Françoise Gilot, the French painter who wrote about her relationship with Pablo Picasso in a bestselling memoir, has died at 101, the New York Times reports.

Gilot, a native of Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, was educated at the Sorbonne and Cambridge University. She studied art from a young age, learning from her mother, Madeleine Gilot, a watercolor painter.

She met Picasso when she was 21 and he was 61. They had two children together, Claude Picasso, a photographer, and Paloma Picasso, a jewelry designer and perfumer. Gilot and Picasso stayed together for a decade.

More than a decade after she left Picasso, she wrote about their partnership in a memoir, Life With Picasso, published in 1964. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus wrote of the book, “An intimate, vivid, above all intelligent and authentic portrait of Picasso, with its twin elements of love and art, this should sell like mad. And rightly. It’s high spirited reading.”

Picasso was irate about the memoir and cut off contact with the couple’s children after it was published. Gilot continued to work as an artist and, in 1970, married Jonas Salk, the virologist who developed the first polio vaccine.

Gilot’s admirers paid tribute to her on social media. On Twitter, author Ariana Huffington wrote, “Thank you dearest Françoise Gilot for all the insights, love and wisdom you brought into my life—from all the invaluable help you gave me when I was researching my biography of Picasso and your stunning illustrations of my book on The Gods of Greece to so many conversations over lunches and dinners about art, life and men!”

And writer Harry Tafoya tweeted, “RIP to the absolutely extraordinary Françoise Gilot, her memoir is a masterpiece. The end of one of the greatest lives of the 20th century.”

Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas