I was 23 when my father passed away.
And I found out through the radio.
IN FRENCH:
It was a shock to hear it on the radio,
but I was not surprised.
Many things in the Picasso family happens in public.
NEWS: Picasso -
who did things no man had ever done before with brush and canvas.
OVERLAPPING NEWS REPORTS
Greatest artistic genius of the 20th century.
My grandfather, the day he was buried,
well, it started snowing...
..as if a mythical figure had suddenly passed away.
I hadn't seen my father for years.
We thought maybe we could go into the house or see him,
but we were not...allowed.
Because of that situation,
my half-brother commit suicide.
It was very, very tragic.
There was a lot of confusion.
Picasso was not the faithful man.
He had wives, mistresses, lovers.
He was really afraid of death,
and so he would have never made a will.
And he didn't.
You can tell somebody's life through the pictures that they made.
There really is a diary.
His work, it'll be around until the planet blows up, or whatever.
Picasso had a strong gaze,
which is a southern Spanish idea -
that the eyes are where the soul is.
Every time he paints, emotional truth is always there,
abhorrent at times or not.
That's what gives his work such incredible power.
There is always that sense of underlying violence
and that violence, it's life.
The brutalisation of women is part of the imagery.
It would be too easy to say that all those women
were like victims.
Everyone knew that it was not
an ordinary world they were entering.
Picasso is a man of contradictions.
He can be tender, he can be cruel.
You can't just say, you know, he's a monster or he's a genius.
He's just a man.
With my grandfather, it started very early.
Pablo as a child was a little genius.
I think from day one, he was given,
like, a super talent.
My father was so gifted at such an early age
because, in part, his father was a painter and...
..and actually a teacher.
Picasso's father thought Picasso had to draw, and he realised his son
was unusual in his skills and talents.
Picasso and his family came to Barcelona
so his father could teach art there.
Picasso, as a 14-year-old, enrolled
in the college where his father was teaching,
but it wasn't as though he was the lonely,
prodigious talent wandering the streets with his notebooks.
He was with his friends,
many of whom were older than he was,
all of whom wanted to be painters.
It was very much a group of handsome, ambitious young men
who were all interested in each other's work.
Barcelona was a hotbed of dissent and radicalism.
We are going to paint paintings to disturb you.
Let's get tradition and see what we can do
to sort of wring its neck.
This is young men having fun,
and there were a lot of young women around them.
They used women as models, as lovers, as muses.
It was not acceptable for women
to be sexually active
before or outside marriage,
so young men were, in many cases,
encouraged to seek sexual relations elsewhere.
Certainly, in that area of Barcelona,
there would have been a huge number of prostitutes,
but the whole idea of the male moving between being fed and
clothed and washed by a group of women to a brothel on a Saturday,
that was part of the system.
And that was the culture he grew up in.
Of course, it would have
made an impression on how he was
going to treat women all his life.
The key to understanding Picasso and his art
is understanding his relationships with women.
Someone later asked him, you know, "When did you have sex first?"
Picasso just went...
..meaning very young.
TRANSLATED:
I don't think we can judge Picasso
on our standards today
because he would have grown up in a very macho culture.
You need to keep in mind he was from Andalusia,
where the traditions of the corrida is very important.
The corrida, or bullfighting, was at the heart of the lives
of many people in Spain at the time.
The spectacle of the bullfight -
machismo, violence, costume, beauty, death.
He's attracted to that sort of high drama.
Picasso's father was highly interested in the bullfight,
and that's how Picasso's
lifelong love affair with bullfighting came about.
One of his first drawings
was that of the male world of the corrida.
Picasso - he was a keen observer.
He understood how the bull behaved
because he studied them intimately...
..comparable to how a bullfighter might know a bull.
Picasso was brought up in a house where,
in order to impress your parents most,
it was your drawing that did that.
In his household, that was the coinage, in a way,
that was the language of love.
From very early on, he made
a number of magisterial genre paintings.
You can see what an extraordinary gift he had for shade, for light,
for face, for drama.
The subject matter was decided by his father.
They were traditional pieces,
the type of commissions that he needed in order to
have a livelihood.
Picasso's father was not a successful artist at all.
On the contrary, he was highly unsuccessful.
Had his father been one of the most famous painters of the age,
it would have been quite difficult to become who he became.
Picasso outdid his father from a very early age.
If you go into the Picasso Museum in Barcelona,
you can see these notebooks,
and the working with his father's face,
which is thinner than his own face, looks oddly sickly.
There's a sort of fear in the eyes.
It isn't a son drawing his father as a strong figure in his world,
but as someone who seems to be
ailing or seems to be weakened.
There's something Oedipal suggesting,
"By drawing him in this way,
"I'm actually weakening him further
"so I can be the one with the strength."
When you're growing up, you look to your father as some sort of god.
He probably thought he was all conquering because
he could draw better than his father at such a young age.
That probably would have instilled in him
a feeling that he was above other human beings
and more worthy and more valuable than other human beings.
In October 1900, Picasso will turn 19,
and he wants to be where the action is.
Paris is the centre of the art world.
Paris is a metropolis of the 20th century.
So this is a young man who arrives in Paris convinced of his genius
and convinced he has to go to the centre of the art world.
But he was not given the red carpet.
He was given the back door.
When Picasso arrives in Paris, he lived in Montmartre,
which was for the people who couldn't afford living in Paris.
And it was dangerous.
People were carrying guns.
You know, people could be killed every day in fight.
So it was really a slum.
And Picasso for a long time couldn't even pay
for his coal to heat himself.
Nevertheless, he is extremely gifted,
so much so that he's invited, in 1901,
to give his first big show at a very well-known gallery
called La Galerie Vollard,
and he produces 64 paintings, working extremely hard.
Picasso's first exhibition in Paris,
he paints lots and lots of pictures that he thinks are going to be
very, very popular and very, very commercial.
There's a reason for that.
It's because he's young and he's poor
and he needs to support himself.
The critics of that exhibition say, you know,
"Who is this impetuous, mercurial guy
"adopting of other painters' style
"and compositions, and making them his own?"
Picasso spent his life copying old masters or people he loved,
like a schoolboy.
But there is this great line where he said,
"Bad artists copy, and the great artists, they steal."
It's undeniable that Toulouse-Lautrec
had a huge effect on him,
That Van Gogh had a huge effect on him.
And there's this continuum in painting
where it's a note passed from one painter to the next.
What to paint and how to paint.
He's with a band of Catalan artists in Paris.
In Barcelona, he had quite a position amongst his friends,
but outside of Barcelona they are not full of success.
They are poor and young and struggling.
Among these friends, there's a Catalan painter
called Carles Casagemas.
The friendship between them was very intense.
Being artists together, drinking and hanging out at night,
they always managed to have interesting evenings.
In other words, the work was done, the galleries, all that was done,
and then at night, the bars and the women.
Casagemas is besotted with a young woman
who's very beautiful, who's called Germaine.
Love leads to disappointment
and Casagemas being rejected.
In a very dramatic scene,
Casagemas attempted to shoot Germaine.
And he ended up shooting himself. And he died.
This made a huge mark on Pablo Picasso.
It was, of course, very difficult for him to lose his...
..his close friend,
and that's when it started, his Blue Period.
We call it the Blue Period because of the blue tones in his paintings
and also, of course, the sadness that they evoke.
The Blue Period is a period where my grandfather was sharing
on the canvas his problems,
his psychological problems,
his financial problems, his perception of the world.
It wasn't just the death of Casagemas.
It's known that that was the depressive time in his life.
When you're an artist, the early years are tough.
I mean, even if you're getting some notoriety on your showing,
it's tough.
And so I think that channels into the work.
It's those universal themes of poverty...
..loneliness...
..urban life.
They're very urban, those pictures.
When you work in a studio and you work in a studio at night
and you're in a city...
I mean, the people I see every night
are homeless people, drunks,
musicians on the street with a guitar,
the sort of down-and-outs of society.
That's who you see.
I think he obviously had an empathy to that level of vulnerability.
You can see that in the blind woman, La Celestina.
So that painting kind of hooked me.
And when you're an artist that is constantly observing,
somebody who's blind seems to exhibit this other sense,
you know, especially if you're a figurative painter,
that paints eyes and the light within eyes,
when you come across another type of eye, it's very exciting.
Picasso was living in the Bateau-Lavoir, which is
a dilapidated building in Montmartre
filled with artists and artistic types.
Full of life, full of squalor.
It is damp, it is dank, and it is very hot in the summer,
and in the winter it is freezing cold.
The floorboards are rotting.
There's one sink for all the residents -
it's in the hallway - and there's a toilet for everybody to share.
So this is not some kind of dressed-up ideal of Bohemia.
This is the real thing.
And it's where Picasso meets Fernande Olivier.
I've mentioned the Spanish painter.
He lives in our building.
Well, for some time now,
I've been bumping into him wherever I go.
He looks at me with his huge, deep eyes,
sharp but brooding, full of suppressed fire.
I don't find him particularly attractive,
but his strangely intense gaze forces me to look at him in return.
Fernande Olivier is born in the same year as Picasso, in 1881.
She becomes an artists' model, and she is in high demand
to pose for various painters and sculptors.
This is a young woman who knows that she's desirable.
She was a catch, because she was this very
interesting model, very beautiful.
She posed for so many artists.
And she was very lively.
She liked to talk with people, liked to go out.
TRANSLATION: One day Picasso was coming home from lunch.
He had a tiny cat in his hands, and to start a conversation -
he had never dared to speak to me before -
he said to me, "Would you like it?"
So I said, "Yes, I would."
And he let me into his studio and he showed me his paintings.
Picasso and Fernande fell in love.
They had a real love story.
Picasso is sweet, intelligent,
very dedicated to his art.
And he drops everything for me.
He's kind and gentle, but he doesn't look after himself.
I don't mind untidiness, but I'm horrified by his lack
of personal cleanliness.
I don't dare let him sense this.
It's a delicate matter, but I'll get around to it.
If I fall asleep, he's beside the bed when I wake up,
his eyes anxiously fixed on me.
He's constantly doing portraits of me.
I really think that Fernande was his first great love.
Les Amants, it's such a beautiful picture.
It celebrates their first night together.
It is one of the most important love pictures in the work of Picasso.
It's also the starting of the Rose Period.
The Rose Period is marked by the rose colours,
but also the more joyous experience of life, and I think
it's greatly due to Fernande.
Picasso, almost from the moment he sees her,
he's been asking her to move in with him.
This, for her, would require moving simply to a different room
in the same complex.
And Picasso has one condition,
and the condition is that she stops working
and she stops modelling.
She cannot model because he is jealous,
and he does not want any other man to have access to her,
to be looking at her, to be painting her.
She will become artistically his.
That's something that she's understandably on the fence about,
because she is making her money from modelling,
and it's not as if Picasso has any money to offer himself.
