11/28/2025
A few years ago I heard Alan Wade talk about responding to violence. He used the example of Kathryn Borel's extraction of a public apology from Jian Ghomeshi for his sexual violence as an example of "ever present resistance to violence". He described these responses as creative and prudent and important.
I see this same responding in the story of Françoise Gilot's escape from her relationship with Picasso.
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"Nobody leaves Picasso." That's what he told her. She was 32, trapped in his shadow for a decade. Then she did something no woman had done before.
Paris, 1943. The war still gripped the city. Cafés were half-empty, their lights dimmed by occupation and fear. In one of those smoke-filled rooms, 21-year-old Françoise Gilot sat painting when a figure approached her table.
Pablo Picasso. Already a legend at 61. Already dangerous in the way only great men with unchecked power can be.
He looked at her work, then at her face. "You're so young," he said. "I could be your father."
Françoise met his gaze without flinching. "You're not my father."
That was Françoise—steel wrapped in grace. That response should have warned him she wasn't like the others.
For ten years, she orbited him. She painted, loved, and endured. Their relationship was brilliant and chaotic. He drew her hundreds of times, claiming to immortalize her beauty. But with each sketch, he also tried to possess her. He called her "the woman who saw too much."
She did see. She saw his genius. She saw his cruelty. She saw the trap.
Picasso didn't just want a partner—he wanted worship. The man who revolutionized modern art was a tyrant at home. Every argument became a storm. Every silence became a weapon. Women before Françoise had broken under the weight of his ego. Some had descended into madness. Others disappeared into his shadow entirely, becoming footnotes to his legend.
"He wanted to be both God and the child," Françoise later recalled. "And there was no room for anyone else in that universe."
By the early 1950s, the relationship had turned dark. The great Picasso, who reportedly said women were "machines for suffering," had become impossible to live with. He demanded absolute devotion. He raged when she focused on her own painting. He belittled her work, her thoughts, her existence outside of him.
One morning in 1953, after another night of shouting and tears, Françoise stood before a mirror in their villa in Vallauris. She was only thirty-two, yet her reflection looked decades older. Behind her, Picasso's canvases lined the walls like watchful eyes.
For the first time, she didn't see his shadow in that mirror. She saw herself.
She turned to him and said quietly, "I'm leaving."
Picasso laughed. It was a cold, incredulous laugh—the laugh of a man who had never been denied anything. "You can't leave me," he said. "Nobody leaves Picasso."
But she did.
She walked out with their two children—no drama, no tears, just the quiet power of a woman reclaiming her soul. Later, she would describe that moment not as an ending but as a beginning. "I wasn't a prisoner," she said. "I came when I wanted to—and I left when I wanted to."
Picasso tried to destroy her for it.
He called galleries and dealers, telling them never to show her work. He used his influence to shut doors that had been open to her. "People will never care about you," he sneered. "They'll only care that you once knew me."
Other women might have disappeared into obscurity, crushed by the weight of his retaliation. But Françoise refused to vanish.
In 1964, she published Life with Picasso—a book that stripped away his myth and told her truth with unflinching honesty. She described his genius and his cruelty with equal clarity. She refused to paint him as either monster or saint—just a deeply flawed man who confused love with possession.
The art world called it scandalous. Picasso called it betrayal. His children from other relationships sued to stop publication. He raged that she had violated their privacy, exposed his secrets, destroyed his carefully constructed image.
Françoise called it freedom.
And freedom became her masterpiece.
She rebuilt her life and her career on her own terms. She moved to America. She painted with renewed passion—canvases that exploded with color and strength. Her work spoke of survival, resilience, and rebirth. Self-portraits that declared: I exist. I matter. I am not a footnote to anyone's story.
In 1970, she found love again—not with another artist, but with Dr. Jonas Salk, the man who developed the polio vaccine and saved millions of lives. The contrast couldn't have been starker.
"Picasso wanted to possess the world," she once said softly. "Jonas wanted to heal it."
With Salk, she found a partnership built on mutual respect rather than domination. A love that celebrated her independence rather than demanding her surrender.
In time, the art world learned what Picasso never understood: Françoise Gilot was not a muse. She was an artist in her own right. Her works now hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou—silent testaments to a woman who refused to be defined by anyone but herself.
When Picasso died in 1973, newspapers rushed to interview his former lovers. Françoise declined most requests. She had already told her story. She had nothing left to prove.
Years later, when asked how she found the courage to leave the most famous artist in the world, she smiled and said simply, "Because freedom is the only love worth keeping."
Picasso painted her face a hundred times, trying to capture her, control her, own her.
But she painted her own destiny.
Françoise Gilot lived to 101, outliving Picasso by nearly fifty years. She spent those decades painting, writing, teaching, and proving that the most powerful act of resistance is simply refusing to disappear.
She became the one woman who didn't just live in Picasso's shadow—she walked out of it and into her own brilliant light.
And in doing so, she left behind a legacy more enduring than any portrait he ever painted: the story of a woman who chose herself.
