'Life with Picasso' (1964) was written by Francoise Gilot (with help from Carlton Lake). Gilot was Picasso’s mistress from the mid-1940s until the end of the 1950s. It’s a first-person account of her stormy time with Mr Love-Pants, beginning with the day in wartime Paris when Gilot was approached by Picasso in a restaurant, to the time when, exhausted by feeding the monster’s ego and with a couple of children in tow, she did what no other mistress of Picasso had done before: she broke free and left him. There are different ways of looking at the relationship that is painted by this book. Picasso certainly considered that it would damage his post-war image as the left-wing saint, and he tried to have the book banned and withdrawn before it was first published. It’s true that Picasso does not come off well in terms of how he treated Gilot, or any of the women in his life. Infidelity? Yes, from the start, as he was still conducting a relationship with Marie-Therese Walter during...
Artist Philip Hartigan talks about art, interviews other artists, and more