Life with Picasso (Signed) by Gilot, Francoise (mistress of Pablo Picasso); Lake, Carlton; - 1964

New York: McGraw-Hill, (1964).

Early Printing.

SIGNED BY AUTHOR ON FRONT ENDPAPER.

Very Good. Tight binding; clean pages and covers; contemporary light wear; no jacket.

Scarce signed.

Marie Françoise Gilot (born 26 November 1921) is a French painter, best known for her long, stormy relationship with Pablo Picasso, with whom she had two children. Gilot was already launched as an accomplished artist, notably in watercolours and ceramics, but her professional career was eclipsed by her social celebrity, and when she split from Picasso, he discouraged galleries from buying her work, as well as unsuccessfully trying to block her memoir, Life with Picasso.

At 21, Gilot met Pablo Picasso, then 61. Picasso first saw Gilot in a restaurant in the spring of 1943. Dora Maar, the photographer who was his muse and lover at the time, was devastated to learn that Picasso was replacing her with the much younger artist. After Picasso's and Gilot's meeting, she moved in with him in 1946. They spent almost ten years together, and those years revolved around art. He painted La femme-fleur, then his old friend Matisse, who liked Gilot, announced that he would create a portrait of her, in which her body would be pale blue and her hair leaf green.

It was believed by some art historians that Gilot's relationship with Picasso is what cut short her artistic career. When Gilot left Picasso, he told all art dealers he knew not to purchase her art, whereas Gilot herself has noted that continuing to identify her in relation to Picasso "does her a great disservice as an artist."

Picasso and Gilot never married, but they did have two children together because he promised to love and care for them. Their son, Claude, was born in 1947, and their daughter, Paloma, was born in 1949. During their ten years together, Gilot was often harassed on the streets of Paris by Picasso's legal wife, Olga Khokhlova, a former Russian ballet dancer, and Picasso himself physically abused her as well. In 1964, eleven years after their separation, Gilot wrote Life with Picasso (with the art critic Carlton Lake), a book that sold over one million copies in dozens of languages, despite an unsuccessful legal challenge from Picasso attempting to stop its publication. From then on, Picasso refused to see Claude or Paloma ever again. All the profits from the book were used to help Claude and Paloma mount a case to become Picasso's legal heirs."--wikipedia