He is abjectly poor.
She really doubted if she was able to live with him.
She said, also,
"Why lose my independency if I have...all this for love?"
He is persistent,
and she decides that she will give up modelling.
She's quite happy, actually.
She writes, "Happy, so happy.
"I'm finally at ease. I don't have to work any more."
They have a really vibrant social life.
It's amazing to think of the people who were living in
and around the Bateau-Lavoir.
Picasso is there with Max Jacob,
and is there with Apollinaire,
who are his two closest friends at the time.
Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob were both poets, writers, critics
that were very much part of his very bohemian existence.
They all are just scrapping things together and reinventing the way
that they were thinking about art and poetry and literature.
This is an extraordinary group and, you know, these are brilliant minds.
But they also love to have fun.
They like to go and drink.
There's opium smoking, you know, quite a bit of it.
Smoking opium exposes them all to love and friendship.
Everything is wonderful,
and the most wonderful conversations are had.
There is this whole world swirling around Picasso,
and Fernande is a major part of it.
It's probably thanks to opium, that I've discovered
the true meaning of the word love.
I've discovered, at last,
I understand Pablo.
I sense him better.
Love has risen up in me,
like a feeling that is suddenly coming into flower.
When they're smoking opium together, everything is wonderful.
Of course, the next morning, everyone feels irritated
and agitated, and it's not totally clear why.
And Picasso is someone
who has strong moods.
In love, he's wonderful.
But when he's irked, when he gets angry,
it's not so terrific.
When he goes out, he doesn't like Fernande to be out.
One thing he does is he locks the door from the outside
when he leaves.
DOOR LOCKS
He keeps her as a prisoner in their studio.
He wants to have exclusive access to her when he's not there, as well.
By today's standards,
that would be totally unacceptable.
But at the turn of the last century,
women were treated like possessions,
and we know Picasso liked control.
He can control paint on a canvas.
He wanted to control his world like that,
and control other people in it like that.
The first half of 1907 was a really challenging time for Picasso,
both personally and professionally.
Fernande was having a difficult time because she very much wanted
to have a child, but she couldn't have children.
She'd had miscarriages, and it wasn't going to happen.
They decide they're going to try and adopt a child together.
So, they go to this orphanage in Montmartre.
They adopted this 13-year-old girl called Raymonde.
And she came back to this chaotic studio.
I mean, one cannot begin to think what an unsuitable environment
this was for a child in any way, shape or form.
This situation lasts for a very short period of time,
because she soon discovers that Picasso has been
using Raymonde as a nude model
in very explicit positions.
He makes sketches of this pubescent girl.
Her legs are splayed, her genitals are shown.
It's a very problematic episode in Picasso's life.
It puts up a warning flag about his future views,
vis-a-vis, young women.
I don't think he ever actually physically made any overtures
towards this young girl, but the drawing was enough.
It does show a very unpleasant side of Picasso.
And so, back Raymonde goes to the orphanage.
The fact that Fernande thought it was important just
to remove her from the studio - I don't think this was the act of
a jealous woman, I think it was the act of a protective woman.
And thank God she did.
He seemed to need conflict to make new phases in his work.
And I think the fact that things were difficult with Fernande
was a stimulus.
It was never that clean-cut.
But certainly, the impetus does seem to be very much out of
personal conflict comes new bouts of creativity.
Picasso wants to insert himself.
He wants to be a leader.
He wants to be the head of the avant-garde,
but it will take him time.
His arch-rival, Matisse, had produced his grand masterpiece,
Le Bonheur de Vivre,
this extraordinary kaleidoscopic giant canvas of
an Arcadian landscape,
synthesising all these different influences.
It was a big statement.
It caused a scandal, which meant that he was suitably
modern and shocking.
And all this, of course, was a massive challenge,
so Picasso had to really step up.
Picasso trying to make that world-altering picture.
But he's struggling away, he's making drawings after drawings,
and he is said to have a block.
He makes a visit to the Ethnographic Museum, in Paris.
There, he encounters works by African artists.
Picasso had a bit of a Damascene moment.
The extraordinary stylization of the faces of these masks
and these sculptures, but also, I think the deeply-superstitious
Andalusian Picasso also got a whole kind of magical,
ritualistic feeling off this.
I mean, this is language now that sounds a bit strange
in our current sensibilities, but he really did feel
the extraordinary presence and power of these artefacts,
and wanted to put them in his paintings so that his paintings
could channel that kind of energy.
Picasso began working on a painting.
It seems as though he set out to do nothing more and nothing less
than kind of reinvent the canon of Western art.
Demoiselles d'Avignon - I always start with the size.
It's eight feet high, and over seven-and-a-half feet wide.
You are confronted, as a viewer,
by five female figures.
Three of whom stare out directly at you,
and two of whom are masked.
At the time, it was shocking for the way that it banished
traditional conventions of perspective, of space,
of how you should represent the human form.
Eyes feel trapped in the gaze of
the three women who stare out at us,
and there's something about the size, and there's something
about the fractured space, and about how compressed
and convulsed it is that is deeply unsettling.
The fracturing of an image is something that Picasso
was very engaged in.
I'm crazy about that painting.
There's diagonals in that painting.
He's describing these women, but essentially, he's constructing
a configuration that has a body.
The body is the painting.
The paint is the skin.
The central figures,
they are based on Ivorian sculpture, which plays with dimension,
and is fluid.
So, it pulls you into a relationship to keep you slightly
off-balance, out-of-kilter.
Demoiselles d'Avignon talks about how we view the world,
gender, race.
Now, part of its controversies,
or the questions that it provokes -
what's involved in the way that he's representing women?
It's very sexual in the way that it confronts the viewer.
It was first published with the title The Philosophical Brothel.
So, it's often connected to a scene of a brothel,
and of sex workers posing for us.
I think there are very good questions about whether this work
objectifies the women, and also, its problematic relationship
with Africa and African artists.
When asked if the art from Africa
is really a point of inspiration,
Picasso very famously says, "No".
And so, he diminishes the contribution of African artists.
That his inspiration is, in fact, another culture,
a culture that then was regarded as primitive,
is difficult for Picasso to acknowledge.
Most great artists don't want to talk about
their points of inspiration.
And it's sad, because African art
has been written out of so much
of global cultural history.
Yes, you could say it's cultural appropriation, but artists grab
whatever they possibly can and put it into their work.
And Picasso absolutely said, "I don't borrow, I steal".
And boy, did he steal!
Who is the audience?
I mean, really, who is the audience?
What's popular now?
What's politically correct?
People rehashing things, thinking,
"Is he being a vampire, using African art for his subject matter"?
It's absurd.
I mean, you know, do we say "thank you" that we have
the Demoiselles d'Avignon?
Or do we say, "Oh, he robbed that from some other culture"?
The modernity of it still endures today.
It's not made to please.
It's made to tickle you in a controversial way.
So, I think that my father would love the fact that
it's still a controversial painting.
In 1907, a number of Picasso's friends visit his studio
and see the work.
And the reaction was astonishment.
Picasso's intimate circle did not know what to do
with this picture.
I've always wondered if Picasso, to a degree, didn't know what
to do with it, either,
because he kept the Demoiselles in his studio for many years.
In fact, he completes it in 1907,
but it isn't publicly exhibited until 1916.
It's fascinating that Picasso chooses to hold on to this work.
You can imagine Picasso standing back, thinking,
"If you were to take that journey further,
"what might lie down that path?
"What..?
"How could you reconfigure the world?"
It was definitely a time when he was trying to achieve something
that would be new and different.
Fernande gives us a record of Picasso's sense that
he needs to be remarkable,
and that he needs to be singular.
Picasso continued to be driven by great ambition.
He wanted to create a new kind of art.
Other artists were coming more frequently to the studio.
Andre Derain was cool and sardonic.
George Braque had a sharp intelligence
and was quite adaptable.
Picasso earned his pre-eminence because he was the most skilful
and the most profound,
ceaselessly trying to transcend what had already been done.
Fernande records Picasso saying he has a crisis about photography,
which many painters have had.
"Photography exists now.
"What does that mean for us?"
Feeling like, what could he do to make something that made sense
artistically when there was this extraordinary machine
that could capture everything so brilliantly?
With his friend, artist, collaborator Georges Braque.
Picasso began a radical new way of thinking
about how to make a picture.
They describe themselves as two mountaineers roped together,
inventing a new artistic language.
So they look to Paul Cezanne
and the fracturing of the plane of the picture.
They looked to the art of Central Africa.
They look to popular culture,
photographic imagery, mechanisation, industrialisation.
And cinema - yes! How did I leave that out?
Picasso and Braque essentially invented cubism.
Cubism is sort of a taking of all of these different elements
and putting them together to make a picture that proclaims itself
to be modern, in the sense that
it's unlike any image that you have ever seen before.
Did away with naturalistic conventions,
with preconceived notions of how you construct a space, and perspective.
It's no exaggeration to say changed the trajectory of Western art,
Western modern art's history.
It's much better than reality.
If you look at cubism that Braque painted or Picasso painted,
you can always tell which ones are the Picassos.
I don't know if it's the confidence, or just the physical reality
of the paintings that hang together
in some idiosyncratic way,
as if he was speaking to you.
I remember he said to my mother when he was doing the cubist painting,
he would put a little something
that was recognisable, so that people could enter.
Then they travelled through the whole experience on their own.
Fernande, as a model and as a muse,
appears again and again in the cubist work.
She sees the transformation from
the Picasso of the Rose Period
into the Picasso of the Cubist Period.
She has an eye.
She understands that she's seeing something extraordinary.
When he turns to cubism,
Picasso becomes the leader of the avant-garde.
And he is selling cubism all over Europe.
And Picasso becomes extremely successful
and extremely rich.
Picasso, at this point, has stature.
He's upped his game.
He's standing alongside Matisse.
Picasso is now a marketable commodity.
He has various patrons.
Gertrude Stein and Leo Stein, her brother, are two wealthy
Americans who include Picasso and Fernande in their circle.
If you can go from the Bateau-Lavoir,
where you're living your somewhat squalid life,
making your paintings all night long, to Gertrude Stein's salon,
you've really accomplished something significant.
And Picasso and Fernande are able to move away from the Bateau-Lavoir.
They move to a beautiful apartment in Boulevard de Clichy.
The movers, when they pick up the stuff at the Bateau-Lavoir -
this harsh, cold studio space, and they go to
this bourgeois apartment - they don't understand.
Pablo and Fernande, they even had maids.
But Picasso's still the same, always obsessive with his work.
Even the maids cannot enter his studio.
No-one is allowed to touch anything.
So, there's a little tension between the two of them.
TRANSLATION: He worked at night because he didn't
like to be disturbed. Like the man who was never happy,
he is a man who always wanted more.
He was never happy with what he was doing.
