Françoise Gilot and the Two Children

*Claude dessinant, Françoise et Paloma* (Claude Drawing, Françoise and Paloma) introduces three new figures. Earlier we described Dora Maar as a photographer with a keen artistic sense and a strong will of her own. Picasso and Dora Maar stayed together until he was 62, but in 1943 he met a woman, and the relationship began to crack. Her name was Françoise Gilot, a beautiful 21-year-old. Picasso fell for her at first sight, and with such a vast age gap, you have to wonder what it was about her that captured him. Dora Maar sensed what was going on and was furious and shattered. After the breakup she suffered a mental breakdown severe enough to need treatment, and she reportedly kept longing for Picasso, looking at the paintings he had made of her, until the end of her life.

Around the time he met Françoise, Picasso took up a new medium: ceramics. It began with a visit in the summer of 1946 to Vallauris in the south of France, still best known as a pottery town, where he made a few pieces. When he returned the following year and saw the pottery he had made, his creative drive seemed to ignite, and he threw himself into ceramics. In 1948 he settled in Vallauris with Françoise.

Back to the painting. Picasso and Françoise had two children, a son and a daughter: the Claude and Paloma of the title. "Paloma," the daughter's name, means "dove" in Spanish. As mentioned earlier, war and peace were important themes for Picasso, and he painted quite a few doves, the symbol of peace. When he joined the Communist Party he drew doves for the peace movement, and that is why he named his daughter Paloma.

Picasso and Françoise spent about ten years together, from 1943 to 1953, but then he met another woman. Disappointed by the news, Françoise took the children and left him of her own accord. As far as the narrator knows, she is the only one of Picasso's partners who walked away on her own. Her decisiveness rattled Picasso, but once she had gone, she never returned. It was true that he had met someone else, and so the two parted for good. The woman was Geneviève, but since the relationship was so short, she can hardly be called a muse. She was neither a source of artistic inspiration nor a long-term partner.