It’s a peculiar statement that accords her rejected lover the motivating agency in her own self-discovery. And it’s unsupported by any careful reading of the rest of the book, which paints a clear-eyed picture of the world’s most renowned artist at the height of his fame, but also a vivid self-portrait of an inexperienced young woman from a privileged background—she was just 21 when she met the Spanish painter, who was 40 years her elder—who nonetheless had the sharpness of perception and toughness of spirit to enter an inherently unequal relationship without sacrificing her identity to it. I suspect that Gilot’s survival instinct was just as inherent as her sense of self. And survive she did: when she died this past June, she was 101.

Early on, Gilot experimented with abstraction but then seems to have accepted Picasso’s dismissal of abstract painting as merely a “kind of invertebrate, unformulated interior dream.” In any case, her paintings up through the 1960s are primarily representational—and, as with many French painters of her generation, they show the strong imprint of Picasso’s influence.

Later she began to alternate between imagistic and nonobjective modes, though she always attributed autobiographical content to her abstract works. In writing about her 1979–80 composition The Hawthorne, Garden of Another Time, a luminous arrangement of flat, clearly demarcated color forms, she described it as embodying “the recollection of looking toward my paternal grandmother’s garden in Neuilly”—the affluent Paris suburb where she was born in 1921—“through the red stained-glass windows of the billiard room on the second floor.” Distilling her memories and perceptions into abstract form, she often secreted fragments of imagery within her works, blurring the distinction. Still, it can be argued that it was in her efforts toward abstraction that Gilot achieved her true independence as an artist. There, she was free to use color, as she said, “to exaggerate, to go beyond, to pursue the extreme limit of what is suggested by the pictorial imagination.”

She also achieved double-barreled success, as both a painter and a writer: Though academic attention to her career has been scarce, her exhibitions were legion, and in 2021 a couple of her paintings sold for $1.3 million each through Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Her book Life with Picasso sold millions of copies worldwide and was succeeded by Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art (1990) and the autobiographical Interface: The Painter and the Mask (1983).

In 1970 she married Jonas Salk, the American inventor of the polio vaccine, and began living for part of each year in La Jolla, California; she taught each summer between 1976 and 1983 at the University of Southern California. Following Salk’s death in 1995, she left California for the Upper West Side of New York.

Having learned from Picasso what she could, Gilot went her own way with equanimity, and without apparent bitterness. How many of us could do the same? The Guardian recently published a takedown of the “blatant sexism” of the obituary headlines for Gilot, which never failed to mention Picasso (e.g., the New York Times: “Françoise Gilot, Artist in the Shadow of Picasso, Is Dead at 101”). Guardian writer Katy Hessel asks, “does his name really have to be mentioned? Aren’t her career, her achievements, her name, enough to stand on their own?”

One retort would be that Gilot herself never believed that she had to sever her name from that of her former lover. Aside from writing two books about him, she was happy to exhibit her own work at the Musée Picasso in Antibes in 1987, and then in 2012 to cocurate a his-and-hers show of their work at Gagosian gallery in New York. So the answer is: yes, you do need to mention Picasso to understand Gilot, and that was something she was never ashamed of. Just don’t call her his “muse,” as did the Washington Post, among others. From the beginning, Gilot met Picasso as a fellow practitioner and not just the object of his adoring gaze.

It’s notable that the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” while claiming to present a feminist riposte to the artist’s well-known misogyny, has no room for the works of either of the women artists who knew him best, Gilot and Dora Maar. The show’s organizers might have discovered that Gilot knew better than most how to get over his arrogant brutality without neglecting everything in his work that’s so useful to other artists.  

Speaking on Zoom, I asked Critchlow how she feels about being part of the new wave of figurative painting that’s swept the art world over the last few years, and her response was telling: She doesn’t deny that her work is figurative—how could she?—but she says her deep interest is not there so much as in the materials and techniques of painting. Can she really be such a formalist, or is she being evasive? After all, her fantasy portraits of young, bare-breasted Black women are not exactly neutral subjects: imagine something like a collaboration between Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Lisa Yuskavage, but at a Giorgio Morandi scale. Drawn, in a far from literal way, from sources ranging from classical European painting and her own ongoing practice of life drawing to 1960s soft porn and contemporary music videos, and not-so-contemporary ones, too, like PJ Harvey’s “C’mon Billy” (1995), Critchlow’s works seem calculated to elicit strong reactions. They test viewers’ visceral feelings about female sexuality, Blackness, and what happens when they intersect. Things can get uneasy. She once told an interviewer that “with femininity you can’t get it right.” Her work reflects an equanimity with that conundrum.