And, when he thought he had achieved something,
he was no longer interested.
He was looking for something else.
Picasso is someone of constant experimentation and development.
We certainly see this in his art.
He's a restless soul,
and I think he's that way in domestic and personal life, too.
There is this constant strain,
and there are also affairs.
He is not a one-woman kind of guy.
Fernande and Picasso's relationship has reached a pretty stale period.
He's working all the time.
She's quite bored.
She goes off and has an affair with this young futurist,
and her friend, Eva Goel, in whom she confides,
goes off and has an affair with Picasso.
And then, Picasso uses Fernande's affair to
break off the relationship.
He was furious.
He never forgave her, so that was the end of their life together.
Fernande finds herself very alone.
All the people who are part of their life choose him.
And it's sort of obvious, you know, he's on the up-and-up,
and he leaves her with nothing of his to sell.
So, she truly has nothing.
What a bitter, sad ending to this relationship.
For Picasso, it was a particularly tumultuous, difficult time.
His father died in 1913.
Whatever he felt about his father, this was huge.
That left something unresolved.
And of course, a lot of relations between father and son
are unresolved, but if your father was a minor artist,
and you have become Picasso,
that haunting is the strangest one possible,
where it isn't as though you're in his shadow -
it is, he's moved into yours.
What are you going to do about that?
1914 marks the outbreak of the First World War.
Picasso's close band of buddies - Apollinaire, Braque -
they go off to the front.
Picasso, as a Spaniard, didn't have to enlist,
so he didn't go to the front.
But everything is in tumult.
He needs some kind of security in a world where
everything has gone mad.
He's on the lookout for a new phase in his life.
1917, Picasso goes to Rome to make the costumes and the designs
for this radical ballet, Parade,
fusing figurative art and extraordinary cubist costumes.
And there, Picasso meets Olga Khokhlova.
Olga Khokhlova was a beautiful
Ukrainian ballerina dancer.
This is a very important moment in his life.
Olga Khokhlova is ten years younger than Picasso, she's only 25,
but she's lived a life.
She's toured with the Ballets Russes,
the most radical dance company of the time.
She's got tremendous talent and tremendous style.
And Picasso really did fall in love.
He absolutely courted with her with these declarations of love.
"My dear, I've just received your letter with the 17 "I love you"s.
"I counted them immediately, and I'm very happy.
"It's my favourite number, 17.
"I kiss you, and I also love you lots.
"And lots and lots, without end."
There's also a very sad letter from her where she says, "I love you,
"but you've loved before.
"I've never loved before.
"And this makes me very sad, because you will never love me
"as I love you."
She already kind of got his measure a bit,
but it was a great, great love affair.
It's very interesting because Pablo Picasso is not into abstraction.
He needed a model.
Every time he was meeting a new woman in his life,
it was a new start.
With Olga, Pablo Picasso proved again, after the Cubism,
that he was a genius in drawing.
Early drawings of Olga, he's paying a tribute to
the greatest art of drawing.
And they're exceptional, in the quality of execution.
Olga appears in Picasso's work, to begin with,
in a very classical way.
Meticulously realistically drawn,
but actually, at the same time, his cubism didn't go away.
So, he tended to render Olga in a very naturalistic way,
probably to please her, because I think she was quite conventional,
in terms of the art that she liked.
Career-wise, it's a time when critics and art historians
are rather eager to write Picasso
into history as the founder of Cubism,
and would like him to keep going in that vein.
And I think Picasso, on one level is determined to say,
"Well, no.
"I don't want to be expected to create art that looks
"in one way or another."
Picasso was at a point in his life
where he didn't want to be a bohemian any more.
And in 1918, Picasso and Olga get married
in a full Russian Orthodox service, at Olga's request.
And then, they go and live in Rue de La Boetie,
which is the height of bourgeois respectability.
I think that my grandfather needed social recognition.
And Olga knew all the rules.
She was a perfect person to organise the relationships, social life.
Pablo Picasso was becoming very famous in the Paris society.
He was also rich. he had a car, a driver, a cook.
And so, everything was perfect.
They were very much the fashionable celebrity couple, you know,
Picasso, the great artist, Olga, the beautiful ballerina.
There was Stravinsky, Cocteau.
Coco Chanel was a friend.
You know, they were absolutely there in the centre of
the kind of beau monde.
Olga has been castigated by art historians,
saying she made him respectable.
Also, Picasso's bohemian buddies didn't like it much either.
But Picasso enjoyed wearing the spats, the snazzy clothes,
living this lifestyle.
The depictions of Olga as a neoclassical figure -
it's him, too.
It's him trying to live this life.
He's trying to paint out that high society in Paris,
that he's kind of "made it".
One of the criticisms that's been levelled at Picasso's
renditions of Olga
is that he shows her as inscrutable.
You don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
The portraits of Olga can be quite cold.
Quite full of anxiety, trepidation.
She's often alone.
Olga actually did have a great deal going on.
Her family, totally devastated by the outbreak of
the Russian Revolution in 1917.
For two years, she had no idea what was happening.
So, she's harbouring a great deal
of anguish and tragedy
in these very inscrutable, impassive portraits.
Once you know this, I think you look at these portraits
in a very different way,
and you actually look at Picasso looking at her, and actually,
I think, emoting with this pensive,
rather melancholic figure.
There isn't ever a single way of reading his work.
If we misread those portraits,
we misread the entire relationship.
Olga...
..is my grandmother.
In 1921, my father was born.
A baby coming is a big event.
And so, it does change life a lot.
In many a family photo album, you have that love.
You see Olga holding Paul.
He make a little joke to his mother here.
It's a more important moment for Picasso's creativity.
The fact he's a recent father
make him paint this love
he had for his wife and his son.
Picasso makes these gorgeous paintings of Paul.
I think Picasso loved being a father at the beginning.
And you can see, from the pictures, his evident joy.
He loved putting Paul in, sort of, harlequin costumes
and matador costumes.
And also, it's back to the old macho, Andalusian stuff, isn't it?
He produced a son and heir - and that was really important
in that patriarchal world.
It was a really happy time.
But, as we know, longevity in relationships
wasn't Picasso's strong suit.
Picasso will get restless.
He will seek out other lovers.
He will try to push away the women in his life.
And, the older he gets, the more explicit he is about
his wanting to really mark the lives of his lovers so that,
in some ways, they're -
and this is a horrible idea, and a horrible phrase -
they will be damaged goods after he leaves them.
That the highlight of their lives will have been Picasso.
When he changed girlfriends,
the style changed, the house changed,
even the dog changed.
It has all the cliched attributes of a mid-life crisis.
She's a schoolgirl.
Picasso's wife, Picasso's mistress
feel like very, very different portraits.
There was this shape which looked very phallic.
People were so shocked, they didn't want to face the painting.
Picasso's said it himself.
"Art is not the decoration.
"It is an act of war."
And then, Dora turns up.
That summer, they were exchanging couples.
Swinging.
So, how did you meet Picasso?
FRENCH TRANSLATOR SPEAKS
You met him in the street, I believe.
TRANSLATION: Yes. I was going shopping.
You were very young.
Well, I was 17.
He was 30 years older than you.
Yes, maybe.
But there was a... I'm not saying sex appeal, as they say now,
but, well, charm.
My father and my mother didn't have a wonderful relationship.
So to me, Picasso was a very great happiness for me.
He was everything to me.
So all he had to do was seduce me and that's it.
And then he gave me a beautiful smile.
And then he approached me and said to me,
"Mademoiselle, you have an interesting face.
"I would like to do your portrait,
"and I feel that we will do great things together."
And then he said to me, "I am Picasso."
TV COMMENTARY: Picasso.
He did things no man had ever done before with brush and canvas.
..The greatest artistic genius of the 20th century.
My grandfather, the day he was buried,
it started snowing,
as if a mythical figure had suddenly passed away.
I hadn't seen my father for years.
We thought maybe we could go into the house or see him,
but we were not...
..allowed.
Because of that situation,
my half-brother commits suicide.
It was very, very tragic.
There was a lot of confusion.
Picasso was not the faithful man.
He had wives, mistresses, lovers.
He was really afraid of death.
And so he would have never made a will, and he didn't.
You can tell somebody's life through the pictures that they made.
It really is a diary.
His work, it'll be around until the planet blows up or whatever.
GLASS SMASHES
Picasso had a strong gaze, which is a Southern Spanish idea.
That the eyes are where the soul is.
Every time he paints, emotional truth is always there.
Abhorrent at times or not,
that's what gives his work such incredible power.
There's always that sense of underlying violence
and that violence, it's life.
The brutalisation of women is part of the imagery.
It would be too easy to say that all those women
were like victims.
Everyone knew that it was not an ordinary world that we're entering.
Picasso is a man of contradictions.
Can be tender, he can be cruel.
You can't just say he's a monster or he's a genius.
He's just a man.
Every year was extraordinary for Picasso.
But of all the years of all his life,
1932 is miraculous.
In the early to mid-1930s,
Paris was the epicentre of Western European culture,
famed for its innovation, for wave on wave of avant-garde artists
who successively broke all the rules.
Picasso was 50 years old.
For all of us, that's a kind of pivotal year.
He was at the height of his powers, but he was also traumatised
by the idea that his star was fading.
And that was very difficult, especially for somebody
who's as creative and as kind of cocky as Picasso.
Probably from a very young age,
he had instilled in him a feeling that he was above
other human beings.
And that is quite a dangerous thing to believe about yourself,
because you'll have to upkeep that all your life,
because you might feel without it, you're nothing.
He's the best or he's nothing.
So he worked very hard at staying at being the best.
Picasso's greatly admired by a group of younger artists
known as the Surrealists.
The Surrealist Group were visual artists and poets and film-makers.
In Paris at the time, the spirit of Surrealism is everywhere,
everywhere, permeating everything
and too powerful, too exacting, too crazy, too important
a movement for him to ignore.
Picasso didn't need
to be part a of a movement
or any other affiliation.
He was too much of an individual,
but he was very close to the Surrealists.
I think Picasso liked that they lived by their own rules.
The Surrealists were very interested in notions of mad love,
of erotic delirium, of ways of losing self in desire.
And I think being a father and a family man,
Picasso on one level is out to reassert himself.
He's in his 50s and he's still a virile man.
He realises he's bored of a married life.
And like for every man and woman after every middle age crisis,
they rediscover the passion, love.
And he's representing in his canvases his impulses,
his desires, his violence.
And he's allowed to do so because desire is uncensored
and absolutely accepted by Surrealism.
So everything becomes sexual.
My theory is that
he showed that side of himself in his art
not to be vulnerable, but to show how powerful he was.
One of the things to know about Picasso in 1932
is Henri Matisse, his great friend and yet rival,
had had his retrospective in 1931, just the year before.
The Matisse Retrospective was really remarkably successful.
