If asked to name any artist, most people will cite Picasso, who died 50 years ago on April 8, 1973, or Van Gogh — due to efficient brand-making in Picasso’s case and a kind of legend of suffering in Van Gogh’s.

But if we’re going to really talk about Picasso, and get beyond the brand and the stratospheric auction prices, we should talk about Françoise Gilot, who was every bit as smart as the painter with whom she spent 10 years.

Gilot is often described as Picasso’s muse — one of them, over his long career.

Yet she deserves so much more.

Still very much with us at 101, Gilot was herself a painter — a gifted watercolorist — and ceramicist before meeting Picasso in the spring of 1943. She was 21; he, 40 years her senior.

Gilot’s career as an artist immediately became secondary to her status as a celebrity inamorata in the public’s view.

(Picasso always had what we now call “drama” going on with these alleged muses of his.)

The pair had two children together, Claude and Paloma, and then a decade after the relationship ended, Gilot teamed with the art critic Carlton Lake to write “Life with Picasso.”

Published in 1964, it’s not just one of the best art books ever written, but a living, breathing, warm, funny, philosophical treatise and large-hearted memoir at the same level.

Picasso attempted to have it suppressed, because he was at least partially a beast: He broke off contact with Claude and Paloma.

There isn’t a lot worse that one can do to one’s children — unless we’re talking murder and abuse — than abandoning them.

The painter also tried to get Gilot blackballed with art dealers and galleries, the epitome of pettiness and insecurity.

Such acts say much about an artist who stopped innovating rather early in his career, for all of the attention he continued to get.

There’s little that followed at the radical level of invention of his Blue Period in the first few years of the 20th century, or the Cubist explorations in the period before the Great War.

(Yes, I know that the ballyhooed “Guernica” is from 1937, but it pantomimes innovation.)

The irony is, there’s nothing unflattering about the famed painter in the book, unless one wishes to count a few humorous examples of his eccentricities.

For instance, Picasso kept an owl that bit everyone including him, whose bites he continued to accept, wincing in pain, until the bird finally gave up.

Despite the age difference, the relationship feels right and infused with love.

Plus, there are those conversations on Cubism, Hegel, Delacroix and what Picasso’s friend and rival Matisse was up to.

You could cut them out of this book and read them in front of a college class.

Minds would be blown, pulses would quicken, and no one would be bored.

It’s a book that will change how one sees the world, and what is a higher compliment than that?

Gilot has a gentleness of spirit from which we can all learn, which can’t always be said about Picasso.

Or maybe it’s her way of seeing the world — with this man being but one example — that has served her so well in her long life.

I’ve often been amazed by how faithfully she recorded his veritable sermons — though they’re not preachy — on specific matters in art, which can inform you in what you do, whatever that is.

But you never think, “This guy is smarter than this woman.”

What one does note is her guileless manner, her humility, her desire to learn and grow.

Her quiet, formidable wisdom.

Proceeds of the book went to legal fees in Gilot’s attempt to have her children named as Picasso’s legal heirs, which they ought to have been anyway.

I re-read this book a lot, and it reminds me that we can help someone become their best, but if and when they veer from that, we’re not at fault.

Nor does it mean that what was wasn’t real.

Picasso “was obviously capable of side-stepping all stereotyped formulas in his human relations just as completely as in his art,” Gilot wrote.

For good and ill, we might say.

The same is true of Gilot, only minus the negative, hurtful component.

And that is formidable art — the art of living — in its own priceless way. 

Colin Fleming is the author of “Sam Cooke: Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963.”