The longtime home of the French artist in Manhattan's Upper West Side, including a companion apartment, is now on the market.
The six-room duplex on West 67th Street where French artist and memoirist Françoise Gilot lived and worked for three decades has been listed for sale at HK$33.7 million (US$4.3 million). A separate two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in the same building, previously owned by Gilot, is available for HK$19.6 million (US$2.5 million).
Gilot, who died in 2023 at age 101, occupied the approximately 2,000-square-foot duplex as her primary residence and studio. She created numerous works there, including “Intuitive Convergence,” as part of a career that spanned seven decades and included more than 1,500 paintings and 4,000 works on paper. Her art has been exhibited at institutions such as Christie’s Hong Kong, the Gagosian Gallery in New York, and the Musée Picasso in Paris.
Located in the Sixty-Seventh Street Studios building, the duplex is designed in 1902 by American landscape painter Henry Ward Ranger and financed by a group of artists. It is part of the West 67th Street Artists’ Colony Historic District, one of New York’s early cooperative buildings intended for creative professionals.
It includes a studio space with parquet floors, a wood-burning fireplace, and an 18-foot barrel-vault ceiling with bookshelves. It also features a den, a dining room, and a galley kitchen on the main level. Upstairs, there are two en suite bedrooms with walk-in closets and an adjoining office in the primary suite. The second apartment, a two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit, was used by Gilot for visitors.
Gilot was born in 1921 in Paris and graduated from the Sorbonne at age 17. She shifted from law studies to art and held her first exhibition at 21 during Nazi-occupied Paris. She had a relationship with Pablo Picasso from 1943 to 1953, resulting in two children, Claude and Paloma. After their separation, she continued her career, developing an abstract style associated with the postwar School of Paris. She later married artist Luc Simon, with whom she had a daughter, Aurelia, and subsequently married polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk in 1970.
Gilot moved to New York in the early 1960s and published her memoir “Life with Picasso” in 1964. She acquired the West 67th Street apartment in 1990 and lived there full-time after Dr. Salk’s death in 1995. Her works are held in more than a dozen museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Kasama Nichido Museum of Art in Japan. In April 2024, her painting “Concert on the Green (Le Concert Champêtre)” sold for HK$11.9 million (€1.315 million) at Christie’s in Paris, exceeding her previous auction record of HK$10.2 million (US$1.31 million) for “Paloma à la Guitare” in 2021.
