She was the only woman to ever leave Pablo Picasso, and to him she remained a mystery. Francoise Gilot is a painter, a truth-seeker, a rebel. She may have spent her life in the company of men who changed the world – Picasso, Matisse, and Jonas Salk – but Gilot forged vital relationships with ground-breaking artists and scientists on her own terms, creating an artistic style all her own, translated into an enormous collection of paintings and drawings held by private collectors and public museums around the world.

In her early nineties, she generously shared her hospitality and wisdom with writer Malte Herwig, who started out as an interviewer but found himself drawn into the role of pupil as Gilot, whom he called ›a philosopher of joy‹, introduced him to different ways of seeing the world.