‘Blatant sexism’: why is a great painter who lived to 101 still defined by a man she left in the 1950s?
On the evening of Tuesday 6 June, it was announced that the artist Françoise Gilot had died. Having lived to the age of 101, she had a career that spanned a staggering eight decades – leaving behind 1,600 paintings and 3,600 works on paper. She was also the acclaimed author of internationally bestselling books, one recently reissued by New York Review Books Classics.
An artist from the get-go, Gilot declared at the age of 21 that she “felt painting was my whole life”, and her output ranges from portraits to landscapes, still lifes to collage. Often luminously coloured, her work uses angular shapes that intersect to make up a beach scene, a cityscape, a speeding comet or a mother and child. But she also turned to monochrome: her 1994 Aspects of Femininity challenged the multitudinous ways women are perceived, while her 1946 work Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple had hardedged lines in its re-examination of the Biblical tale, focusing on temptation, punishment and the blaming of women. Her work now features in the collections of the Met and MoMA in New York, as well as the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2021, her 1965 work Paloma à la Guitare fetched $1.3m at Sotheby’s.
Gilot, the daughter of a ceramicist mother and lawyer father, received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne, and another in English literature from Cambridge University. Although initially interested in law, she switched to art full time due to “security reasons”, after the Germans invaded Paris. Sadly, her early work disappeared after a cart carrying all her family’s possessions crashed during the war.
Her first exhibition took place in 1943, when she was just 22. Her first book, detailing the life of her artistlover, was published in 1964, despite the former partner trying to block it on multiple occasions. Gilot was sharp and formidable. When Emma Brockes interviewed her for the Guardian in 2016, she called her “fierce and uncompromising”. In 2010, Gilot was named a member of the Légion d’Honneur.
But when it came to the headlines announcing her death, the media had other concerns. Instead of honouring and remembering her as the accomplished woman she was, The New York Times wrote: “Françoise Gilot, Artist in the Shadow of Picasso, Is Dead at 101.” The Guardian followed with “painter and muse to Picasso”; The Washington Post defined her as “celebrated artist, writer and muse to Picasso”; ARTNews wrote that she was an “Artist Who Fearlessly Chronicled Her Relationship with Picasso”.
My question is: does his name really have to be mentioned? Aren’t her career, her achievements, her name, enough to stand on their own? When will the media stop referring to women in relation to a partner they split from over seven decades ago, and perpetuating this blatant sexism?
The New York Times’s subheading originally read: “An accomplished painter (and memoirist) in her own right, she did what no other mistress of his had ever done: She walked out.” The subheading has since been corrected from “mistress” to “lover”, considering their relationship lasted almost a decade, and the words “in her own right” have been removed. But I want to touch on those four words. This unnecessary parenthesis appears far too commonly, especially with women. It is used to highlight something that is “other” to what the establishment considers the default: the patriarchy.
This isn’t about removing or cancelling certain stories and details. At times, they are important. But we must be respectful to someone’s life and how they lived it, what they achieved. If we need to root people to something else, in order to guide readers, could this not be social and political context?
How do you think Gilot would have felt at her life being reduced to a headline that referred to a relationship she had in her 20s? In that 2016 interview, Brockes wrote: “She has always pointed out that it does her a great disservice as an artist to identify her as ‘Picasso’s lover’ or ‘a friend of Matisse’” – because she was so much more than that. Similarly, in 1997, the New York Times’s story about the death of Dora Maar – a pioneering artist working in photography, painting, and photomontage – merely addressed her as “Dora Maar, a Muse of Picasso, Is Dead at 89”, while perpetuating the problematic concept of the muse.
Rearranging sentences or using alternative phrases to honour someone’s life in a respectful manner isn’t hard, and the media should not default to rooting women as the muses of, the wives of, or in the shadow of. We must also assume that the reader is intelligent and interested enough to click on the article without such headlines – because if it’s not being done now, then how will the landscape ever change? No one lives “in the shadow” of anyone – especially a person whose light clearly blazed so brightly. As Gilot said: “I live my own life in my own way.”
How would she have felt to see her life reduced to a relationship she had in her 20s?