For what it’s worth, I’m willing to believe the smiling, ingenuous-looking young woman I see on the screen really is unconcerned about how others might react to her provocative images. She’s so clearly absorbed in her own self-exploration by way of the language of painting—not formalism, but form as a metaphor for the self. The critic Johanna Fateman once put it beautifully: Critchlow’s figures, she said, “seem to fix their dispassionate gazes beyond the sexualized tropes that frame them.” The results are often poignant, sometimes ironic, always honest in their willingness to go where the inherent and undemonstrative sensuality of her paint seems to lead.

The paintings exude an unmistakable intimacy. That’s partly to do with the modest size of most of her works: When she mentioned she’d done some bigger paintings for the New York show, I asked how large, curious about what sounded like a significant shift in the work, and she admitted, “well, medium-scale.” The intimacy owes perhaps as well to her muted palette, dominated by the myriad browns she uses to describe, not only her characters’ flesh, but much of their surroundings; above all, it derives from the delicacy of touch that she brings to the canvas. And although there is a surprising strain of traditionalism in her approach to painting, perhaps a reflection of her postgraduate training at London’s Royal Drawing School, she is no more constrained by any sort of academicism than she is tempted by the overt sociopolitical messaging that engages many of the other figurative painters in the spotlight today. Her art is finding out who she is and what she can do through painting.

As a man of mixed race, Smith must have felt something of an outsider in the New York art world. He was born in what was Indian Territory in 1906, the year before it was admitted to the union as Oklahoma, the 46th state. His parents, both partly of Cherokee extraction, had moved there from Tennessee; the people among whom he grew up were predominantly Choctaw and Chickasaw, members (like Smith’s Cherokee ancestors) of the “Five Civilized Tribes” that had been forcibly removed from the Southeast in the 1830s. After graduating from high school, he worked as a rancher, among other jobs, before heading to Oklahoma’s East Central State Normal School (now East Central University) in 1931 for a degree in English, and it was there, in his final year, that—having never set foot in a museum, met an artist, or seen a serious work of painting—he took an art class and experienced it as a revelation: “I felt very strongly … that I had always been an artist,” he said in a 1985 interview.

Upon graduation, Smith commenced his career as a schoolteacher in his home state, but began attending summer sessions at Teachers College, Columbia University. In New York, at the Albert E. Gallatin Gallery of Living Art at New York University, Smith experienced a further revelation: the existence of abstract art. Henceforth, his heroes would be Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, and, above all, Piet Mondrian.

Not that Smith’s work turned completely nonobjective right away. The paintings in his first one-person exhibition, at New York’s Uptown Gallery in 1941—he had moved to the city two years earlier—retained referential imagery, albeit in a geometricizing, reductive key. An unsigned review in Art Digest describes “a highly personalized idiom” in works that “picture farm life, comment on our war-mad world, and depict the biological cycle of life” along with “semiabstractions executed in bright watercolor washed with accents of ink line, alternatively sharp and blotter fuzzy.”

By 1943, though, when Smith painted works such as OK Territory (now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum), he had clearly made a commitment to the heritage of Mondrian and De Stijl, employing only flat, rectilinear forms and a very limited palette. While, at least according to its title, that painting was a homage to the artist’s birthplace, many more of his paintings of the 1940s, not unlike Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943), pay tribute to his adopted city through their brisk, jazzy abstract rhythms. Smith’s encapsulation of Mondrian’s lesson remains key to his own art: “the interchangeability of form and space.”

It was really only in the early 1950s that he declared his independence from Mondrian, adopting the circle rather than the rectangle as the basis for his compositions—sometimes in counterpoint to rectilinear forms, as in Chickasaw (1954), but often entrusting his art entirely to curvilinear ones, in works like Blue Red Spheres (1955). Smith retold the origin story behind this change often; like most such stories, its accuracy may be less to the point than its symbolic value. It has to do with the most ordinary thing, a catalogue of athletic equipment that caught the artist’s eye: balls! The illustrations, Smith explained to an interviewer in 1987, “were drawn with a pencil, rather than photographic illustrations. And the seams on a—let us say football or basketball—intrigued me. That showed me how to use the curvilinear form with an inner circle.” And to another interlocutor, in 1995: “I kept that catalogue on my desk and would go back to it every day or so. I thought, ‘What in the hell am I doing with this thing?’ When I put that question to myself, a little voice inside said, ‘Because that’s what you are looking for.’”

