Latest news with #Gilot
New York Post
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Françoise Gilot's NYC home has just listed for the first time
Françoise Gilot — the brilliant French artist loved by Pablo Picasso and Jonas Salk — loved this apartment. And, indeed, home is where the art is. The late Gilot's lofty duplex in the heart of the West 67th Street's historic artists' district just hit the market for $4.3 million, according to StreetEasy. Gilot, known internationally for her watercolors, ceramics and the bestselling memoir 'Life with Picasso,' used the loft-like co-op home as a live-in studio for decades. Advertisement 9 Gilot, pictured in her California studio in 1982. Getty Images 9 A young Gilot and Pablo Picasso, with whom she had two children. Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images 9 The duplex features impressive barrel-vaulted ceilings, even in the kitchen. Evan Joseph/Evan Joseph Studios Advertisement 9 The co-op's lofty ceilings reach more than 17 feet high. Evan Joseph/Evan Joseph Studios In addition to striking French Modernist art, including works like 'Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple' and the mythological 'Labyrinth Series,' Gilot was known for her impressive romantic relationships. Gilot first met Picasso when she was a 21-year-old artist living in German-occupied France. Picasso was 61 at the time. The dynamic pair spent almost 10 years together and shared two children. Gilot recounted this time in her 1964 best seller 'Life with Picasso.' The acclaimed book was loosely adapted in the 1996 James Ivory film 'Surviving Picasso,' featuring Anthony Hopkins. Gilot went on to marry Jonas Salk, the pioneer of the polio vaccine, and settled in New York City until her death at 101 years old in 2023. Advertisement This listing marks the first time Gilot's three-bedroom residence on West 67th Street has hit the market. It's being sold by her estate. The home features soaring, and striking-looking, barrel-vaulted ceilings over 17 feet high, a woodburning fireplace, oversized north-facing windows and a flexible three- to four-bedroom layout. 9 The two-tiered living area offers ample space and natural light. Evan Joseph/Evan Joseph Studios 9 The northern exposures were what Gilot liked best about the apartment. Evan Joseph/Evan Joseph Studios 9 The unit is a few floors below Peter Yarrow's former duplex, which entered into contract just last month. Evan Joseph/Evan Joseph Studios Advertisement 9 Gilot, as seen in a 'Woman in The News' feature by Nora Ephron in 1965. William N. Jacobellis/New York Post Gilot's duplex is just one of three units up for sale in the building. The second property, a $2.5 million two-bedroom, was also owned by Gilot. She used it as a guest apartment and a pied-à-terre, said Christie's International's Leslie Hirsch, who holds the two listings alongside Howard L. Morrel. The third unit is the recently in-contract home of the late Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame. Yarrow's fifth-floor duplex home last listed for $4.44 million and earned itself an impressive bidding war. Its final sale price is not yet known. The fact that all three listings at 27 W. 67th St. are estate sales is no coincidence. Families there tend to hold fast to their homes, Hirsch said. What is surprising, however, is that three units are on the market in the first place. 'Properties in the building don't come up for sale very often, ' Hirsch said. 'You see one or two a year, maximum.' 9 Gilot in 2015. Getty Images Advertisement The building is one of several special residences along an iconic New York City block, known at West 67th Street Artists' Colony Historic District. The landmarked stretch of brick and limestone buildings between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue gained a reputation for its high concentration of artist apartments. Famous residents included the daring 'Readymades' artist Marcel Duchamp and photorealistic painter Normal Rockwell. This building, in particular, was founded by a group of 10 artists who pooled their money for the 14-studio co-op, Curbed reported in 2023. The building continued to attract generations of artists, thanks to its wide open studio-like set-up and large, north-facing windows — the light best for painting. Advertisement It was that feature of the apartment, Hirsch said, that Gilot valued. 'You can stand on the balcony and look at your work from multiple angles,' she said. 'That's what her daughter said to me, that what she [Gilot] liked about painting in this apartment.
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe review
'No woman leaves a man like me,' Pablo Picasso is supposed to have declared to Françoise Gilot, his partner and the mother of two of his children, in the spring of 1953. The couple had by this point been together for a decade, their first encounter having taken place in 1943 in a black market cafe in Paris (Picasso, who was then 61, had approached the 21-year-old Gilot bearing a bowl of cherries). But now he'd become involved with Jacqueline Roque, the woman with whom he'd go on to spend the final years of his life. What to do about this? Gilot would not confront him. Better simply to call his bluff. 'I am very secretive,' she said in an interview in 2016. 'I smile and I'm polite, but that doesn't mean that… I will do as I said I will do… He thought I would react like all his other women. That was a completely wrong opinion.' The following year, the question of her relationship with Picasso was resolved when she married a painter called Luc Simon. Gilot, clever and hard working, was an artist in her own right whose relationship to Picasso even in later life was vexed. In 1964, she published a brilliant, bestselling memoir of her time with him (he was enraged, and so was the French establishment on his behalf), but thereafter, she often disdained to talk of him. She preferred to discuss her work, which is held by, among other institutions, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. If Picasso's influence on her art was clear, she was adamant that it had made its mark before she met him (she had studied his pictures). Leaving him hadn't been liberating, she insisted, for the simple reason that she hadn't been a prisoner in the first place. Gilot appears on the cover of Sue Roe's new book, Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso, in a famous photograph by Robert Doisneau, and from the moment you look at it – her famous lover reclines on a divan in the background, wearing a Breton shirt – the feeling grows that there's something wrong here. She would surely have loathed this book, and not only because it defines all its subjects only in relation to Picasso; try as Roe might to insist that each of her women is equally worthy of attention, there's no getting away from the fact that this is not the case. Several books have been written about Gilot, and I'd be happy to read any of them (I recommend About Women, a collection of conversations between her and the American writer Lisa Alther). But about other of Picasso's lovers there is, I'm afraid, somewhat less to be said. The book comprises six biographical essays, though self-containment is tricky given that Picasso usually began his next relationship before he had ended his last (the book's structure isn't always fit for the time frames involved). It begins with Fernande Olivier, the artist's model who lived with him in Montmartre between 1905 and 1912, and who appears, in various guises, in many of the Rose Period portraits. She is succeeded by the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, and she, in turn, by the model Marie-Thérèse Walter. Next comes Dora Maar, the photographer and painter, to be followed by Gilot and Roque, a saleswoman in a pottery shop. After Gilot, Maar is the most interesting, not least for her influence on Picasso's Guernica (she first caught Picasso's attention in a cafe by peeling off her gloves and stabbing between her fingers with a penknife). Sometimes, there's light relief. The scene – possibly unreliable, since several different accounts of it exist – in which Walter and Maar physically fight as Picasso looks on is straight out of a film by François Ozon. But mostly – Gilot being the exception – Picasso leaves these women devastated. It's not only his restlessness and unthinking cruelty; while once they were living in Technicolor, now they're back in black and white. Roe tells her stories straightforwardly, though she can be both repetitive and a touch Mills & Boon ('We can only imagine the chemistry between the charismatic, seductive, black-eyed painter, who by all accounts exuded charisma even when standing still; and the poised, serious dancer…'). If this territory is new to you, the book won't be without interest. But as a feminist project, however well-intentioned, it misfires badly. Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
