Françoise Gilot

This post originated as an e-mail to my friend Laurie Israel.

So, last week a student of mine posted something about Picasso's Guernica, and I went to my beloved exhibition catalogue from the 1980 blockbuster Picasso retrospective at the MoMA:

As you know, my mom really loved living in New York. She got married and moved there in the summer of 1980, when this exhibition was held. I remember her talking about going to it like it was the most memorable experience of her life. She bought the catalogue and the poster for the show (I used to have the poster; don't know what happened to it), and I begged her to get me a copy of the catalogue, which cost fifty bucks and was an extravagance for her and Bill. Her inscription on the inside of this book says she gave it to me on my 20th birthday, in 1984. It's probably one of the first "art" books I owned, and it has ever since been a cherished member of my collection.

After I got what I needed about Guernica and responded to the student's post, I went back to the catalogue and flipped through it for the first time in years. I was struck not only by the many great paintings, many favorites that I had forgotten about, but also by the quality of the reproductions. I remembered that I had seen a paperback copy of the exhibition catalogue at my local used book store, and I thought it would be fun to buy it and cut my favorite pictures out and tack them to my wall.

The back story on this is that I put that Starry Night poster on the wall a couple of months ago, and a couple of weeks ago when my upstairs neighbor's bathroom leaked through the ceiling of my kitchen, the poster stuck to the wall! I told one of the maintenance guys about it, because to pull it off the wall would damage the sheetrock, and he recommended that I just leave it there. "It's wallpaper, now," he said. "You should put some other posters around it." He's actually into art, for a maintenance guy. His name is Clay. His work partner's name is Paul. Paul and Clay. Paul Clay. Paul Klee. His name's actually Clarence, but nobody dares call him that except for his mother. Have I told you that I go by Edward up here?

So anyway I bought that paperback edition of the Picasso retrospective catalogue (for nine bucks) and ripped it to shreds! There were actually two copies when I bought the one, and I'm thinking about going back to get the other one. I thought it might be fun to mat and frame my favorite paintings from the book. My favorite among these many favorites is the one at the bottom right: Woman-Flower (Françoise Gilot), from 1946. 

This is not my framed copy. I stole this image off the Internet. My new computer doesn't recognize my old printer/scanner as a scanner.

It's been a long time since I paid any attention to Picasso, so I was, like, "Okay, who is Françoise Gilot?" I knew she was one of his mistresses but I couldn't remember where she came in the succession. Turns out she was the third of his three mistresses, sandwiched between two wives! Not quite sandwiched, actually, because he comported with all three of his mistresses (Marie-Therese Walter, Dora Maar and Gilot, in that order) while he remained married to his first wife, Olga K-something, a Russian ballerina, whom he married sometime in the teens and stayed married to, though separated from, until her death in 1955. His last wife was Jacqueline Roque. He had a son with Olga (Paulo), a daughter with Marie-Therese (Maya) and two children with Françoise (Claude and Paloma).

Paulo is dead. Marie-Therese and Jacqueline both committed suicide. Claude and Paloma are still alive. And . . . Françoise Gilot is still alive! She's 97 and lives in NYC. It appears that she still owns this painting. She is listed as the owner in the exhibition catalogue, and an internet search doesn't bring up any news of a sale of this painting. If her estate decides to sell it after she dies, it will go for a pretty penny. It's quite large: 57" x 34".

Gilot is the main character (besides Picasso) in the Merchant-Ivory/Anthony Hopkins film Surviving Picasso, which I saw when it came out but which I don't remember much of, except when he fired his long-time chauffeur for no reason and gave him no severance and left him on the side of the road. This film was the beginning of the mainstream revelation that Picasso was an asshole. It was based on a book by Arianna Huffington, which was supposedly plagiarized from the unpublished PhD dissertation of one of my professors at UVa, Lydia Gasman. Gilot wrote her own book, Life with Picasso, which might be fun to read.

I have this semi-morbid obsession with New York Times obituaries, which I also get from my mom. Back in the nineties a friend of mine and I came up with something called the Ghoul Pool, which was a list of a hundred famous people fixing to die. We put all the names (on pieces of paper cut with pinking shears) into a Mason jar and took them around to all the bars in downtown Charleston, selling the names for five dollars each. We weren't trying to make money; whoever had the name of the first person to die got the entire pool. The winner (or loser) was Dizzy Gillespie. I don't remember who had his name.

A couple of months ago I came up with a new list of famous people fixing to die, just for fun. I won't bore you with the entire list, but some of the top names are Olivia de Havilland (102), Kirk Douglas (102), Betty White (97), Jimmy Carter (94), and Elizabeth II (93). I. M. Pei, Doris Day, and Bart Starr are three recent decedents from the list. Françoise Gilot has now been added to the list.