(Paris) The painter Françoise Gilot, who was the companion of Pablo Picasso from 1946 to 1953 then had pursued a career as a renowned artist, died at the age of 101, AFP learned on Tuesday from the Picasso museum. , confirming information from the New York Times.

According to the American daily, with which the death was confirmed by Aurélia Engel, her daughter Françoise Gilot had recently suffered from “heart and lung diseases. »

Born on November 26, 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, in the suburbs of Paris, into a bourgeois family, François Gilot followed in the footsteps of his watercolourist mother to move towards drawing and painting.

A time muse to Pablo Picasso, she was an artist in her own right for more than 60 years, establishing herself as a renowned painter after their separation with works in the collections of New York’s prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA.

In June 2021, one of his paintings, Paloma with Guitar (1965), sold for $1.3 million at auction at Sotheby’s.

She had among her mentors the surrealist Endre Rozsda and her first exhibition in a Parisian gallery took place in 1943, the year she met Picasso. She was then in her twenties, he was 61. The couple will have two children, Claude (born in 1947) and Paloma (born in 1949).

In 1964, the publication of Living with Picasso, a relatively intimate book on his life with the artist, met with enormous success (translated into 16 languages, more than a million copies sold). She depicts him as a tyrannical, superstitious and selfish being. For her, this relationship was “a prelude to (her) life. Not life.”

Having become an American citizen, she had not gone to her funeral in 1973.

Spending the last years of her life in New York, she made the link between the Paris school of the 1950s and the American scene, exhibiting her paintings, drawings or prints in many museums and private collections, in Europe and in the United States. -United.