Interface: The Painter and the Mask

by Françoise Gilot

A companion volume to her earlier best-seller Life with Picasso, Francoise Gilot's the Painter and the Mask celebrates the author's own development as a painter as well as her circle of acquaintances during the height of modern painting in France. Beginning with her first childhood recollections, Gilot captures in her highly poetic prose the subtle impressions upon the eye, mind and soul of the artist that comprise the raw material for the magical transformation that becomes the artist's vision upon blank canvas. Gilot was an internationally known artist working largely in watercolors and ceramics as well as a bestselling memoirist of the book Life with Picasso. Gilot's artwork is showcased in more than a dozen leading museums including the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2021 her painting Paloma à la Guitare, a 1965 portrait of her daughter, sold for $1.3 million at Sotheby's in London. Gilot is also known for her romantic partnership with Pablo Picasso as well as her later marriage to Jonas Salk, the American researcher who developed the first safe polio vaccine. In an interview questioning how she came to be with two of the most influential men in the world, Gilot responded 'Lions mate with lions.'

196 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Françoise Gilot is a French painter, critic, and author. In 1973 Gilot was appointed as the Art Director of the scholarly journal Virginia Woolf Quarterly. In 1976 she was made a member of the board of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. She held summer courses there and took on organizational responsibilities until 1983. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s she designed costumes, stage sets, and masks for productions at the Guggenheim in New York. She was awarded a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, in 1990.

She is also known as the lover and artistic muse of Pablo Picasso from 1943 to 1953; the pair had two children, Claude (1947-2023) and Paloma (1949-). She later married the American vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk.

She passed away June 6, 2023 in Manhattan (New York).