Life with Picasso

Françoise Gilot's candid memoir remains the most revealing portrait of Picasso written, and gives fascinating insight into the intense and creative life shared by two modern artists.
Françoise Gilot was in her early twenties when, in 1943, she met the sixty-one-year-old Pablo Picasso. Brought up in upper-middle-class comfort and educated at Cambridge and the Sorbonne in the hopes that she would go into the law, the young woman defied her family’s wishes—and her father’s wrath—and set out to become an artist. Her introduction to Picasso led to a friendship, a love affair, and a relationship of ten years, during which Gilot bore two children, Paloma and Claude. Gilot was one of Picasso's muses; she was also very much her own woman, determined to make herself into the remarkable painter she did indeed become.
Life with Picasso, is an indispensable record of his thinking about art, as well as an often very funny account of his relationships with other artists and with dealers and hangers-on. It is also about Francoise Gilot. This is a brilliant self-portrait of a young woman of enormous talent and exacting intelligence figuring out who she wants to be.