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Life with Picasso | 
 enlarge | Author: Francoise Gilot
Publisher: Anchor
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy Used: $1.58
You Save: $13.42 (89%)
New (24) Used (36) Collectible (8) from $1.58
Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 247678
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0385261861
Dewey Decimal Number: 709.24
EAN: 9780385261869
ASIN: 0385261861
Publication Date: June 26, 1989
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Standard used condition.
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Product Description
At 21, Gilot met 62-year-old Picasso. For nearly a decade, she shared her life with this complex artist, giving birth to two of his children. In her recollections, she describes the exuberant, if exhausting, world they knew together. 10 photos.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 One of the most interesting books I have read on Picasso. July 2, 2007
(.....please take note that due to legal constraints, there was no public tie made between this book and the movie "Surviving Picasso" starring Anthony Hopkins and Julianne Moore - I just wanted to give you all a little footnote here, because that movie *is* this book, virtually scene by scene, and almost word for word....and they did a fantastic job.)
This is a beautifully articulate book. I have read it four times. If you have interest in the mentality of Pablo Picasso, this book is one of a handful which you should take the time out to consume. It goes without saying that being written by an ex-lover there is some bias involved.
I'm not so much a fan of the man's work, but I have always been fascinated with his psyche.
Francoise Gilot is a very dynamic and insightful person and her work is as interesting to appreciate as her writing.
His thoughts apply to every art February 21, 2007
It is refreshing and empowering to see the words with which Picasso descirbes his arts and his talents, and the talents of his contemporaries. If you have artistic intutions, but, you can't really put a word to what you mean sometimes, it might be very helpful to read this book.
For he is thoughtful. And he is egotistical.
And, being both, he has quite a precise verbalization of the intellectual and analytical techniques he uses to make himself so successful. He paints be emotion, to be sure, but, when he steps back and evaluates his own work he is an accurate, and precise, and viscious critic. His own ability to express what his work lacks - and then address that identified issue - is inspiring and educational to artists and to scientists alike.
In the later years (the book is chronological), Francoise will spend more time talking about the children and her emotional relationship to Picasso. In this, there is less value to 'take away.'
But in the beginning two-third of this nonfiction narrative - with its intimate and intelligent insight into Pablo, Matisse, and Rembrandt (as well as those artists whom Picasso does not like) - is a treasure and I have gone to it many times to research half-remembered bytes of information.
To be human, too, it is a wonderful depiction of an unsual love and courtship.
Highly interesting read from Gilot's perspective December 3, 2006
Francoise Gilot is a legend as an artist and a feminist (my term...not hers). This book opens up a world about Picasso and Gilot's time together in a way that is almost impossible to put down.
 Intimate portrait of artistic genius as moral monster January 9, 2005
23 out of 25 found this review helpful
I read this book with a certain guilt as if prying into the intimate world of others I had no business looking into. But the fascination with the life of the great artist, and the whole subject of creativity kept me reading on even when I felt a bit disgusted in doing so.
I don't think it is my prudery that led to these feelings. The Picasso of this work is an egomaniac, a moral monster, who shows absolutely no consideration whatever for those closest to him. The people who have helped him in the past do not count for him. The people who are involved with him in the present are manipulated by him for his own purposes. He is tremendously ambitious, greedy financially, stingy, sexually driven and demanding without necessarily being interested in the feelings of the woman he is with . Gilot is no innocent, and her relation with Picasso comes not only one feels out of her own ambition as an artist but her desire to be next to the big- deal the big- name the great genius of art. It is instructive how she cans the two aunts who raise her when the great Pablo demands exclusive attention. This is not to deny her genuine love for him or his passion for her, though no doubt this was never particularly exclusive. Picasso was a great user, user of materials and situations for his art, and user of people for his life. His work has a cruelty his life shares. And it seems to me that that cruelty means his work in the deepest sense does not reach the highest level, the level where Rembrandt and Michangelo and Raphael are. And this because the great draughtsman is not a great reader of the human soul . He is rather a twenty- second technical man a supreme master of means who knows how to put the machine in himself to use to cut up and recombine the world for his purposes. Gilot goes too as do all the previous wives and mistresses, the agents and friends. And Pablo takes and takes to the end .
Gilot is a tough character and in a way her presentation of herself as one who stands up to him at points gives the work a certain dramatic power. But in the end the feeling is that the greatest art cannot come of or dwell in the kind of sordidness of spirit which Picasso so often displayed. And thus the reading of this work gave me the sense that generations hence though they may admire the work of Picasso will not be inspired by and love it as we do with the work of the very greatest artists.
Interesting book, hard to put down once you get into it. September 8, 2002
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Not being very well educated in art, the book helped me better understand some of what Picasso was trying to portray in his artwork. It is an easy book to get through once you get into it, the way it is written it can be long and tedious at times but the information Francoise Gilot gives is quite sincere and in depth. The book will give you a better incite to Picasso's twisted and passionate life, leaving you with a newfound knowledge and idea about Picasso.
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