Françoise Gilot: Life with and without Picasso

Robert Capa snaps his friend Picasso with his mistress, Françoise Gilot, in 1948. She walks gleefully along the beach, while he trails, looking at the camera. Living in Picasso's shadows Gilot most certainly was not. The book "The Woman Who Says No" tells the story of the famed artist's muse of 10 years.

"He was the master, she the muse. He had discovered her when she was 22 years old, young and unaffected. Virginal, as a white canvas he desired to fill," the author Malte Herwig writes of the encounter between the two. The book describes how the towering artist, and his equally large ego, could be won over by a single smile from his muse.

"The most famous painter of his, and maybe all, time was a gifted self-promoter," Herwig writes in "The Woman Who Says No." "Besides himself and the art, there was little room in Picasso's life - the tyranny of genius degraded all other people to extras." Only Françoise Gilot could break this logic.

"Girls who look like that cannot be painters," Picasso is supposed to have said about Gilot. Then he invited her to his studio - at least this is how the story is told today by the 93-year old Gilot, in one of the interviews the author conducted in her Paris and New York studios. Gilot continues to paint each day. This 1943 picture is titled "Portrait en noir," oil on canvas.

Over 75 years Gilot etched more than 5,000 drawings and 1,600 paintings. For the past 50 years, her work has regularly featured in global exhibitions. Most of her works are privately owned. However, some are hung in museums - including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In this self-portrait from 1941, she looks at the viewer with a questioning gaze and eyes wide open.

"Picasso and I - the embrace," is the name of this picture from 1948. Here the two are still a happy couple. They never married. Claude, their son and first child together, was born earlier that year, followed a year later by their daughter, Paloma. Françoise reveals she never wanted children, but Picasso persuaded her. Her art, however, she would never give up for Picasso.

Picasso was her great love, her passion. However, there were limits as to what Gilot was willing to accept. Her proud attitude is clearly visible in this photograph of her at work. "Ne me touchez pas" (Don't Touch Me) is the name of this work by Gilot. It was her philosophy for life - as a child she would never let anyone get too close to her.

"Even Picasso never knew me, despite our 10 years together, because I locked myself up. I never reveal, why should I?" These are her words to Herwig, "in the friendliest of tones, until her resounding laughter broke through the ice." The image shows her at the age of 15 - her first oil painting came two years later.

"That is what Pablo explained to her a few weeks before and fixed her with his dark-but-shining reptilian eyes. A man so rich and famous as he was, the most famous painter in the world, a king of the art world. Yes, some kind of God." Herwig begins his book about Gilot with such playful irony from the perspective of the great master himself - "and she laughed uproariously."

"Leave him? There was nothing to laugh about. He was dead serious." The book manages to offer a completely new perspective of the great Picasso, revealing his failings and thus rendering him more human. Again, there's the warm, endearing gaze of Gilot. "Françoise smiled. That a genius could utter such naïve stuff."

Gilot left Picasso in 1953. Shortly after, he painted "Bust of a Woman," which is currently on show at the exhibition "The Century Mark: Tel Aviv Museum of Art Visits Berlin" in the Martin Gropius Bau. The separation also marks a break in the book. Gilot is presented as a 93-year-old woman, full of wisdom.

Gilot is the only woman to have ever successfully left the artist. And survived him. Picasso's last wife, Jacqueline Roque, committed suicide, and Marie-Thérèse Walter hanged herself. The ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova remained married to him until her death in 1955, and the photographer Dora Maar (pictured here, in a painting by Picasso), who had given up her passion for him, went mad.

Gilot is radiant with life, even at 93 years of age. "I knew it would be a disaster, but a disaster that would be worth it," she told Herwig. Regret is a pure waste of time. "It's much more interesting to experience something tragic with a unique man than to lead a wonderful life with a mediocre person."

"If you really want to live, you need to risk something dramatic - otherwise it's not worthwhile," Gilot says. "Above all, you will not be boring. This is the worst thing: being boring." Malte Herwig's book "The Woman Who Says No" is currently only available in German, as "Die Frau, die Nein sagt."