Françoise Gilot is the most compelling figure in this biography of the painter’s lovers – but you get the feeling she would have loathed this book

“No woman leaves a man like me,” Pablo Picasso is supposed to have declared to Françoise Gilot, his partner and the mother of two of his children, in the spring of 1953. The couple had by this point been together for a decade, their first encounter having taken place in 1943 in a black market cafe in Paris (Picasso, who was then 61, had approached the 21-year-old Gilot bearing a bowl of cherries). But now he’d become involved with Jacqueline Roque, the woman with whom he’d go on to spend the final years of his life.

What to do about this? Gilot would not confront him. Better simply to call his bluff. “I am very secretive,” she said in an interview in 2016. “I smile and I’m polite, but that doesn’t mean that… I will do as I said I will do… He thought I would react like all his other women. That was a completely wrong opinion.” The following year, the question of her relationship with Picasso was resolved when she married a painter called Luc Simon.