So I think Picasso knew this was a moment to reassert
his supremacy in the French art world.
Picasso basically invited himself into the gallery
and asked if he could have his own one-person show
and then proceeded to curate it himself.
And he made damn sure that he had a much bigger space than Matisse,
and he broke some fundamental rules about curating exhibitions.
I think he wanted to show people that he didn't abide by the rules.
One of the fascinating things about the retrospective,
he specifically hung it outside of chronology.
And it's this sort of crazy
mishmash of works.
He really mixed it up.
It showed the strength of his history,
full of great innovative works, including the Blue Period
and the Rose.
Cubism.
Neoclassicism.
He was throwing so many balls into the air and within it all,
this gorgeous, captivating
early portrait of his wife, Olga.
Olga was hugely important in Picasso's life,
and he wouldn't have been Picasso without Olga.
And there was, for a period,
astonishing affection and love.
But that marriage
was under huge assault.
At this exhibition, Picasso make it public
at the Galerie Georges Petit that he has met a different woman.
There is numerous portraits spread on the walls...
..of my grandmother.
He was deeply in love with Marie-Therese, a very young woman.
And it was a relationship that inspired him to make
some of his most memorable and innovative work.
They're just wonderful, beautiful,
pale pinks and blues.
And there is this opulence and this
glorious colour and the line.
It's almost as if Picasso's dancing with the brush.
You can feel hand on flesh.
When he's painting the curvature of Marie-Therese's body,
the sensuality of that.
I mean, I don't know another artist in art history
that has painted desire and sex as beautifully as Picasso.
The body of work of Marie-Therese
is just... it is just so charged.
It's got such desire within those pictures.
The eroticism is everywhere.
You can see, even in the very
smooth silhouette...
..it's Marie-Therese, but you feel the attractions,
such a tsunami of colours
and with the curves, can feel the heat between the two of them.
Yeah.
The legend, right, is that Olga had no idea that Marie-Therese existed.
And she looked around the room and she saw all these beautiful,
stunning portraits of this blonde woman on the walls.
And that was her discovery of the fact there was another woman
in Picasso's life.
When Le Reve was exhibited,
people realised there was this shape above the head
which looked very phallic and people were shocked.
Some people were so shocked they didn't want to face the painting.
They would prefer to turn their head because it was so vibrant.
She is on her throne, dreaming.
In the same gallery, a portrait of Olga, Picasso's wife.
Picasso's wife, Picasso's mistress.
They feel like very, very different portraits.
Picasso's meeting of Marie-Therese has all the kind of
cliched attributes of a midlife crisis.
She's 17.
She's a schoolgirl.
Times have changed, but even then, it was a big age gap.
Nobody really frowned on it when it came to light,
but it does seem problematic now, it has to be said,
particularly because it was so sex fuelled.
He just absolutely couldn't get enough of her.
I think women, they always feel when there is something happening.
For Olga, it must have been something very difficult to accept.
Probably something you would want to deny for a while.
To come from Paris in a car, it was maybe three hours.
Picasso will be here
with his official family.
Young Paulo, my father, and my grandmother, Olga.
Picasso wanted to do sculpture, large scale sculpture,
and he wanted to have a place for my father to play, to have space.
During the week, Olga and Paulo will go back to Paris for school.
And then Marie-Therese will come.
But it was no secret at the time.
You have the official wife
and you could have a mistress.
And Olga knew.
I think for Olga, it was very, very painful.
I remember visiting Boisgeloup...
..many years ago.
My cousin Bernard was happy to share with me a place
where both our grandmothers had shared so much time with Picasso.
And the day I came,
it was very emotional.
CHURCH BELL CHIMES
This was Picasso's studio.
It has no electricity, no hot water.
No heat.
It's where he would paint at night
and during the day.
And also, there is a sculpture studio.
It's a moment where he's not very happy with his life.
He needs a change.
He needs someone like my grandmother.
He needs Marie-Therese.
Picasso, his main focus was his work.
And I think it became more and more obvious
for Olga that Marie-Therese has the greater impact
for his creativity.
It's almost like a vision.
When he sees her, it's like a sign that something new needs to happen.
So he starts this work of sculpture.
They're very powerful, very erotic.
Also, there is a sensuality added by the way
he's caressing the plaster and moulding the shape of his beloved.
He's creating a forest of sculptures
of Marie-Therese that are this giant,
enormous, revered profiles.
He is trying to make basically a tangible representation
of what he is attracted to.
FRENCH TRANSLATOR SPEAKS
What was your life like with Picasso when you first posed
at his house like that, those first few times?
TRANSLATION: Exhilarating.
Covered, so I tell you,
covered with love and kisses
and jealousy and admiration.
He was an angel when he was working.
He stood back to see his painting and if he liked it,
then he danced in front of his painting.
And he was graceful and generally always happy.
You told me he was wonderfully terrible.
Yes, of course, fortunately.
Otherwise, I wouldn't have liked him.
Picasso spent quite a lot of time in the 1930
doing sculpture, paintings
and etchings.
He had installed printing machines
and he made the Suite Vollard.
So here we have the Vollard Suite, the Suite Vollard.
A group of 100 Picasso prints.
It's named after Ambroise Vollard,
one of Picasso's dealer.
It really follow all the wonderful sculpture he made of Marie-Therese.
There is recurring figures.
So you see here
there is this mature man who is the artist.
There is his model as well.
And you can clearly recognise Marie-Therese.
That's the Minotaur.
And for Picasso, the Minotaur has become his alter ego.
The Minotaur is half bull, half man.
The bull part is important
because it connects to Spain and bullfighting.
BULL ROARS
Picasso, being a lifelong aficionado,
his first painting at age eight is of a bullfight.
But Picasso doesn't identify with the matador or with the picador.
He identifies with the bull.
When you look at how Picasso depicts himself,
he does not portray himself as a hero.
I think Picasso adopting the Minotaur is a warning.
Picasso's I'm saying, "I'm a monster.
"Enter at your own risk."
Carl Jung theorised that each of us has a dark side
and that we tend to project our own dark side
onto other people.
Picasso appears to be owning his own dark side,
which is very advanced psychologically.
That's what the Minotaur tells me about him.
He knew he wasn't innocent.
I think that he was delighted
by the idea of bestial forces,
and it was a way to adopt a character
that seemed to suit him.
But, you know, there's a violence in this image.
The Minotaur is often depicted with swooning women
or frightened women.
The Minotaur is...
..capable of extreme violence...
..and also certain tenderness.
Here, Picasso, in my opinion,
captures a moment intimacy between two lovers.
For me, maybe after making love, the woman fall asleep
and he's just caressing a face.
It's beautiful.
But some people call it rape, this series.
I see Picasso's work with harmony,
I see it with grace.
I see it with joy.
But there's always that sense of underlying violence.
The brutalisation of women is part of the drawings.
Many of the images are profoundly marked
by the pleasure
of looking at women in pain.
It's very problematic.
You have all these different incarnations of Picasso getting up
to some pretty extreme things, the way he deals with
the women's bodies, the way he distorts the female body.
And given that Marie-Therese was a 17-year-old schoolgirl
at the beginning is tricky for us.
It is a fact that Picasso was 45 when he met Marie-Therese.
She says that she was initiated
into sadomasochistic sex by Picasso.
She says she was part of this.
On the other hand, I think we now think of her
as a fairly young initiate.
The relationship between Pablo and Marie-Therese
was extremely intense.
Suite Vollard, they are more challenging artworks of that period,
and anyone could say that maybe Pablo was controlling Marie-Therese.
According to what I understood,
I think there was absolutely no violence.
It was a fantasy.
It was a fantasy on the canvas, on the piece of paper.
You do feel quite uncomfortable and complicit.
You're dragged into these drawings.
You become Picasso's eyes, wherever they might be.
But I don't think he intended you to feel like that particularly.
I don't think he was thinking about you.
I think he was thinking about him and her.
Picasso continued doing portraits in Boisgeloup of Marie-Therese.
But I think there must have been some moments where it was difficult
for Olga.
My grandmother could not accept the way Picasso
would live this kind of double life
and plus with their son, my father, Paul.
We all know in a relationship when the fuse go,
it's not a good moment.
For my father to see the parents fighting,
it was surely very painful.
When you're young and you see your mother crying
or criticising your father - you love your father -
well, you know, kids would like the parents to be
peaceful at all time.
And it was not always possible.
Picasso could not handle to live any more with my grandmother.
And I think same with Olga.
But divorce was not acceptable
in the society.
You will marry, you will not divorce
and you will live with the other lover.
The way that Picasso depicts a woman over the course
of their relationship changes.
When you look at the portraits of Olga,
she starts off as the beautiful wife.
By the end of their relationship,
she's depicted as a hag and a monster.
And it's hard to see love in their relationship in the work.
TRANSLATION: Of course, he was married.
TRANSLATION: He spent his whole life telling me,
"I'm going to divorce. I'm going to divorce."
And then one day my young doctor sister, she said,
"My girl, you're pregnant."
So I was very scared, maybe.
I didn't cry in front of her, but I cried afterwards.
When I told Pablo Picasso, he cried with happiness.
He told me it was the greatest day
and the greatest happiness of his life.
And then I was happy.
Picasso finally split with Olga in 1935.
The reason for that split was that his young lover,
Marie-Therese, was pregnant with their first child.
Maya was Picasso's second child.
She was born in '35, so on the eve of the Second World War.
To have a daughter, something that Picasso really wanted.
He made so many images of her.
Here are some of the letters.
Hundreds and hundreds of letters that they would exchange,
and he's asking...
Then again like...
He decides to name her Maya Conchita.
Such a beautiful name.
And Conchita was the name of his little sister.
These are sketchbooks that my grandfather and mother shared.
He literally taught her how to draw,
how to draw a bowl, how to draw a little wolf.
Of course, it is very moving to see that he is a father.
He's teaching Maya to draw.
And he himself, he learned it from his own father.
This is a sketchbook from... it was 15 years.
He master drawings,
watercolour, oil,
all the techniques.
Also pastel, is a very difficult technique.
Picasso was very fond of his sisters, his sister Lola...
..and his sister Conchita.
He was 14 and Conchita contracted diphtheria.
It was, of course, traumatic.
There's a story that, you know, he said that he had promised the Lord
or whoever that he would stop painting if his sister didn't die.
Of course, he couldn't resist drawing or painting.
And his sister passed away.
It's a very traumatic thing that he has to create
and at the same time, he must be feeling that he's killing his sister
over and over, you know, through his whole life.
My father didn't want to hear about the fact that he might die
or even be sick.
That's something he never talked about - deaths or illnesses.
He was really afraid of death.
This is his first brush with death coming to him so young,
having his gorgeous baby sister dying of diphtheria.
Later on in paintings, there's an element of her emerging,
of the memory coming back, of that great fear of death.