In the work Smith began doing after the fateful encounter with the catalogue, the division of the pictorial field became above all a sovereign act of drawing. The power of the line, as Smith discovered, is that it produces two shapes. One might call them positive and negative, as long as it’s clear that each one is positive to the other’s negative and vice versa: here is that “interchangeability of form and space” that so fascinated Smith. It would be tempting to say that from this point on, Arp and Brancusi become more relevant to Smith’s work than Mondrian, as his paintings begin to take on a strangely sculptural aspect, a sense of volume, even without giving up the flat plane of painting (except in a few reliefs made in the early 1960s). In the tondos that Smith was painting in the second half of the 1950s there is a distinct sense that one is seeing not a disc, but a single face of a sphere, and that the interchangeable forms encompass the unseen remainder.

In Smith’s more conventionally rectangular works from this period and on throughout the 1960s, this same principle of interchangeability applies. The artist himself explained it quite clearly in a 1964 interview:

“I will get up and draw this one line through the canvas which creates two forms, one on either side of the line, and while I am drawing this line, it seems that I am travelling many, many miles in space instead of just fifty inches or sixty inches whatever the canvas happens to be, but it is a great, great distance from one point to the next and around the curve, and I begin to feel the tensions develop and the forces working on either side of this line; there is a color often suggested, usually the color that I am going to use, that comes to me before the line reaches the other side of the canvas.”

Often the two color areas engaged by the complex curvilinear line of their boundary are approximately equal in extent. But the visual force of two different colors is never entirely equivalent; to balance the tensions between them is never easy. Still more of a challenge is to do so when there is an evident disproportion in area between the two forms. Yet in a work such as Over Easy (1958), the smaller black zone does not become a merely passive ground against which the larger magenta one appears as a figure; instead, both register as equally active, forming and being formed by its companion.

The apparent “formalism” of Smith’s lifelong fascination with the reciprocal relations of forms and spaces in painting is not something to be boxed away in a purely aesthetic realm sealed off from the rest of life. Consider Smith’s experience as a person who grew up between cultures—settler and Indigenous—and considered himself to belong to both, or perhaps to neither. “What place would an interracial artist have,” cultural historian Randolph Lewis asks in a 2001 essay on the artist, “in the dichotomous identity politics of the New York art world of the 1940s? An artist could be Euroamerican or could be something else, but being two things at once was difficult to sustain in the (white) public sphere.” Yet Lewis finds connections that others have overlooked in Smith’s art, both to Native arts and to the landscape of the American Southwest. These are all plausible. And as for the Southwestern landscape, Smith himself once ruminated, “that’s influenced my paintings more than any other experience that I’ve ever had.” From OK Territory on, the titles of many of his ostensibly abstract works attest to this. But more important, I think, is the way Smith’s art proposes that we experience what Lewis calls “being two things at once.” This double being is implicit in Smith’s very conception of line as entailing the simultaneous coming-into-being of distinct forms. One might almost feel that Smith was always addressing, in his own way, the famous words of W.E.B. Du Bois: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”

A more precise description than “identity” of the subject of Smith’s abstraction may be, how to live together, but also how to live with oneself. Whether we are thinking of a single person, or of a whole society, identity is paradoxical: It depends on the coexistent nonidentity of its sources or members. What Smith’s art suggests is that equality is not measurable. In this regard, I think in particular of the painting Black-White Duet with Red (1953), a tondo in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Keeping Smith’s mixed racial heritage in mind, the painting becomes an almost comically blatant allegory about race in the United States, which has too often been imagined as, quite literally, a matter of black and white; whereas the Indigenous people who are coded as “red” are displaced to a small wedge of the picture. Yet that little patch of red occupying a very small area of the canvas is not mere background; on the contrary, it is key to the form of the whole, unbalancing the apparently stable contrariety of the black and white spaces in order to construct a new, more complex and dynamic equilibrium.

That complexity and dynamism would multiply in Smith’s subsequent work, particularly the polyptychs he began to make in the latter part of the 1960s, many of which he called “Constellations.” They ask viewers to see forms that strictly speaking are not there, forms that leap from canvas to canvas, so that the meaning of a shape as it literally asserts itself on any one panel has to coexist with its meaning as a fragment of a larger and partly unseen shape that exists only in the viewer’s imagination. In these paintings, as John Yau observed, “instead of coming together into a harmonic balance, the forms no longer fit comfortably inside each other” as, in the end, they had usually done in Smith’s single-canvas paintings. That’s to say that, just as Smith’s art kept opening itself up to greater degrees of difficulty and unsettledness without losing its cool, it asks viewers to do the same.

