[1] Gilot was an accomplished artist, notably in watercolors and ceramics, and a bestselling memoirist of the book Life with Picasso.

Delving into the realms of mythology, symbolism, and the power of memory, Gilot's work explores complex philosophical ideas with spontaneity and freedom.

[4] 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.

"[6] Today, the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania is an international center for the study of Gilot’s works.

[8] While training to be a lawyer, Gilot was known to skip her morning law classes to study art with Monsieur Gerber, a retired artist living in Paris.

Gilot was tutored at home, beginning at a young age, and by the time she was six years old, she had a good knowledge of Greek mythology.

By the age of fourteen, she was reading books by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Alfred Jarry.

[11] While her father had hoped she would go to school to become a scientist or lawyer, Gilot was frequenting museums in Europe to understand and gain an appreciation for the masters.

She began private lessons with a fugitive Hungarian Jewish painter, Endre Rozsda, and attended classes at the Académie Julian.

[12] Dora Maar, the photographer who was his muse and lover at the time, was devastated to learn that Picasso was replacing her with the much younger artist.

Picasso painted La femme-fleur, and then his old friend Henri Matisse, who liked Gilot, announced that he would create a portrait of her, in which her body would be pale blue and her hair leaf green.

[14][16][17] Gilot's biographer Sacha Llewelyn writes: Picasso, enraged, destroyed her possessions, including artworks, books and her treasured letters from Matisse.

Mobilising all his networks, he demanded that the Louise Leiris Gallery stop representing Gilot and that she no longer be invited to exhibit at the Salon de Mai.

Explained away as the unfortunate behaviour of a moody genius, today this aggressive intervention is finally being seen for what it was: the devastating actions of a bully[18] In 1964, 11 years after their separation, Gilot wrote Life with Picasso (with the art critic Carlton Lake),[19] a book that sold over one million copies in dozens of languages,[20] despite an unsuccessful legal challenge from Picasso attempting to stop its publication.

[23] Her first exhibit with Kahnweiler's famed Galerie Louise Leiris took place in 1952 in Paris, which became a critical moment in her life and career.

[23] Her provocative 1946 work Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple re-examined the Biblical tale taking a fresh look at temptation, punishment and the blaming of women.

[4] Gilot's paintings pulse with dynamic rhythm, overthrowing conventions to let her impulses discover intense pictorial equivalences of mythical storytelling.

[2] At Christie's in Hong Kong, her artwork entitled "Living Forest," , an abstract canvas created in 1977, also sold for $1.3 million.

[29] In 1969, Gilot was introduced to the American polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk[30] at the home of mutual friends in La Jolla, California.

[31] During their marriage, which lasted until Salk's death in 1995, the couple lived apart for half of every year as Gilot continued to paint in New York City, La Jolla, and Paris.

In 1976, she joined the board of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, where she taught summer courses and took on organizational responsibilities until 1983.

[35] Gilot died in a New York City hospital on 6 June 2023, at the age of 101, after suffering from heart and lung ailments.