Francoise Gilot, the woman who dumped Picasso

France's Francoise Gilot, who died on June 6 aged 101, survived what she called the "hell" of being Spanish artist Pablo Picasso's mistress and muse to become a renowned artist in her own right.

The Picasso Museum in Paris confirmed her death to AFP, after the New York Times reported Gilot had passed away following recent heart and lung ailments.

While two of the other women in Picasso's life died by suicide, and two others had mental breakdowns, Gilot stood up to the giant of modern art, and was the only woman to leave him of her own accord.

"Pablo was the greatest love of my life, but you had to take steps to protect yourself. I did, I left before I was destroyed," she confided in Janet Hawley's 2021 book "Artists and Conversation."

"The others didn't, they clung on to the mighty Minotaur and paid a heavy price," she said, referring to Picasso's first wife, dancer Olga Khokhlova, who lapsed into depression after he left her; his former teen lover, Marie-Therese Walter, who hanged herself; his second wife Jacqueline Roque, who shot herself; and his best-known muse, artist Dora Maar, who had a nervous breakdown.

The painter of "Guernica" was, she said, "astonishingly creative, a magician, so intelligent and seductive... But he was also very cruel, sadistic and merciless to others, as well as to himself." Gilot was 21 and a budding painter when she first met Picasso, who was 40 years her senior and married to Russian dancer Khokhlova, in occupied France during World War II. At the time of the meeting he was also the lover of French photographer, painter and poet Maar.

The meeting took place in a Paris restaurant in the spring of 1943 when he brought a bowl of cherries to her table and an invitation to visit his studio.

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