And that obsession with blood and dying.
Throughout Picasso's life,
emotional truth is always there.
Whatever is going down in his life, he goes in the studio.
So his way of dealing with anything is to channel it into the work.
And the work becomes a sort of valve for everything.
1936 is a complex time
in Picasso's life,
because he's got a wife, Olga, who he is trying to divorce from
and that's very messy.
Olga didn't want to divorce,
so it was a big fight for years.
He's got a lover, Marie-Therese Walter,
and they've just had a little baby, Maya.
And then Dora turns up.
The story goes that one afternoon at the Cafe Deux Magots,
Picasso caught sight of a striking woman
wearing rather elegant gloves.
Dora Maar was petite, but she was statuesque.
Had a strong, angular face.
And she was passing the time of day by playing with a pen knife and...
..flicking it between her splayed fingers.
And every now and again, the pen knife would hit the finger.
And so there was sort of a Jackson Pollock effect
of blood spilling out.
He introduced himself.
Asked whether he could have her gloves.
And they became part of his memorabilia.
It's not very normal to see a beautiful girl
stabbing the knife between the fingers.
Dora was a kind of masochist personality,
and Picasso was a kind of sadistic personality.
He could be cruel.
So they had this in common that, you know,
that one needs the other.
She's the ultimate Surrealist diva.
She enters the scene like a Shakespearean heroine,
absolutely full of drama and art and tragedy and power
and erotic prowess.
And he is totally taken aback.
And that's the beginning of the story.
He became obsessed with her, obsessed with her physique,
obsessed, no doubt, with her body.
I would like also to think obsessed with her mind.
She was surrounded by the creme de la creme
of the intellectual milieu in Paris.
She was friend of Andre Breton and Paul Eluard,
who was a great friend of Picasso.
The artists that she got to know quite well through Surrealism,
for example, include Frida Kahlo.
I mean, artists who had really major reputations.
She was very close to Dali.
She's absolutely epicentre of this group of people
and was obviously already very talented as an artist.
She was exploring the dream world
and other forms of reality.
She did quite innovative work.
She absolutely rocked it as a Surrealist photographer.
She's visually highly imaginative in the way she's working,
whether as a painter or as a photographer.
Dora and Picasso, I mean,
they're famously regarded as kind of intellectual equals.
He's got Marie-Therese, who he now puts outside Paris with Maya,
and in Paris, Dora Maar, who's taking up a lot of his time,
and also interest because she was very intellectual in a way
that Marie-Therese never was.
Marie-Therese remained madly in love with him.
Picasso meets Dora Maar soon after Maya was born.
It was terrible because Dora Maar was taking away someone
who had become her exclusive love.
It must have been devastating for her.
Perhaps because she had become a mother,
it's made her a different person.
But Marie-Therese remains an important part
of my grandfather's life, and she always remains that iconic figure
throughout the work of Picasso.
The Femme Endormie. It's a portrait of Marie-Therese,
but this garment that she's wearing, this red,
it feels like a robe over a nightgown.
It's cosy, and it's a bit mumsy,
which is a very different look for Marie-Therese, right?
Not the sexy look.
Marie-Therese thought having a child together
would change their relationship and it did.
And it's telegraphed in the work.
She becomes less of a sexy character.
Dora Maar.
So when you look at the portraits of the women, when he changed
girlfriends, the style changed,
the house changed, even the dog changed.
People think about him as cold-hearted or ruthless,
that he could abandon people as easily he could take them up.
But those love affairs really did preoccupy him
and came out as these exquisite different images that he made.
In 1937, Picasso produced this extraordinary suite of paintings,
known as The Weeping Women, of which arguably
the one in Tate's collection is the masterpiece.
Dora Maar's features are often said to be the basis
for the Weeping Women series.
It's unfair, in a way, to Dora
because it gave her the sobriquet of being the woman who wept,
and people thought that she was just a miserable character
who was always blubbing. But, no, she wasn't.
She frequently dismissed the idea that she was the muse
or indeed featured in any other works.
In the late '80s,
the Tate collection had just acquired the work.
I was responsible for doing the research,
and knowing that Picasso and Dora Maar had a very traumatic
relationship, I imagine that she was therefore the weeping woman.
I was trying to track down people who were intimate with the painting,
who knew Picasso and Dora Maar at that time.
And the door was flung open by the then keeper
of the modern collection at Tate and said,
"I've just had the most dreadful thought.
"Dora Maar might die.
"You must go and see her."
I went to Paris, I had my little cassette recorder,
I got into my taxi to see Dora Maar at an address
that had taken me months to track down.
And I pressed a button and the door opened.
And a little old lady opened the door and she said,
"C'est moi." It's me.
It was just, I don't know, the most extraordinary moment.
And she invited me in.
And so I just pressed record.
The painting of you that we have at the Tate Gallery.
I have a photograph.
Wonderful painting.
Can I ask you a personal question about that time?
Did you cry a lot in your youth?
You know, I was trying to, in a unsophisticated way, find out
whether she was, you know, traumatised by their relationship.
But she was absolutely adamant that that was not the case,
but that it was her trauma at the state of the world.
The spectre of fascism was all over Europe.
CHANTING
A Spanish civil war is brewing.
CROWD CHEERS
Hitler is consolidating his power base in Nazi Germany.
Fascist forces demonstrated in Paris
and there were big riots and dead people.
It was awful.
WOMAN SCREAMS
The Surrealist Group was very associated with left wing politics.
So you get a highly creative, volatile artistic community,
including Dora Maar, in a country that was under huge stress
facing this existential torment.
The Weeping Women series are just these heart-wrenching
sort of responses to world circumstances.
I think that '37 is such a unique moment in Picasso's work,
because prior to that, you can connect his art to his life.
But it's not so easy to make direct connections to the political events
and the calamities of his century,
and that the Weeping Women is an expression of that,
just of the tragedy of the world.
With the Weeping Woman, there is astonishingly brilliant colour,
yellows and reds and oranges,
a broken face,
eyes like vessels, little boats tossed on the waves
with sort of curious knobs on the end of them.
The face wracked into geometric shards.
It's symbolic of the fact that in that moment,
this person's life is utterly shattered,
and the way that she's clawing at her face with her hands -
and there is the most incredible expression of grief.
Having met Dora Maar, it's quintessentially a real person,
but depicted in a kind of heightened reality of abstraction.
It's not decoration.
He said it himself, art is not the decoration.
It is an act of war.
NEWS REEL: Snapshots behind the scenes of the Spanish Civil War.
And the rebel leaders, Franco and Llano,
are held by the insurgents in Seville.
Franco harangues his followers and promises victory.
At Madrid, there is grim evidence of what war means.
Dora pushed Picasso to do more things
in favour of the Spanish Republic.
Picasso paid many, many things for children,
money for exiles.
He was very generous.
The Republican Government, they wanted Picasso on their side.
And certainly in Spain, there is no-one more important than Picasso.
He had been asked to make a big work for the Spanish Pavilion
in the Great Exhibition in Paris in 1937.
But the image won't come. The image won't come.
He can't force it.
And the deadline was getting closer and closer.
And this was going to be important.
CHURCH BELLS RING
TV COMMENTARY: A peal of church bells rang out over Guernica
at 4.30 in the afternoon on a market day in the spring of 1937.
MAN SHOUTS
Ten minutes later, German pilots in German planes
hired by General Franco bombed and strafed the Spanish town
unopposed for three hours.
LOUD EXPLOSION
1,654 people died and 889 were wounded.
NEWS REEL: First pictures from the Basque Republic of the holy city
of Guernica, scene of the most terrible air raid
our modern history yet can boast.
The bombing of Guernica was deliberately done to create
as much civilian casualties as possible.
A journalist had gone in, and he described it vividly,
graphically, the number of people who were incinerated by those bombs,
the city collapsed.
And there it was in the newspaper
that Picasso would read in the morning.
So you can just imagine Picasso was thinking, "I have a deadline,
"I have an image to make,"
"and the savagery of this, the cruelty,
"the levels of destruction, the darkness,
"this is what it's going to look like if these people take over."
And so, instantly, I mean, within a very short time,
he realises what he wants to do.
In preparing the canvas, he'd put on a primer of lead white.
And then on the top of that, there was white mixed in with charcoal.
Then a layer which had crushed glass
laid into a very thin layer of paint.
And the effect is actually extraordinary.
The light that bounces into the canvas also comes back out.
It was a trick that was well known in the 14th and 15th century.
So Picasso is starting to lay
the foundations for a masterpiece.
Cahiers d'art, which was a very renowned art magazine,
commissioned Dora to photograph the history of this painting.
SHUTTER CLICKS
Dora Maar begins to make these daily progress photographs
of Guernica.
Extraordinary detailed photographs that document every stage.
SHUTTER CLICKS
She was in the studio every day.
The Germans, they dropped these bombs made from white phosphor.
They literally set light to the air, to the atmosphere itself.
Everything would turn white.
It literally shreds the colour.
It felt only right that this would need to be
not just a large canvas,
but a monochromatic canvas too.
What Picasso does is the bomb blast expanding across the landscape.
SHUTTER CLICKS
He didn't attempt a big aerial bombing.
You know, it was a much more theatrical sense
of figures, not in conversation,
but alone.
One holding something, one looking this way, one screaming.
There is a man,
his arms are stretched out, but one of his arms
has been amputated and it holds a broken sword.
The other arm, within it is a nail.
It looks like he could be Jesus Christ himself.
It's the balance of the two things.
This is a bloody war but we have hope.
It's so beautifully conceived.
I have no idea how so many themes and images can be combined
into a single thing.
And it balances the opposition
of devastation, of bleakness,
but also of hope.
On the right-hand side, we've got these three women.
There's a lady with a huge foot.
And you can almost see the bone
coming through almost like an X-ray.
And there's one lady coming out of a window with a candle.
There have been so many accounts of the presence of the three women
in Picasso's life in Guernica.
So Olga, his first wife, Marie-Therese, his lover,
and then Dora Maar.
Commentators have identified the mother as Marie-Therese.
And the figure holding a candle as Dora Maar.
Her breasts have become bombs.
So it's kind of the absurdity and the tragedy
of what happens when man...
..loses all reason.
Guernica, it's first shown in the World Fair in Paris,
and it's a kind of powerful statement to the world.
But it doesn't get that much of a reaction.
It's really after the exhibition that the painting begins
to build up presence around the world.
It came to England in the autumn of 1938.
It goes to Whitechapel.
This is an area which has a huge amount of immigration,
large Jewish population,
but also the area where fascists would very often march.
NEWS REEL: Mosley proposes to march his Blackshirts
through the East End of London and is obstructed by anti-fascists.
To the people who were fighting back against fascism,
it seemed to have a resonance.
I'm imagining that for Picasso,
it was everything that he had hoped.
