The fact that she reached and surpassed 100 years of age is just another singularity. But other reasons are to be highlighted about this writer and painter born in Paris, in November 1921. She also studied philosophy and law before devoting herself to art, to which she contributed with a prolific and celebrated work for over 80 years.

A skewed approach, due to biased gender perspectives, identified her especially as the muse and lover of Pablo Picasso, whom he met in 1943 and was 40 years older than her. 1943, that was the year in which she exhibited her work for the first time, at the height of Nazi occupation.

Her relationship with Picasso lasted a decade — resulting in two children, Claude and Paloma Picasso — whose strong personality and enormous fame in the artistic world temporarily eclipsed the brilliance of Françoise, whom the father of cubism had predicted in their first date: "Girls looking like you would never be painters."

But this artist, who at the age of five had stated that she would be a painter, had the good sense to love herself and became the only woman who walked out on the genius from Malaga. On him, she revealed: "Pablo was the greatest love of my life, but you had to take actions to protect yourself. I did it. I left before he destroyed me."

She stated so in the book Artists in Conversation, by Janet Hawley. Also in the volume Life with Picasso, written in 1964 together with journalist Carlton Lake, she shared experiences with the famous painter and her reflections on art, a book whose release Picasso attempted, unsuccessfully, to prohibit, and it brought the French woman several enemies.

There are many experts on the life and work of Picasso who, from a gender perspective, have shed light on the relationship of this immense artist with the women who shared his life. Even some of them, such as Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar — in addition to Gilot herself — left their testimony in this regard.

Even the painter's own granddaughter, Marina Picasso, wrote in her book Picasso, my grandfather, about those relationships: "He subjected them to his voracious sexuality, tamed them, enchanted them, devoured them and crushed them on his canvases. After spending many nights, extracting their essence, once bled, he got rid of them."

But it was Françoise Gilot who got rid of him, and she later managed to put her life back together, despite Picasso's dark prediction: "Do you think someone is going to be interested in you? They will never do just for you. Even those who you believe have certain appreciation towards you, they'll just have a kind of curiosity about a person whose life touched mine so intimately."

However, this talented woman had two other marriages, one of them with the famous American virologist and physician Jonas Salk, one of the developers of the first polio vaccines. Gilot served as art director for Virgina Woolf Quarterly magazine and was chairwoman of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California.

Currently, works by this famed creator are exhibited in famous institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as in the Pompidou Art Center in Paris.

Not for nothing did the French Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, labels her as "one of the most surprising artists of her generation" on the occasion of her death, the woman who not only knew how to dazzle with her art, but also with her integrity to defend her freedom and talent against prejudice and false expectations.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff