Francoise Gilot

Françoise Gilot, born 1921, is a French painter, and is known as a companion of Pablo Picasso.

She was raised in Paris by her father, a businessman, and her mother, a watercolorist. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University and the British Institute in Paris (now University of London Institute in Paris). While training as a lawyer, Gilot was known to skip morning law classes to feed her true passion: art. Despite her mother being an artist herself, the extent of the young woman's artistic pursuits inexplicably drove her away from immediate family to her grandmother's attic.

At 21, Gilot met Picasso, then 61, and would ultimately raise both their children: Claude and Paloma. The children's antics were often captured on the canvases of their parents. Gilot maintained a relationship with the Spanish painter from 1944 until 1953. Eleven years after their separation Gilot wrote Life with Picasso, a book that sold over one million copies in dozens of languages.

In 1969, Gilot was introduced to Jonas Salk, the polio vaccine pioneer, at the home of mutual friends in La Jolla, California. Their shared appreciation of architecture led to a brief courtship, and they were married in 1970 in Paris. Gilot remained married to Dr. Salk until his death in 1995, and during her marriage she continued painting in New York, California, and Paris. At 87, Gilot's vibrant, colorful art continues to reflect her thoughts on nature, time, symbols and signs.

"When I do sign a painting, I often make my signature rather typographic because I want it to be as neutral as possible." Adding her signature to a painting has always been a problem for Gilot. In her earlier years, as a painter, she was not eager to sign her work. She felt that the signature, by introducing additional forms and colors, however small and peripheral, would disrupt the rhythms she had established so carefully in the composition. In 1978, Gilot designed a new signature monogram, a circular chop mark that she began to use to sign many of her canvases.