In May 1970, aged 89, three years before his death,
Pablo Picasso displayed with no frames on bare stone walls a large
number of his latest paintings.
These crude, raw,
provocatively sexual images were met with confusion and disappointment,
if not horror.
Flocking to venerate Picasso, the colossus of modern art,
his admirers expected echoes of museum masterpieces -
the compassion of the Blue Period...
..or the inventiveness of Cubism.
By comparison, they judged the new work as incomprehensible,
evidence of terminal decline.
Were they right?
Or had they missed a final statement of artistic genius?
Parts of the society in the European country, even in America,
described Picasso as a Communist, as a pornograph, as an antichrist.
And most of the population, they were against Picasso.
Picasso always managed to shock and horrify people.
Even people who loved his work, I mean, just didn't get it.
It was too new.
They didn't understand that revolution in line, in colour.
They always said, oh, it's not the Picasso we have known.
The great Pablo Picasso was thoroughly feted
at his French Riviera home on his 80th birthday.
Ten years earlier, the titan of the 20th century had
been on top of the world.
Public interest in him was insatiable.
The bullfight-loving millionaire T-shirted genius seemed invincible.
Or so he thought.
"I can say shit to anyone!" he said.
I think the newspapers are always out for a star,
ideally a movie star.
But Picasso had the allure of a movie star.
I don't know why.
But it just happened.
And Picasso hated it,
but I think secretly got a certain amount of enjoyment out of being a
superstar in the eyes of the world.
But in his last decade, Picasso came under attack on all fronts -
as a Communist obsessed with property,
a man who left a trail of broken relationships behind him
and a great artist with nothing left to say.
The criticisms of Pablo, the man, may have been valid,
but could it be that Picasso, the artist, had yet again wrong-footed
his critics and that, in fact,
he'd counter-attacked with some of his greatest art?
Breathtakingly daring painting.
Revealing his obsessions and vulnerability
in old age with searing, triumphant honesty.
To see these pictures is to get to know Picasso
as if for the first time.
Picasso wanted his private life to be extremely hidden.
He just wanted to lead a quiet, normal life.
But, occasionally, people got through the fortifications and ended
up in the studio.
Picasso allowed in only the most trusted friends
to witness the creative chaos.
Everything had to be left exactly where he'd dropped it.
Among the few he welcomed were his British biographer, Roland Penrose,
photographer Lee Miller and their son, Antony.
The first time I was really conscious of visiting his home was when we
were in Cannes and we went to see him in Villa La Californie.
I was about 15.
And I remember the cavernous interior.
As a small child, it seemed much bigger than it probably was.
But the most wonderful thing was the clutter everywhere -
the works of art and things he'd collected and so on -
in the most fabulous confusion, all over the place.
I turned to my mum and I said, "Has Picasso just moved in here?"
And she said, "No, he's lived here for a couple of years."
In his last decade, Picasso produced more artworks than ever before.
To keep the press at bay,
he agreed to a few carefully choreographed photoshoots.
Photography was something that Picasso understood instinctively.
And when he was in the presence of photographers, it was almost like a performance.
He knew exactly what they were seeing through the viewfinder
and he would respond so they would get the best possible image.
And that's why he always looks so good on camera.
But there's a paradox here because the Picasso we see in the photographs
is a simplified version of the real thing.
And, actually, underneath that image lay a very complicated, a very,
sometimes conflicted, a deeply passionate person.
What he's showing us is almost the persona that he wants us to take away
rather than revealing his true inner self to us.
When Gary Cooper came and he gave an Indian chief's headdress eagle feathers,
Picasso put it on. It was just getting on toward evening.
And behind him, the door was open, so no reflection from the glass.
Black, headdress.
He turned sideways.
At that moment,
unbelievable!
He sucked in his cheeks.
He became an American Indian.
He changed his own profile, just like that.
Talk about a great actor.
I'm watching him. What's this guy thinking about?
Where is he? I never knew.
Where is he? Not in my world, that's for sure.
Up till now, this performance of supreme self-confidence kept the public satisfied.
