Francoise Gilot Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Françoise Gilot is a French painter born in 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Françoise Gilot already knew at the age of five that she would become an artist thanks to her mother's teachings. She studied art although her father had other goals for her.
His first exhibition was held during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Read the full biography

Françoise Gilot is a French painter born in 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Françoise Gilot already knew at the age of five that she would become an artist thanks to her mother's teachings. She studied art although her father had other goals for her.
His first exhibition was held during the Nazi occupation of Paris. His first drawings and watercolors were lost in a German bombing. In 1943, in a restaurant on the Left Bank, where she frequented legendary figures such as Joan Mirò, Gertrude Stein and Simone de Beauvoir, she met Pablo Picasso, who was 40 years her senior. She began a ten-year relationship with him that brought two children: Claude and Paloma. He also posed for Henri Matisse. In 1964 he published Vivre avec Picasso, a book about their life together which was enormously successful and due to which the painter went so far as to refuse to see his children again.
From the Seventies he began to paint on large format canvases in less traditional compositions using spontaneous and less formal solutions, using a technique similar to Japanese kakemonos or large Tibetan tanks. Paints on unstretched, unmilled cotton canvas with acrylic paint. He calls his large paintings, painted on both sides, “floating” because they can move and fly freely.