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Life with Picasso Audiobook
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Publisher Description
Françoise Gilot was in her early twenties when she met the sixty-one-year-old Pablo Picasso in 1943. Brought up in a well-to-do upper-middle-class family, who had sent her to Cambridge and the Sorbonne and hoped that she would go into law, the young woman defied their wishes and set her sights on being an artist. Her introduction to Picasso led to a friendship, a love affair, and a relationship of ten years, during which Gilot gave birth to Picasso's two children, Paloma and Claude. Gilot was one of Picasso's muses; she was also very much her own woman, determined to make herself into the remarkable painter she did indeed become.
Life with Picasso, written with Carlton Lake and published in 1961, is about Picasso the artist and Picasso the man. We hear him talking about painting and sculpture, his life, his career, as well as other artists, both contemporaries and old masters. We glimpse Picasso in his many and volatile moods, dismissing his work, exultant over his work, entertaining his various superstitions, being an anxious father. But Life with Picasso is not only a portrait of a great artist at the height of his fame; it is also a picture of a talented young woman of exacting intelligence at the outset of her own notable career.
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"Learning so much about Picasso’s personal life was amazing compared to what we are taught in a normal art history program. Also, being told by the wife was a special privilege. I don’t know why they don’t include some of an artists, personal life along with the painting life in a normal program at art college. Even though Picasso does not come out as a very likeable person in this novel, I really enjoyed the way it was told. Also, there was a lot of information about other artist and dealers of this time. Which usually doesn’t appear either in a regular art history course. "
— Ani (5 out of 5 stars)
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“The gentle voice of narrator Mary Sarah lends a wistful quality to this memoir…Sarah’s fluency in French is evident and adds authenticity to dialogue, names, and places in France…Today’s listener will still find this memoir fascinating.”
— AudioFile -
“One of the most illuminating we have had on the mind and spirit of Picasso.”
— Los Angeles Times -
“Not only a vivid account of her life with [Picasso] but an intimate panorama of life in Paris during and after the German occupation, a Paris populated by Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, and Gertrude Stein.”
— New York magazine -
“Gilot’s gift of total recall seems scarcely human, but in her account of the ten years she spent with Picasso…everything he said to her about his work rings true even in English.”
— New Statesman -
“The portrait of Picasso that emerges…has a monumentality, a richness and diversity and intensity of being that could have been captured only by a woman of uncommon gifts.”
— Harper’s -
“What it is like actually to live with the most publicized artist in history—as chauffeur, secretary, pupil, companion, mother, lover, and ex-lover—is now told for the first time.”
— Saturday Review
Awards
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A New York Times bestseller
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A #1 Amazon bestseller in Artist Biographies
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About the Authors
Francoise Gilot (1921-1923) was a French painter, critic, and writer. Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, she began writing and painting at a young age. In 1938, she graduated from the Sorbonne with a BA degree in philosophy and in 1939 from Cambridge University with a degree in English. In 1943, when she was twenty-one, she met Pablo Picasso, who was sixty-one, and they had two children, Claude and Paloma. Their relationship lasted ten years. She published the bestselling memoir Life with Picasso eleven years after their separation. In 1970, she married Jonas Salk, who pioneered the polio vaccine, and they remained married until his death in 1995. She worked on behalf of the Salk Institute in California and continued to exhibit her work internationally.
About Mary Sarah
Mary Sarah is an actor and voice-over artist known for her subtle, emotionally potent performances. Classically trained at the Riverside Shakespeare Academy and the Film Actors Studio in New York City, Mary narrates books filled with adventure, mystery, and romance.