But times were a-changing.
Francoise Gilot, who'd been Picasso's partner for ten years,
and had left him eight years earlier, set to work on a revealing memoir.
Her book not only told of his work but also of the painful breakdown of
their relationship.
Such an account was unprecedented.
Picasso was stunned.
In 1964, he failed to halt Francoise Gilot's publication in America.
And the following year, he failed again in France.
Fortress Picasso had been breached.
"I congratulate you," he said to her.
"You know I always like a winner."
He never spoke to Francoise again.
Oui.
Gilot's memoir revealed Picasso's infidelity and his controlling nature.
The book sold nearly a million copies worldwide.
Fame became notoriety.
To his horror, the hidden detail of his private life was on show for all to see.
I think that he was disturbed by Francoise's book
because it was very accurate.
One couldn't get him to discuss it in any detail
because he clearly felt that she'd got a bit too close to his private life,
and this was sacred.
A successful artist herself, Francoise Gilot even dared to attack
Picasso's current work.
She told him, "I always looked upon Cubism as the period of pure painting
"and that he'd done nothing greater."
To his fury, she was repeating the critical consensus that America had
become the epicentre of modern art,
and that, by the 1960s, abstraction had become an orthodoxy,
leaving Picasso, the figurative painter, a relic from a previous age.
He had total contempt for abstraction.
He hated American art.
He went his own way.
And he...
felt that he was still the greatest painter in the world,
which, let's face it, he was.
And there was no reason why he should not go on.
I mean, what he wanted was just to
go on visualising the world as he saw it.
A few months later, another bombshell.
A former champion of Picasso's political work,
British art critic John Berger
wrote a devastating attack on what he claimed to be Picasso's
loss of direction.
There is a very direct sense of humanity, I think,
always, in Picasso.
He is concerned only with the world of men
and what happens to men with feeling.
But there is a limitation in Picasso.
And it's what I see as the tragedy of Picasso.
You see, if you are that kind of extrovert artist...
..you need a theme - that's to say, significant subjects -
constantly fed to you.
Now, I think the difficulty that Picasso has had is that he hasn't
been able to find these themes.
First of all, he did in the waif pictures.
And then he did in Cubism.
The theme of this was the theme of painting itself,
a new language of painting.
And then, later, there was Guernica.
But, often, he has been without themes.
It is to do with his personality.
Although, heaven forbid,
I don't mean that in the sense that his personality is...
..exploited by all the gossip columnists.
But somehow, when you consider Picasso,
it is the spirit of the man rather than any single work which dominates
and is so striking.
Picasso was distraught.
In a very short time, his personal and public reputation had been trashed.
For the first time in his life, at the age of 84,
he suffered a physical collapse.
In great secrecy, he was rushed to the American Hospital of Paris for
major surgery on his stomach.
Before, when we saw him in 1965...
..we didn't really notice that he had not been well.
And the only thing was that my father had always suffered from stomach ulcers,
and Picasso asked him often,
what did you do and how did it work...
..how are you now?
And later on,
we learned that he had been suffering from a stomach ulcer also.
But until that period, we never really realised that he was not so well.
The wall of secrecy around Picasso's operation was soon breached.
Every newspaper discussed his condition with morbid curiosity.
After a month in hospital, he returned to convalesce in Mougins,
his country retreat in the south of France.
Security was upgraded
and the enormous burden of care fell to his new wife, Jacqueline.
I think what he demanded from his wife or lover, what have you,
was total reliability
because it was a very, very arduous job.
He wanted her with him as much of the day as possible.
So she would have to get up at...
..seven in the morning and do all the household chores,
going into the local town, buying the food, going to the bank,
mailing things,
all the rest of it, and had to be back by 10 o'clock,
when Picasso woke.
And then she had to be on duty from ten o'clock till he finished painting,
which could be midnight or two in the morning.
Francoise was exceedingly intelligent,
came from an excellent background,
was very educated
and very sophisticated.
Her replacement, as it were, Jacqueline, was...
..very much the opposite.