AMONG THE MOST significant artworks that have come into my life have been a chair, a trash can, a child’s dress. When I look at them as art, I tend to think of them as sculpture. Why do I (sometimes) call them that? As when I bestow the name of art on other things, it’s because of how they prompt me to think about form, appearance, meaning. Usually, when people speak about things like this in some slightly grander way than as chairs, trash cans, dresses, they call them objects of design, which of course they are—but that slightly distracts from what fascinates me about them because of the premium it rightly puts on function. There is a pleasure inherent in certain everyday objects that is certainly not in contradiction to their functionality but by the same token is not limited to the appreciation of it. There is a free and independent sense of invention and of the integrity of a thing’s making.

Besides, most such functions could be fulfilled in an infinite number of ways. If fulfilling a use in a satisfactory way were all that counted, there would be no choosing among the thousands of chairs that are sufficiently comfortable while not being offensive to the eye. As far as wastebaskets go, I made do for years with old Jiffy bags—this was extraordinarily efficient, in my view, since once filled, the entire thing could be discarded. The only downside was that they did not stand on their own but had to be propped up between my desk and the wall; but since I did have a desk and a wall this was no real problem. As for dresses, well, there could be no better proof than their overwhelming multiplicity that things don’t need to be standardized to be equally useful.

Anyway, out of all these everyday things that have taken on special esthetic status in my eyes—these noticed (rather than found) sculptures—perhaps my favorite is a certain lamp I keep in my living room. I am not original in this: this lamp is renowned in the annals of design. I’m speaking of the Toio standing lamp, designed by Achille Castiglioni for Flos in 1962, one of which I’ve lived with for the last 10 years. Admittedly, there might be a special reason why an art critic in particular would become fascinated by this object, and not only because its self-evident construction and spare, stripped-down industrial appearance align it with modernist sculpture. More importantly, it might be because in making this lamp Castiglioni, whether consciously or not, offered a surprising twist on the concept of the readymade, which was just then undergoing a rediscovery in the art world thanks to figures like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in the United States, the Nouveaux Réalistes in France, and the adherents of Fluxus just about everywhere.

What is this Toio lamp? The best way to describe it might be to start at the top and work my way down. It starts with what lamps normally don’t show: the light source itself, in this case the headlight of a car—an ordinary, off-the-shelf object, although then again, in 1962 Italy, maybe not so ordinary as that. This type of headlight came from the United States, so it might have seemed a bit new and exotic despite its being so ordinary in a different context. Obviously this exoticism has little effect on me, since it is a kind of light that I am used to seeing. But there is another, more important aspect of de- or recontextualization at work here: the fact that something made to be used outdoors has here been inserted into the domestic interior. And this has not been done arbitrarily. The use of the automobile headlamp solves the big problem with lamps, namely that they need lampshades. In my view, this is as problematic as sculptures needing bases. It shows up a sort of inner contradiction in the very idea of the lamp: we need them both to shed light and to shield us from it. Facing the ceiling, the headlight, its lower portion silvered (normally to reflect its light forward, here upward), already shields us from any glare while reflecting light off the ceiling over a wide area. The headlight is displayed as an object for its own sake but also fulfills its function beautifully.

This recontextualization of an existing product is already a stroke of brilliance, a way of designing by not designing. But still there was the question of how to lift this headlamp above eye level. The rim that holds the headlamp is in turn attached to a slender hexagonal rod. Containing the wires are several loops reminiscent of those in a fishing pole—and in fact Castiglioni’s first prototype really was a fishing pole. So this is a sort of remade readymade. If you move the Toio, the rod sways like a young tree in the wind, as if to show its litheness in comparison with the heavy “head” of light it bears. But as it is metal, one has no fear that it will snap. It’s attached to a large clamp, lacquered red, that sits on the floor and holds the heavy transformer necessary to use ordinary house current for the headlight; this transformer is at once a counterweight stabilizing the whole construction and a quasi-decorative element in itself.

The Toio is made of existing elements—or adaptations thereof—with nothing added to beautify or stylize them, and nothing hidden. But it has incredible beauty and style. Yes, it performs the function of a lamp and does so with exemplary efficiency, but it does a lot more: It sheds light not only in the literal sense but also sheds light on the thinking that goes into making something. It values resourcefulness, the everyday genius of finding value in things rather than adding value to them. It talks to me about paradox and brio, and satisfies, most of all, Castiglioni’s declared desire “to communicate with the observer, to stimulate his power of understanding, his knowledge of the object, and to disregard formal appearances. This relationship could be described as one of mutual curiosity.” What could be a better account of what art should do? I’ll admit my Toio was fairly expensive for a lamp. But it was incredibly cheap for a sculpture.

Photo: Toio lamp. Courtesy Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany.