to us and told Cuny that he knew him: Can you introduce me to your friends?’ Gilot responded fearlessly, explaining that she was an artist. Since then, at Picasso’s invitation, he began to visit him in the morning in his studio at Grands Augustins.

Soon, Gilot and Picasso fell in love. In her book she recalls the first months of their relationship. At the time, Picasso was having an affair with Dora Maar, with whom he had previously cheated on Marie-Thérèse de Walter. Marie-Thérèse de Walter never got over the trauma of their relationship, and in 1977, four years after Picasso’s death, she committed suicide. For her part, Maar ended up in a psychiatric clinic. Meanwhile, Picasso was never able to legally divorce his first wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Jojlova, who died in 1955 of cancer. Picasso, with whom she had a son, did not bother to attend her funeral.

Picasso’s control over his friends and mistresses has been a source of controversy and the focus of several books, including Sophie Chauveau’s The Minotaur and his granddaughter Marina’s My Grandfather Picasso. In the 1960s, Gilot’s book talked about what it was like to have to put up with the great artist every day. Jean Cocteau—one of the few people who remained loyal to Gilot after she abandoned Picasso—also mentioned it in his memoirs. Cocteau was in the Spaniard’s studio when he heard the artist say to his collaborator: “You are nothing more to me than the dust on this staircase.” Gilot retorted meaningfully: “I don’t need to be wiped. I’ll be gone before that.”

Picasso’s modus operandi was mainly psychological torture. He was not a violent man. He constantly tested both the men and women he trusted. Picasso was deeply in love with Françoise, but he couldn’t bear to see her leave him. The trauma of abandonment, which he had carried with him since childhood, resurfaced in 1954 when Françoise took their two young children and moved out of the house they shared in the south of France.

Gilot undoubtedly suffered the worst after her separation from the artist with whom she had formed an interesting kind of painting collaboration during their relationship. Unlike Picasso’s previous companions, Gilot refused to become a muse. He didn’t want to be “the creature” in one of his plays. He wanted to be a creator and often drew it. After their separation, Gilot began to have problems with the owners of the gallery, notably because she married another man and had another daughter. But the publication of her book in 1964 fueled her exile to a certain extent. Picasso tried three times to stop the publication of the book. Dozens of artists drafted a resolution calling for the book to be banned in France. These efforts failed, but Gilot was forced to start a new life. In 2019, during an exhibition dedicated to her in New York, the painter insisted that she could not live in France: “People don’t like me. You can’t imagine how much they hate me.”