But she performed incredibly well.
Recovery was slow,
and Jacqueline needed huge reserves of patience to cope with him.
Picasso was unable to stand up comfortably to paint.
And his depression deepened.
But he found comfort and some solace in etching.
When we first could see him again, he was doing more drawings,
graphic works and so on.
All of a sudden, he had the idea of doing a portrait again of me.
And Jacqueline said, "Oh, life is starting again."
She was very happy about that.
We started at about eight or nine in the evening.
And when he was finished, it was by ten o'clock.
And he immediately phoned the Crommelynck brothers, who always pulled these...
..graphic works for him,
not thinking that, at ten at night,
they would perhaps have a rest or so.
He was working so the others had to work, too.
And they came immediately, took the plate,
brought them back again with the proofs.
And he looked at it and agreed.
And then it was already about midnight when he finished.
His sense of humour was marvellous.
And he liked to make a little joke.
For instance, one day, he was talking about my portraits.
And he said, "Oh, the next one we do as Maja desnuda,"
"the Goya." And he had fun because I...
I blush...
..blushed... I don't know the word.
Yes, blushed! Blushed, yes. Oh, he was so amused!
Of course, he never did a portrait like that.
But he liked to do things like that.
Picasso's energy levels continued to fluctuate.
By the end of 1965, he was still too weak to paint large canvases.
But in the hope that his etching work would continue,
master printers Aldo and Piero Crommelynck had already joined Picasso in the south of France.
But, to their frustration, Picasso remained unable to work full-time.
With his faithful retinue, including the Crommelyncks,
he went instead to the bullfights and the beach.
Everyone waited impatiently and nervously for him to get back
to serious work.
Crommelynck!
THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE
Merci!
By mid-November 1966, Picasso was clearly on the mend.
The Crommelyncks printed his first comic experiments, combining etching and aquatint.
And there was something in the choice of subject that confirmed a
returning sense of vigour.
The Picasso show was back on the road.
He even gave his first-ever TV interview.
As a Spaniard, Picasso had always been wary of speaking French in public.
But now the opportunity to influence opinion in his favour seemed irresistible.
Picasso's campaign to restore his reputation was helped by an authorised interview.
It was with Helene Parmelin, a writer close to him.
She directly contradicted Francoise Gilot's negative portrait of Picasso,
presenting someone more open-minded and freethinking,
a charming whirlwind of creativity.
Notoriety and criticism hadn't damaged Picasso's pre-war legacy.
In the autumn of 1966,
his largest-ever retrospective
was unveiled at the Grand Palais in Paris.
6,000 visitors a day were to marvel at his past achievements.
But Picasso refused to join the celebration.
He wasn't interested in past glories.
He'd recovered sufficiently to stand all day with a paintbrush in his hand,
working on a new series of very large paintings.
As I'm about to be 93...
..um...
..I think I can...
..understand what he must have felt.
And that is, however old you get, you're very lucky be alive.
And if you are, so long as you're active, you keep going,
you do whatever you've been doing all your life,
that was the way Picasso felt.
I mean, he worked away like crazy.
I would say that most of Picasso paintings are self portraits.
In the '60s, you would look a lot at television,
and see so many series -
Musketeers and, you know,
those kind of series of the '60s on television,
and I think he was inspired by those television programmes.
Fight!
Picasso's new paintings were playful and self-deprecating.
A swashbuckling hero, fighting for honour and justice,
with an old-fashioned sword.
It was the perfect comic role for an artist trying to change the way
we see, with an old-fashioned paintbrush.
We're way back in terms of subject.
But we're way ahead in terms of the new force in his painting.
A last great enormous attempt to
go on being the greatest modern artist
of his time. I feel that very strongly.
The originality of these images,
in that, I mean, he's not just
redoing old things and not becoming enfeebled.
On the contrary, he's becoming stronger and stronger and stronger.
Right up to the end of his life.
The fact of death, I think, was driving him.
And I think it was driving him back to Spain, in some ways.
Since the Civil War, Picasso had
been a Spaniard in self-imposed exile.
He had an enviable Mediterranean lifestyle.
But, as he said, a man belongs to his own country, forever.
There were times when he did feel quite agonised about being shut out
of his own country.
There was so much of the Spaniard in him,
even after those decades of living in France.
In 1936,
after Roland and Picasso had been together in the South of France,
Roland was so inspired by
Picasso's anguish concerning the Spanish Civil War,
he thought he had to go to Spain and see what it was all about.
When Roland arrived in Barcelona,
he went and found Picasso's mother and his sister.
And his mum said, "Oh, I'm so glad,
"today's the first day I can open the window,
"because the monastery that's burning two blocks away,
"the smoke has been blowing in all the time."
They were in a war zone, that's how it was.
And Picasso was fascinated to hear first-hand all the news that Roland
could bring back to him in Paris.
And that was kind of like the first direct news that Picasso had had for
quite a long time of his own family.
For Picasso, it was as if the Spanish Civil War had never ended.
In 1937, General Franco had ordered the fascists to bomb Guernica.
BOOM
Picasso vowed never to return while the dictator was still alive.
He yearned ceaselessly for Spain
but found comfort in his fellow
countryman Jaime Sabartes, a lifelong friend,
secretary, and butt of his jokes.
Sabartes was his shadow, I think, in a way.
He'd known Picasso when they were all young, back in Barcelona,
in the old days. He worshipped Picasso.
He always had done. I mean, since he was 14 or 15.
And Picasso needed Sabartes.
I mean, Sabartes was crucially important to his...
..his life. But Picasso loved
getting the better of Sabartes, or making little
traps for Sabartes.
For instance, one of the things he did - every night,
Sabartes would come very late at night, midnight or later,
to see what was in the trash cans.
Because Picasso threw a lot of stuff away - drawings and things.
And one night, Picasso wrote on a piece of paper, "Sabartes..."
HE SPEAKS FRENCH
"Sabartes, you are a..." ..rude word.
And he put that at the bottom of the dustbin.
And then he piled all of the stuff up.
And he knew that Sabartes would come later, after midnight,
and he would take everything out.
And all he'd find at the bottom was a very rude message.
This was Picasso's idea of black fun, I think, in a way.
But it sort of typifies the kind of relationship they had.
Picasso played endless tricks like that.
In February 1968, Sabartes died.
Another key link with his past had been severed.
Now, it seemed, he was alone with his memories.
Within a month, Picasso began a major series of etchings,
conjuring up his youthful adventures in Spain.
He's thinking about his childhood.
About his father, who seems to be
always kind of omnipresent in his work.
He spent a lot of time in Barcelona,
going to the so-called school of life,
paying frequent visits to some brothels.
There he became friendly with some prostitutes.
And we know that very early on he was exposed to some dramas,
such as the play of Celestina,
which might have shaped his mind and heart.
But, yes, Celestina is definitely an echo to his own life.
Celestina is one of the greatest characters in Spanish literature.
It's a character which was invented in the Renaissance by this great
writer - Fernando de Rojas.
It tells the story of a woman who is the tenant of a brothel and she's
helping a desperate couple to solve their love affair.
Celestina is cruel.
She's cruel because she's helping but at the same time this help leads
to the execution of the characters.
It's a tragicomedy, which is something Picasso was always
attracted to throughout his life.
In old age, Picasso was also haunted by the image of his father,
which unexpectedly came to life.
Picasso's work was a fusion of observation, memory and fantasy.
For his next series of prints, he was inspired by a story of the
artist Raphael, which he used as a
metaphor for his own erotic fantasies.
La Fornarina was a baker's daughter who'd ignited the great painter's
passions. According to the myth, Raphael's excessive lovemaking to
her brought on a fever, which led to
his premature death at the age of 37.
It's one of the great mystical and mythical stories of the pantheon of
love and art. One can see that
Raphael and La Fornarina is a kind of metaphor, again, of Picasso's
relation with the model.
The story of the painter and the model is definitely the obsession of
his life.
For Rafael, just like for Picasso,
painting and making love is the same thing and Picasso is always dreaming
of his ideal model, and how you can capture the model,
how you lose your identity within the model,
how you project yourself within someone else,
and become someone new again.
TV: De Gaulle is certainly in sticky situation.
In May 1968,
Picasso switched on his television and watched as student unrest rocked
the nation.
The youth of France were pushing the country to the brink of civil war.
The old artist was energised by the mood of social and sexual liberation.
It was definitely a period where things were moving.
1968 is a big social revolution, and for someone like Picasso,
whose entire life is devoted to affirming the power of freedom,
it is something that he felt very connected with.
Erotic movies were available very early on in the beginning of the
20th century but in the '60s, some of the close-ups are really striking.
And then, with some of the prints, it's a bit the same.
With the play of costume,
you were, like, constantly unveiling certain parts of the body and giving
the eyes the sensation of close-up,
so I think these cinematographic effects somehow is something that
Picasso was very well trained in.
The series - Raphael and La Fornarina - went on show
immediately, but its publicity was,
unsurprisingly, limited.
The editor of Time magazine refused to publish what he called,
"the inappropriate imaginings of a senile, dirty old man."
I think people have the wrong idea about old age.
You don't necessarily stop screwing at 70 or 75, or whatever it is.
I mean, I'm 93,
and I'm surprised to find that one's sexual feelings continue
for quite a long time.
And I don't think Picasso became
non-sexual, impotent or anything of the sort.
I think he went on screwing as long as he possibly could.
On the 25th of October, 1968,
Picasso celebrated his 87th birthday in private.
With nothing to report,
global news agencies merely updated their obituaries.
Behind closed doors, with astonishing vigour,
Picasso began to paint dozens of large, urgent, direct images.
Seeking to portray the inescapable
truths of life and the indignity of ageing.
Picasso turned to me and said,
"We have to look for something that develops on its own,
"something natural and not manufactured.
"It has to evolve just as it is in its natural shape
"and not its shape in art.
"Grass like grass, a tree like a tree and a nude like a nude.
"We do the same thing over and over again, and yet we could do anything.
"What is there to stop us?
"The great quest for freedom has begun again."
Picasso was pushing figurative art
in new directions but his expressive
marks and elemental imagery had an
origin and inspiration from another time.
I think, in 1965,
one can already feel what he would do in 1967, '68.
The revolution is beginning here.
In Arles, they would do bullfights and Picasso,
he would travel from the South of France, from the Cote d'Azur,
to Arles, to see that bullfight.
And so, he had to go through the countryside where van Gogh painted.
You will see, here, really, he took pleasure in painting that.
He marked it,
it's a quick painting, and it's a very loose and the strokes,
and when you are close,
you don't even see that these are mountains but when you go backwards,
you will feel that these are really the picture of the area, with these
very wild, strange mountains.
Picasso carried with him this cutting,
from the local newspaper, of van Gogh's death.
And he kept it with him always.
It was always in his wallet.
I think that van Gogh was the filter of the sort of powers
that he himself felt, and by carrying this around in his pocket,
this magic piece of paper, it kept him somehow
related to van Gogh.
I think that was enormously important in his life.
Maybe he saw himself in the light of van Gogh.
I mean, the way that van Gogh's works suddenly grab you and seem
more vivid than any other imagery you've ever seen,
and I think Picasso wanted to absorb that into his own work,
and I think that, to a great extent, he did it.
By November 1968,
Picasso had embarked upon a new phase of intense painting.
He projected on his studio wall the works of Rembrandt, another hero.
Picasso appreciated his stoical acceptance of old age, but even more,
the vitality and vigour that flowed from Rembrandt's maturity and wisdom.
There are three pictures,
and they are all inspired, actually, by Rembrandt,
because, after his illness in
1965-66, he read a book about Rembrandt,
and that's why these figures come up.
And you see the Dutch pipe, and you see the collar, and so
Rembrandt was very much on his mind at that period.
Here we have, again, a Rembrandt figure, with the Dutch pipe.