Guernica has to be the greatest anti-war painting
because Picasso managed
to create something which was so Spanish and yet so universal.
It then ends up in 1939 going over to America.
The reception that it started to get around the world
is what also made his international reputation.
The tragic end to this story is that, of course,
Franco wins in Spain.
Picasso, his response is to vow to never return.
You know, they say the Spanish never forget
morrina, the idea of homesickness.
There's such a kind of deep rooted sense of place.
And he'd missed Spanish life.
Picasso had really made his home in France,
but he remained at heart a Spaniard in exile.
One of the things that, of course, happened during that period
after Guernica was that Picasso and Dora's relationship
begins to collapse.
In 1937, a whole bunch of people all went to the South of France
in the Cote d'Azur.
Picasso was with Dora Maar.
My father, Roland Penrose, was part of this whole group of artists,
mainly Surrealists, people like Man Ray and Paul Eluard.
Man Ray was well known for making this sort of film
at places that he visited.
There was an immense sexual freedom amongst all of them.
They exchanged partners.
It was part of being a Surrealist that they were not bound
by normal conventions and rules.
It was just this incredible enactment of free love.
Later, some of them found it a little bit more difficult
to avoid the jealousy.
They were swimming, they made love
and they exchanged couples.
Penrose with Ady Fidelin
and Picasso with Nusch.
But I don't think Dora...
I think Dora was so aloof and so jealous.
And I think that she's upset because of these partouzes.
You know, exchanging couples.
OFF CAMERA: Swinging. Swinging. That's it.
So there must be quarrels between Dora and Picasso
because of that, I'm sure.
Picasso and Dora returned to Paris.
Dora Maar was living only 200 metres from Picasso's studio
in the Rue de Grands Augustins.
But she couldn't go to Picasso
if she hasn't called before...
..on the phone.
It's always on his terms.
She has to be always available to him.
So what has happened to this wonderful artist?
This woman?
Well, when you're in love, you surrender to some extent
to the other person. And if that surrender is mutual,
then it's a kind of a beautiful thing.
What I think that happens in Picasso's case
is that the woman surrenders, but he never does.
He holds on to that control.
So even someone as clever and as developed as Dora...
..has been manipulated and coerced
into being controlled by Picasso.
Picasso was a great womaniser.
He didn't care to have two or three or four women,
so poor Dora Maar must have suffered a lot.
He was the most macho of Andalusian men.
Basically, he didn't like his women to assert themselves against him.
He wanted to dominate them completely, but he also wanted them
to have a kind of feisty characteristic streak
and be really sexually available and active,
not just sort of passive muses.
So it was always going to cause some trouble.
It was a very strange, fluid, febrile time
when, you know, the end of the world was nigh.
NEWS REEL: These criminal methods of the Nazi conspirators
brought them early success.
Now, an evil ambition for power and more power drove them on.
Picasso was in Paris during the war. He didn't flee.
The United States made a special programme to enable
some of the biggest artists to go
to New York or wherever they wanted.
My father, contrary to most artists, refused to go.
He decided to stay in Paris and stick it out.
He was very proud of resisting the Germans.
When the Americans rescue artists from wartime France
and get them safely to America, they want Picasso.
I love the idea that he might have gone to Wisconsin or somewhere
and spent the war years in some city in Missouri.
And, erm...
But he wasn't, he wasn't for taking.
Dora stayed, or they stayed together through much of the war.
During the war, he does a lot of quite sombre, sinister
representations of Dora.
You have glasses and shards rather than apples and pears
that you have when you have Marie-Therese.
During the occupation, life was very difficult.
And also, Dora's mother died.
Because of all these things,
she starts to mentally deteriorate.
She was unstable
and he fed on her instability.
But is that to say that it's, you know, that he was mean to her?
Well, maybe he was mean to her.
She also had some episodes.
The worst was one day at the Catalan restaurant.
Everybody was having lunch and Picasso was talking and talking.
Dora said, "I cannot stand any more this conversation. I'm leaving."
And she fled.
And Picasso was after her.
And all of a sudden, he enters the restaurant
and he said to Paul Eluard, "Please, Paul, I need you.
"Come with me."
And it seems that Dora had had a nervous breakdown.
Eluard blames Picasso for Dora's situation.
But Picasso blames the Surrealists,
saying that it was them that put all these ideas..
..into Dora and that they were dangerous influences on her.
She has a terrible breakdown at that stage.
She had electric shock treatment and then went into therapy.
You know, she returned to life a slightly different person.
She became very religious and withdrew.
Events, including the relationship with Picasso, conspired, I think,
to detour her from what was an extraordinary career.
Picasso, people say, is not the most emotionally intelligent
when it comes to relationships. You know...
..he behaved like an adolescent.
Picasso never really ended a relationship.
Nothing was ever clean cut and there was always an overlap.
He used me until he felt there was nothing left of me.
The hundreds of portraits of me he painted.
Then one day in his car, we had the most appalling argument.
Afterwards, he left me at my door and I knew it was all over.
But I didn't know,
and waited and waited, waited for more than two weeks
when we'd seen each other almost every day for years.
He didn't have the courage to tell me.
The monster was busy painting portraits of the girl
who would give him children.
Dora Maar wanted desperately to be with him.
Picasso cut her off completely.
Why Dora stayed with him for so many years?
It's because to be the lover of Picasso,
it was like to be in the centre of the world.
I suppose for these women, they were put in such a light
that when the light was taken away, well, they couldn't stand it.
I mean, it wasn't just Dora Maar.
His first great love, Fernande Olivier,
was left almost destitute.
His wife, Olga, became very unstable.
And Marie-Therese Walter committed suicide after he died.
Picasso left a trail of female carnage in his wake.
My mother, Francoise Gilot, she was very young when she met Picasso.
It was like having a rock star as a father.
The book by one of Picasso's mistresses.
It was a bombshell.
Nobody likes to have their secrets told to the world.
Everybody had to choose a side.
He cut his two children from his life utterly.
There is so much tragedy through the whole of his life.
Some people call him Don Pablo.
Some people would come and say Maestro.
When I talked to him, I call him Papa.
He was very down-to-earth.
I've always looked at him
both as my father and Picasso.
So in the summer, we would go swimming.
My father would actually pretend that he knew how to swim,
but he didn't.
He kept one foot on the sand and then pretended to swim.
He's recognised as the greatest artist of the century.
But he didn't want to show this weakness.
I think that he was wanting to be
the best at everything that he did.
And that's what keeps you going -
that you want to prove that you're better than the others.
ARCHIVE VOICEOVER: Picasso. He did things no man had ever done before
with brush and canvas.
ARCHIVE NEWS: The greatest artistic genius of the 20th century.
My grandfather - the day he was buried,
it started snowing...
..as if a mythical figure had suddenly passed away.
I hadn't seen my father for years.
We thought maybe we could go into the house or see him.
But we were not, er, allowed.
Because of that situation, my half-brother committed suicide.
It was very, very tragic.
There was a lot of confusion.
Picasso was not the faithful man.
He had wives, mistresses, lovers.
He was really afraid of death.
And so he would have never made a will,
and he didn't.
You can tell somebody's life through the pictures that they made.
It really is a diary...
..his work.
It'll be around until the planet blows up, or whatever.
Picasso had a strong gaze,
which is a Southern Spanish idea -
that the eyes are where the soul is.
Every time he paints,
emotional truth is always there -
abhorrent at times, or not.
That's what gives his work such incredible power.
There is always that sense of underlying violence,
and that violence - it's life.
The brutalisation of women is part of the imagery.
It would be too easy to say that all those women
were like victims.
Everyone knew that it was not an ordinary world they were entering.
Picasso is a man of contradictions.
He can be tender, he can be cruel.
You can't just say, oh, he's a monster or he's a genius.
He's just a man.
My mother wrote a book about my father,
when I was a little girl.
"I met Pablo Picasso in May 1943,
"during the German occupation in France.
"I was 21.
"'You must come to my studio and see some of my paintings."
"'When?', I asked him.
"'Tomorrow.'"
My mother was very young when she met my father.
She was an artist already
and she was, I think, fascinated by the artist, on one hand,
but also fascinated by the man.
He is Picasso.
He's ultra-famous.
In 1943,
Francoise Gilot is 21 years old
and Picasso is 61.
They had a very interesting courtship.
A few years ago, when Francoise Gilot's memoir of her life
with Picasso was republished in the United States,
I wrote about it for the magazine.
It gave me a totally new perspective on Picasso
and what it meant to have shared a life with him.
He has an interest in Francoise - it's evident -
but he doesn't make a move right away.
There's a bit of a seductive dance going on between the two of them.
First of all, he was trying to woo her.
And then, eventually, because she seemed very interested in his work,
he had to also show her the works.
My mother was from a very good family.
She was studying to become a lawyer,
but she was really not that interested.
She really knew from the deepest part of her heart
that she wanted to be an artist.
He was very good at speaking about his own work,
but he was able to share things with her
that he wouldn't share with other people.
"In theory, we had nothing in common, Picasso and I.
"But, in fact, we had a great deal in common.
"When I told him how much at ease I felt with him,
"he grabbed my arm and burst out excitedly,
"'But that's exactly the way I feel!
"'I never found anybody that seemed like me.
"'I took refuge entirely in my painting.
"'Gradually, I met people with whom I could exchange a little bit,
"'and I had that same feeling with you -
"'of speaking the same language.
"'From the very first moment, I knew we could communicate.'"
I think what was irresistibly fascinating about Francoise
was that she was always her own person
and, right from the beginning,
she was no pushover to Picasso.
Francoise is very aware.
She's not coming into this naively thinking,
"Oh, he's never had a past."
I mean, if you know anything about his artwork at the time,
you see the past in all
the paintings that he's making.
There's his wife, Olga, who he cannot get divorced from.
So it was a very bitter relationship.
But she is Madame Picasso and she is still there
and she certainly wants to remind him of that.
And then there is Marie-Therese Walter, who was Picasso's love,
and the mother of one of his children,
who still very much depends on him emotionally, financially,
and also, their daughter is a part of his life sporadically.
There is Dora Maar, his girlfriend.
Dora is a major part of Picasso's life,
and the arrival of Francoise means that her role
is going to get marginalised and, eventually, cut altogether.
The past kept being present.
All the exes are still around.
My father never ended the relationship
with the different women he was with.
On one hand, he didn't want the drama of the other person
being unhappy, but, at the same time, there was one part of him
who couldn't part with that part of his past.
Francoise explicitly thinks about Bluebeard
when she thinks about Picasso.
Bluebeard, who married a sequence of women
and kept their heads in his attic.
That's how Francoise thinks of Picasso with his previous lovers,
except there's a difference.
She says he never cuts their heads off completely -
he leaves them hanging by a thread
because he likes to hear them occasionally make little moans,
like dolls,
just so he can know that they're still there
and that he's still a part of their lives.