He took every freedom to paint,
no rules any more, and he would just, how he felt,
that he needed a colour somewhere
and he just did whatever his brush
would like to do. But it's not the picture of an old man.
He was younger there than he was in his Blue pictures.
Now well into his 88th year,
Picasso was finally ready to display his latest work,
with no frames on bare stone walls, at the Palais des Papes, Avignon.
He personally curated the show in a direct no-nonsense way,
letting the intense confrontational paintings,
the raw reality of love in old age, speak for themselves.
The exhibition opened on the 23rd of May, 1970.
To those expecting classic Picasso,
the new work was now unrecognisable.
To his enemies, his images
were simply obscene.
As one critic said,
"The incoherent scrawls of a
"frenetic old man
"in the antechamber of death."
I know I talked to endless people at the time.
People said, "It's so sad, isn't it? I mean, he's really lost it."
And I said, "Absolutely not.
"I mean, it's the reverse."
Here he is in old age, really embarking
on a whole new period, as it were.
Above all, Picasso still had the urge to create on his own terms.
Images poured out of him, seemingly effortlessly.
As Picasso said to me,
"You can make the most appalling efforts and sweat blood over
"your canvasses, but nobody's making you do it.
"Anyway, you, the painter, you've done this work,
"and that's something, so you're happy.
"I'll tell you why. At the moment you do it,
"it brings some sort of release,
"and that is the essential thing."
On the 21st of October, 1971,
President Georges Pompidou opened an exhibition in the Grand Gallery of
the Louvre in Paris, to celebrate Picasso's 90th birthday.
He was the first living artist to receive this honour.
But Picasso, once more, had no time for looking back.
He continued to work full-time,
perhaps feeling that if he stopped again,
he would stop for ever.
The last paintings of Picasso are immensely strong.
Basically, they are nearly all head and shoulders of sometimes women,
nearly always of men, and the man is nearly always himself.
And they're kind of visions of himself, sometimes horribly funny.
There's a bit of disguise thrown in, but they're all about himself.
The darkness of his nature, he seems to be exploring,
it's very Spanish in that respect.
I mean, it just gets darker and darker and darker.
And it's like a long fight against death, and seeing himself,
and it is wonderful, intensely moving to watch...
..and far from being...
..an old man who can't do it any more, they are superbly done.
They are as inventive as ever, as well as being intensely moving.
The famous 1972 portrait, we did see that,
and it was difficult because it was obvious that it was a self-portrait,
but it was something like an adieu,
and we didn't want to see that, actually.
My father and me were in Cannes, in April, 1973...
..and we saw Picasso coming back from a trip in the car...
..and we saw him like a head, which already is dead, and then...
..in the night of the 7th-8th April,
there was a huge storm over the Cote d'Azur, a thunderstorm,
horrible weather, and by chance,
I opened the radio in the hotel room at four o'clock,
and it was announced that that night, Picasso had died.
I'll never forget that.
And it was really, you know, that weather, and Picasso's death,
it was like a revolution in the sky also.
Picasso died today at his country home
at Mougins on the French Riviera,
overlooking the rust-coloured hills
and the blue Mediterranean which had become his spiritual home.
He was 91.
His death came as a surprise to his wife,
Jacqueline, and to the few friends who had visited him recently.
Still hard at work in his immense cluttered studio,
Picasso had seemed as indestructible as the thousands of artworks he had
created over eight decades.
The wealthiest of artists,
Picasso's total fortune had been estimated at $50 million in
paintings, real estate and investments.
He will undoubtedly be recorded by history as the greatest painter of
the 20th century,
and perhaps the greatest multifaceted artist of all times.
He had not made a public appearance in three years.
Picasso left his villa only occasionally, to visit a dentist or
to shop in Nice. Now he is making the final journey.
Even in death, the artist kept the world at bay.
Behind locked gates, on the 16th of April, 1973,
Pablo Picasso was buried in the grounds of his chateau at Vauvenargues,
with only Jacqueline, his son, and a few close friends in attendance.