Wow. That's a very strong thing to say about anyone,
let alone someone you are with at the time.
Francoise is certainly aware of Picasso's habits
of collecting women and then discarding them.
So, certainly, there is an awareness of risk.
He's playful, he's flirtatious. He can also be really mean.
He has this extraordinary charm -
so playful, so charismatic.
But then he'd turn and become this absolute beast -
this cruel person who took pleasure in cruelty.
"I told him I thought he was the devil.
"His eyes narrowed.
"He took the cigarette he was smoking
"and touched it to my right cheek and held it there.
"He must have expected me to pull away,
"but I was determined not to give him that satisfaction.
"After what seemed like a long time, he took it away.
"'No', he said.
"'That's not a very good idea.
"'After all, I may still want to look at you.'"
It's a very scary story
and it demonstrates Picasso's controlling tendencies.
When Picasso and Francoise take up together,
life, of course, was constrained in various ways.
Paris was a town under occupation.
Life in Paris was nightmarish.
The threat that maybe somebody that you were fond of, maybe
that you had as a friend, was going to betray you
because you'd done something to help the Resistance,
or you'd sheltered a Jew.
Picasso chose to be there
and, in quiet sort of ways,
he helped the Resistance.
He gave them money, he sheltered people.
He was...clever about it.
He was cunning.
He was very, very careful.
There's no example of him attending a social event
at which he knew the Nazis were going to be.
Paris, in these years, was filled with collaborators.
It was filled with parties.
Cocteau spent his time... Coco Chanel.
They were always at parties where there were Nazis there.
Picasso was careful of what it would look like after the war.
He came out squeaky clean.
Picasso saw few people
and remained stuck in his studio,
and he worked.
The art he produces at the time is a skull.
Or a nude which was like another skeleton.
He expressed the drama of what was going on.
Picasso was painting stark images
of light and dark, for example.
Good and evil, freedom and restriction.
I think he really did realise that, you know, freedom mattered.
So he is becoming ideological.
Picasso did a sculpture called
L'Homme au Mouton - Man Carrying a Lamb.
This sculpture shows a humble man, an everyday man -
a shepherd, if you want.
Picasso did have a huge sense of compassion.
People often try and make him out to be ruthlessly self-centred.
But I think the way the man is holding the sheep
shows that sense of looking after people who are less fortunate.
There's something very charming about
the vulnerability of the sheep
and the strength of the man.
He's going to stand firm, whatever.
I think we can look at that sculpture and say,
yes, it's a message of hope.
NEWSREEL: The great cathedral of Notre Dame as the French Armoured Division moves to complete
the liberation of Paris.
# C'est si bon, de partir n'importe ou
# Bras dessus bras dessous
# En chantant des chansons...
After the war, my father goes back where he comes from
and what is most important for him, and that's the Mediterranean.
# Les passants dans la rue
# Bras dessus bras dessous. #
For Picasso, it was the end of the war,
the beginning of a new relationship with a 40-years-younger woman,
and a kind of renewal.
Picasso and Francoise, they end up
buying a house together - La Galloise -
and, suddenly, colour comes back into Picasso's painting.
because, in fact, he was a Mediterranean man.
So there is a sense of happiness.
You have all these paintings related to this mythological world
and antique world.
So you have the famous Joy Of Life, for instance.
The natural way of life that was possible here
was very important for Picasso.
The other artist that settled here was Matisse.
My mother, being a painter, was fascinated by the idea
that she could meet Matisse.
And then, finally, one day, my father takes her to see him.
The friendship with Matisse was a friendship
where they each wanted to be the best.
And Matisse is very taken by my mother
and does a little paper cut of my mother,
and my father is absolutely furious.
You can see he's fuming
and, finally, out of that, comes the fact that he starts
drawing her and painting her.
For every woman, there's a different era in his work.
He had to find a new woman
because he had different ideas in his head.
The influence of Picasso
on Gilot's art is also very apparent.
She's quite young then and she is looking for a master, explicitly.
She's looking for a teacher. She wants to be taught.
She wants to have a style and a technique impressed upon her.
"During that Spring, I worked harder than ever at my painting.
"Sometimes, I would take a drawing or painting to show Pablo.
"Even though he appeared not to be giving me any direct advice,
"whenever I applied those general principles of his,
"I would make progress."
One of the first works she makes when they're together
is a painting called Adam Forcing Eve to Eat the Apple.
My mother did a portrait of my father with a kind of humour...
..when you can very well recognise Picasso being depicted there.
Picasso wanted to have children with Francoise,
but he has a superstition about it.
During her first pregnancy,
he does not want her to see an obstetrician.
He thinks going to an obstetrician may mean that things won't turn out well.
"No, why don't you go get psychoanalysed, instead, by Lacan?"
It is quite extraordinary that Picasso recommended Lacan -
the leading psychoanalyst of the time, the pupil of Freud -
to be her doctor.
It says a lot about Picasso's fear of illness, dislike of
any kind of medical situation whatsoever.
It also shows, frankly,
his cavalier disregard for his wife and her wellbeing.
"About a week before the baby was to be born,
"I was beginning to be quite excited
"and I decided it was time to do something.
"Pablo called Dr Lacan, who was astounded to learn
"that I hadn't been seeing an obstetrician.
"The baby, a boy, was born without difficulty on May 15th, 1947.
"Pablo wanted him to be named Pablo, but, since his first son
"had been named Paul, I thought we should try something different,
"and so we named the baby Claude."
I think it was a kind of carefree time -
having one boy and then me coming along.
They'd been through such hardship during the war
that, suddenly, everything seemed easy and nice and positive.
But it was always very present that there were, to me,
two sides to him.
You couldn't go out in the street -
the minute we stopped in a restaurant or in a cafe,
people would start gathering in front of us
and start asking for autographs and all of that.
So it was pretty much like having a rock star as a father.
Picasso is absolutely at the height of his powers.
Loved and known by everyone.
The most famous artist in the world.
For a man of his years,
how could he remake himself again?
He's working on these short films -
the most well-known, Visite a Picasso, in which he
is painting on glass.
And we are viewing
both the process and the man
as these works are being created.
There is an exquisite beauty in the process,
as much as there is in the completed work.
Many artists aren't keen to have
people actually observing their processes.
But Picasso, particularly in this period, was open to it.
And then there's this documentary, The Mystery of Picasso,
in which we are watching these things actually form
as if by magic on white paper.
When my grandfather decided to work
on Le Mystere Picasso,
it was a moment in life for my mother...
..Maya.
She was the first daughter of Pablo and Marie-Therese Walter.
It was exciting for her to go to the studio
and to be his assistant.
She was close to him, listening to his comment.
My mother told me that it was stunning to see how her father was,
at the age of 70 years old, reinventing something.
So, you are really seeing how an artist is moving
from a fish to a bird...
..to a person, within minutes.
He's not announcing what he's going to do -
it's just his brain working maybe working faster than himself.
It was never seen before.
For sure, an artist doesn't like to reveal his creation process.
But, for Pablo, it was also a way to control his image.
It shows a very canny, I think, form of self-marketing.
He realised, I think, how powerful the media was.
People now know about marketing themselves as artist rock stars.
But Picasso, arguably, was one of the first.
I think that he is the first painter who becomes a star.
He's not just a painter or an artist -
he is a star.
But things started getting difficult for my mother.
Their relationship was very demanding.
She is running the household,
she is dealing with the money. She's buying the bullfighting tickets, which, let me tell you,
is not a small responsibility in the world of Picasso.
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:
There are a number of pressure points.
There is the extreme conditions under which anyone who lives
with Picasso has to live.
You have to really go along with his pace of life
and his decisions.
There's a great amount of emotional cruelty, I think we can easily say,
and controlling behaviours.
He is leaning away from the family,
he's leaning away from her, and he's doing things
that are devastating and sort of openly insulting.
And there are also affairs.
"In the spring, he went from one bullfight to another.
"The intervals between sprinkled liberally with amorous intrigues."
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:
My connection with Picasso -
I think he came down to Arles for the bullfight.
My husband was there -
Lucien Clergue, very famous photographer.
MUSIC: Zou Bisou Bisou
SHE LAUGHS
"In 1954, there was a silhouette
"he used to see outside his studio.
"It belonged to a girl named Sylvette David,
"who had a blonde ponytail and very pictorial features."
# Zou bisou bisou
Zou bisou
# Zou bisou Means that I love you. #
Picasso saw me, then.
He must have asked somebody who is that girl, because he knew my name
and he said, "I want to paint Sylvette."
I was 19.
He said, "I love the long hair and the..." Yeah.
Well, he didn't say about my face, no.
He didn't. He just talked about the ponytail.
You can see it. It's very high up, on top.
Normally, they had it lower down.
And that's what Picasso liked, really.
He was fascinated, and that's why he painted me.
He was friendly,
clean, good-looking,
and beautiful eyes.
I'll never forget his strong, dark eyes.
But very direct, he was,
and I looked at him without fear.
We sat together in that studio without a word.
Silence. And then he asked me, "Would you like me to pay you?"
And I said, "No, I don't want to be paid
"because I'm happy to sit for you,"
thinking if he pays me, then I have to get undressed.
But he never touched me.
Always very friendly and joyful.
He was a kind man, really.
I don't know why it didn't work with the women.
"Undoubtedly he wanted to make portraits of her,
"but I know he also hoped that I might think twice about leaving
"if I realised there was someone else so close at hand
"who could step into at least one pair of my shoes.
"But I encouraged him to go on and make more portraits of her.
"For I found her as charming as he did,
"and I made it a point to never be around while she was posing for him.
"One day he reproached me.
"'You don't seem at all unhappy about it.
"'You should refuse to admit another face into my painting.
"'You are a monster of indifference.'"
The thing about Francoise Gilot is
she has an enormous amount of dignity.
She is the opposite of an abject woman.
But she wants the relationship to work.
She doesn't want it to end like this.
It just becomes untenable.
She becomes too unhappy.
"I realised, as I thought it over, that Pablo had never
"been able to stand the company
of a woman for any sustained period.
"He had insisted I have children
"because I was not enough of a woman.
"And now that I had them, it began to be clear
"that he didn't care a bit for it,
"and I began to do something terribly feminine and, for me,
"most unusual- I cried a good part of the time.
"I remember sitting there and crying steadily
"with only an occasional let-up.
"Pablo found it very stimulating."
I think that when she decided she was going to leave him,
it took her a while to make that decision.
Obviously, she didn't take it just in a day,
and she decided she was going to move to Paris
and take Claude and I, and do work on her career as a painter.
My father was very upset.
"'If you want to do me one last favour', he said,
"'you can open the bullfight. You're going out of my life,
"'but you deserve to leave with the honours of war.
"'For me, the bull is the proudest symbol of all,
"'and your symbol is the horse.
"'I want our two symbols to face each other in that ritual way.'"
So, my mother was a very good horse rider
and she knew how to train the horses to do special steps and all of that.
And my father was rather fascinated by that.
It's a moment of glory. I mean, Picasso himself seems to admire it.
He has her ride into a bullfight after the relationship is separated.
He wants to symbolise this, as well,
and he is paying homage to her power.
It's quite wonderful and she looks extremely beautiful,
and it's a very special moment.
She decided she would do this as a gesture to say goodbye
in a grand way.
She's leaving, but she's not leaving like a little mouse -
she's leaving with grand style.
She was the only one that left Picasso.
That is really significant.
That's proof that she never...never kind of...
..never gave up her own spirit.
It was a huge pain for Picasso.
It was with something really disastrous.
And so he just focused on what he could do the best,
and the best he could do is to continue working.
BELL RINGS BIRDSONG
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:
The discovery of the ceramics was another proof of his curiosity.
Making ceramics was a very innovative way
to reinvent his passion for sculpture.
He could transform a pitcher into something more seductive.
"During the fall of 1952, a young woman named Jacqueline Roque
"came to work at the pottery studio.
"She was just over 5ft tall with a rather little, cute head,
"high cheekbones and blue eyes."
So this is a sketchbook of Picasso from 1954.
These are very beautiful ink drawings
and you can see the face of Jacqueline.
And, here, it's turning
and then just the profile.
But there's ink all over...
..and there's scratches.
And you can see
this very beautiful profile.
Jacqueline had turned up just at the right moment,
because he could turn her into a Spanish,
elegant, aristocratic figure.
She was a woman who was entirely devoted to him
and, by all accounts,
a charming, wonderful woman.
I was very close with Jacqueline.
She was so affectionate with me.
And when I had Anne and Olivia, my daughters,
then she wanted to be the godmother, Picasso the godfather.
And Jacqueline, she bought a coat for Picasso
and one for Olivia the same.
You know, it's difficult to explain.
They were just happy to be there together.
In the 1950s, Picasso was approaching his 75th year.
His father died at the age of 75,
and it was a moment in his life when he was taking stock.
Now is this extraordinary moment
when New York takes over from Paris as the centre of modern art.
The artists who are now being revered across the Atlantic.
Jackson Pollock - Jack the ripper, as it were, or dripper.
De Kooning, as well,
and Francis Bacon.
Picasso is beginning to feel threatened that he's dated.
It was a time where Picasso felt challenged
by the world around him, about his own sense of his relevancy,
and he wanted to prove himself.
Picasso suddenly realises
that that generation needs to see
that he can still kick ass.
And, perversely, what he does is he goes back
and puts himself against the great artists of the history of art.
He still had the cojones - the balls -
to take on some of the greatest works in the history of Spanish art.
He hasn't been back to Spain for a long time.
There was Franco, who was there.
There is this frustration.
It's a country that he completely loves and he misses.
It's a way for him to reconnect him with his roots.
And to revive memories of when he discovered,
for the first time, the works of Velazquez.
Velazquez's painting Las Meninas preoccupied any Spanish painter,
because it did what Picasso sought to do, which is startle the viewer,
enter the imagination, enter the nervous system.
It's a court painting, but it's using a mirror
at a certain point to depict a figure.
It also has the painter included in the painting,
and it's large and it's ambitious.
You cannot make a single meaning from it.
And, of course, visually, it would have fascinated Picasso.
TRANSLATION:
Jacqueline, who tells friends
it's like the abominable snowman thumping around upstairs.
It's about two months where he's doing
one or two paintings a day.
Different versions.
The first version is the most complex -
black and white, landscape, scale,
and not far off the size of the original.
And then he just breaks it down.
He deconstructs,
cannibalises,
pulls them apart,
sees how the form works,
the colour works - just basically shredding
and rebuilding.
And some of them with a Cubist lens put on it.
Then there'll be a kind of expressionist lens put on it.
And he works with very, very jarring colours.
Playing with the ideas of a previous age.
One of the last images of the Las Meninas series
is a portrait of Jacqueline...
..framed within a frame.
A very brooding image.
It's like the mirror in the back of Las Meninas,
where we see the Spanish Queen.
Almost as if that's his homage to her as his queen.
Jacqueline, in many ways, was the gatekeeper.
Picasso was now so famous that if he went out in the streets,
there was never going to be any privacy there.
The book came out this week
and it's a book by one of Picasso's mistresses,
and it's called My Life With Picasso by Francoise Gilot.
It was a bombshell.
It was like something you don't have to touch.
It is an absolutely spectacular document.
Everybody had to choose a side - kind of bang, overnight.
It was considered to be an outrageous betrayal
of the intimacy they'd had together.
It is an unparalleled record of Picasso the man,
because you're seeing him as no-one else could see him -
from the perspective of domestic intimacy -
and so you get the good, the bad and the ugly.
For me, when I read the book, I was saying, "Ah, so much
"noise for nothing!"
"He came up behind me and put his arms around me.
"He moved his hands up and lightly cupped them over my breasts.
"I didn't move. 'I want to see if your body corresponds to the mental image
"'I have of it.
"'Also, I want to see how it relates to your head.'"
"I stood there and he undressed me."
Does this help us at all to know more about Picasso?
It's fine. Everybody wants to know
what the great men are like in the sack.
My mother wanted to write a book about my father
while my father was alive.
She thought it would not be fair to do it after he passed away.
So since he was getting older, she thought
that she should write the book.
By the time it was supposed to come out in France,
then there was a big movement organised by Jacqueline
to have all the artists in Europe make a petition against it.
It's not a book against my father.
It was...read like this
because Jacqueline decided that's how it should be read.
It's a very in-depth portrait that nobody else could have told.
He was presented as a man, not as a god.
So, for people who kind of deified my father, then it was wrong.
But, actually, she didn't say anything that would make
him less extraordinary.
I don't think he ever read it. But I think that it's quite normal
that if you use your life as your inspiration for your work,
you don't want somebody else to come and say
what the inspiration really was.
It's like, you know, your little secrets.
So nobody likes to have their secrets
being told to the world.
His reaction was just, you know, crazy.
It was... He became mad.
And all the people around them, when they were a couple,
took, you know, the position of Picasso, so it was a very tough time for her.
He didn't want this book out and he did everything he could
to fight its publication. He did not succeed.
But what he did was he cut his two children with Francoise -
Claude and Paloma - from his life utterly.
Claude and I, we'd spent all our holidays with our father.
It was very difficult not to see my father.
I mean, he was so much part of my life.
Jacqueline went around telling people
that if they said good things about the book,
then they would never be allowed into the house any longer.
She felt threatened by us, one way or another.
And my father
wanted to keep on being able to paint.
And I think that he felt that he needed Jacqueline
to take care of him, and that if Jacqueline didn't want us around,
then he was not going to have us around.
Lots of people in the art world were saying, "Oh, no, the children,
"they're so mean to their father.
"You see - they don't come down to see him any longer."
I mean, completely reversing the story.
So I made a point every year to go down to my father's house
and ring the bell at least three or four times,
until he finally passed away.
In the 1960s, Picasso was totally obsessed about the fact
that he was going to die and that he needed to use every
minute on his work,
and that everything else was not worth thinking about.
It's probably the most interesting moment in Picasso's life.
There is this urge to produce something meaningful.
There is the series of prints - reminds you that Picasso is
one of the greatest printmakers of all time.
As you get older, you can capture memories.
The father who taught him how to paint...
..the mother whose name he took,
the tragedy with his little sister, who died early.
He's going to the depths of his emotions and memories.
That's what I think makes these years particularly powerful.
And, also, the theme of eroticism is very present.
When they were being shown at the gallery,
you had to be more than 18 to see them.
Every artist is confronted to this moment in life
when there is a shift of your sexual drive.
But, nevertheless, he's able, through these prints,
to represent the same energy that was there before.
And that idea of Picasso as an old man
back with the female body -
he's acting out not impotence, but a dream of potence.
When you're that old and you're painting,
who's going to criticise you?
Who's going to judge you? Death, basically.
You're not making the paintings to sell them.
You make the paintings to see them.
The late Picassos were also extremely controversial.
And to be controversial when you're over 80,
that's pretty good.
My father didn't want to hear that he may die or be sick.
I mean, that was something that he really ignored completely.
He was really afraid of death.
I think that he, essentially, wanted to keep on painting for ever.
I've studied the late works of my grandfather
and especially what we can call self-portraits.
I spoke with people who were close to him in those last moments
and they say that Pablo was looking for something.
He did many self-portraits during his whole life.
But, at the end, the very last years,
he was aware of the skull appearing more and more under the face.
His last self-portrait was also giving a kind of a mirror to death.
It's extremely frightening.
You have two big holes instead of eyes,
and it's probably because he is realistic and he knows that,
sooner or later, there will be, um, no more future.
FRENCH NEWS REPORT:
We knew that we couldn't just go to the house,
because there would be an army of journalists in front of the house
and it wouldn't be helpful.
But we did speak with Paulo, who was inside,
and he said, you know, Jacqueline is in such a state,
there's no way I can make you come, so, voila.
There happened also something very, very tragic with my half-brother.
Just after the death of Pablo Picasso,
one of my cousins, Pablito,
went to the gate in Mougins and he was declined.
He was very confused at that time.
I've been told that he went back in the little village of Vallauris
with a sign saying "I'm the grandson of Pablo Picasso
"and they denied me the right to see him."
And, after, he killed himself.
My father was very silent about that part of his life.
It's pretty tragic.
Your father passed away
and your son commits suicide
because of that situation.
You can't really recover from those...those events.
When you look across the whole trajectory of Picasso's life,
there's a lot of tragedy.
And, in his relationships,
so much abusive behaviour.
That's why people are questioning him now.
It's a difficult thing for me to reconcile, because I admire him
so much in terms of what he created.
It's difficult to say this,
but I feel that, in many ways, we have to separate
the work from the personality.
I'm not saying that excuses some of the things that he may have done,
but don't get the two overly mixed up.
There have been something like 4,000 different books
about Pablo Picasso, hundreds of exhibitions.
When I see people queuing in front of the museum in Barcelona -
or in Malaga or in Paris -
I'm always thinking, OK, another exhibition, it's going to be boring.
But, no. I see artworks I've never seen before.
He arrived wide-eyed and changed the world.
That's where he stands.
The most famous and the most important artist.
When I think of my father, I think of him as both
Pablo Picasso, the painter, and my father.
You can't just say he's a monster, or he's a genius.
He was a man.
But he had the magic touch.
He was definitely the greatest painter of the century.
He's inventive, fearless,
very human, very passionate.
Sometimes dark,
and probably thrilled by knowing that, today,
we talk about him so much.