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- [00:01]
Progressive Insurance Narrator
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- [00:56]
James and Andy
hi everybody, it's James and Andy here from your next favorite podcast. No such thing as a fish. Yes, we. We are two fourths of a group of people who love facts and we love to find new facts and we come here every week and tell each other about them. For instance, Andy, did you know that one of the world's oldest cycling road races is getting much harder because people keep stealing the road? I want to know more already, but I'm instead going to tell you my new fact, which is that some ancient coffins from the 17th century have faces. The coffins have faces? Really creepy. Not just on the inside, no. Wow. If you like the sound of those facts, or indeed facts in general, then come and find us no such thing as a fish wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:44]
Danny Bird
From his birth in 1881 to his death in 1973, Pablo Picasso lived a life as revolutionary as his arts. A child prodigy who transform modern art, his story is one of genius, reinvention, scandal and relentless creativity. In this episode of the History Extra Podcast's Life of the Week series, Danny Bird speaks to Sue Rowe about the passions and upheavals that shaped the pioneer behind Cubism and masterpieces such as Guernica.
- [02:18]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
Before Picasso became Picasso, he was a prodigy from Malaga in Spain with an intense relationship with his family, especially his father. What do we need to understand about his early life to understand everything that came later?
- [02:30]
Sue Rowe
His father was an art teacher and I think a pretty good artist. If you have an opportunity to go to Malaga and see Picasso's house where he grew up, there's a huge painting on the ground floor by his father of pigeons, which was One of Picasso's favorite subjects, and it's strikingly good painting. Picasso was inspired by his father and was painting and drawing from a very, very early age. If you go to the Picasso Museum in Malaga, you can see some of his drawings that he did, aged about nine or 10. They are extraordinary portraits. I do feel it was a sort of God given gift. His mother was an adoring, doting Spanish mother who loved her son. She had two daughter and one of the daughters died of diphtheria as a child, which did affect Picasso. He always felt responsible for her death. And he said that at the time he prayed to God that if he could keep his little sister alive, he would give up painting. He would give up the thing that was most important to him. And sadly she died. But Picasso couldn't give up painting. And he always felt a sense of quite complex guilt about that. When little Conchita died, they moved to Barcelona and Picasso went to the art school and got in with a group of artists at the local tavern. And there was a back room and they used to get together and put on exhibitions. And again, their work was really good, slightly cartoonish, full of spirit, life Pastichi. And that he did in his early years. But by the time he sent a large painting, a deathbed scene, very traditional for exhibition at the Exposition International for the Spanish Pavilion, and it was accepted. So the first time he came to Paris was as a very young man, just 19, to see his own picture. And I think he imagined it would take pride of place, but actually it was tucked very, very high up in the Spanish Pavilion. But there it was. And he thereby discovered that he absolutely loved Paris and wanted to stay. And he had some Spanish friends who had settled in Montmartre and he went to live with them. He did little drawings of Notre Dame and the kinds of things that artists sold to tourists. And he couldn't sell a thing. So he went home to mum and dad and they had to support him for another three or so years until he could stand it no longer. He just had to get back to Paris and back he came to Montmartre again.
- [05:31]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
And before we get into his life in Paris, which is obviously a very formative episode in his career as an artist, but also in terms of his personal life, could you tell me a little bit about the sort of styles that Picasso was dabbling in in the earlier part of his life as a young artist? What was he engaged in when he was younger?
- [05:50]
Sue Rowe
He did traditional stuff. The deathbed painting was very popular. Big paintings that glorified big occasions. But he was just sort of learning his lessons as an artist. What really came from him was the shock of the new, if you like. And he went from Barcelona, which was quite straight laced in those days, to the streets of Montmartre, where he saw women leaning on bars and strolling the streets. And he was just fascinated by their sense of the mixture of freedom and their authority. And I think he was always interested in interpreting what he saw and putting himself into what he saw. So what you get in a portrait by Picasso of a woman is her feelings, her attitude, her stance, her perspective, but also his. And I think he's always recording his own responses to the things and people he paints. And that must have sort of started early on. I think he was a very unconstrained, unnervous, unshy child who'd always been encouraged to be himself. And that was the child who became the artist who simply painted what he saw. Whether it was like what everybody else was painting or not, didn't matter to him.
- [07:25]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
Now, the Blue Period and the Rose Period are often presented as distinct chapters in his evolution as an artist.
- [07:32]
Sue Rowe
Yes.
- [07:32]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
What was emotionally and artistically happening in Picasso's life during those years? And why do those works still resonate so strongly today?
- [07:39]
Sue Rowe
The Blue Period, he painted in that period when he was back in Spain, but with the images of down and out Paris still in his head. People with their babies sort of bundled in a gray rag close to them. He painted people who were not coping with life, that they were sort of outsiders. And I think that's how he felt himself. He felt in Paris that. I mean, he saw the Paris Opera, he saw all the grand buildings, he saw the well to do people from the Haute Monde coming and going in their carriages. And then up in Montmartre, he saw the absolutely penniless, who were living on a complete pittance. And those images of people struggling and emaciated and gaunt were still in his head. So he almost went to Barcelona and painted a record of everything that had up to now changed and inspired him. And people do flip from the Blue Period to the Rose Period, quite rightly, because it is a completely different period of work. The Rose Period was the years that Picasso returned to Montmartre, began his relationship with Fernand Olivier. He was living in another part of the Bateau Lavoie, the building famously called the Laundry Building because it looked like one, and towards the heights of Montmartre, where all the artists gathered because it was so cheap to live there. And he fell in love in Montmartre with Fernande. She was really his first love. She was a confident, very bohemian person who absolutely loved Montmartre. She relished the lifestyle, she was interested in painting, she was interested in his work and had things to say about it. And she became his really first significant other and he painted her and she sat for him. The delicate, very simple rose period nudes are based on Fernande. And Fernand looked, I think somewhere between those little delicate pinky rose colored nudes and the figure that turns up in Les Demoiselles d' Avignon where she's the figure, the tallest figure on the right hand side as you're looking at the picture. And she has the sort of authority and presence and impact that she was refuted to have. He was experimenting with a new palette of earth and rose colors inspired by, I think, not necessarily Fernand, but inspired by the sort of simplicity of his love for Fernand.
- [10:43]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
Looking forward, Cubism changed art forever. For listeners who know the term, but not necessarily the revolution behind it. What exactly did Picasso alongside Georges Bras invent and why was it such a radical break from centuries of Western art?
- [10:57]
Sue Rowe
Yes, I think it was a radical break because Picasso was experimenting with and playing with perspective. And there used to be rules of perspective that artists followed and Picasso just played with those rules. And I think the most lucid person who has ever described Cubism is David Hockney, who said if Picasso painted a woman with three noses, that's not because she had three noses, it's because he was looking three times and recording all those views. And I find that if you stand in front of a Cubist painting and you begin maybe towards the top and you let your gaze go round in a circle, it sort of comes into perspective before your eyes. Georges Braque was very interesting because he was basically a sort of engineer. He was interested in technique, he was interested in materials, he was interested in architecture and buildings and all of that stuff. And so he was so very, very precise about lines and perspectives and diagrams that he was exactly the right person for Picasso to meet at that time so that they could combine those influences and the knowledge of Braque's exquisite exactness and Picasso's desire to sort of break the old rules and produce something new. And I think it was really to draw attention to the fact that if you are looking at a beautiful, well to do woman's portrait, you're not actually looking at that woman. You, you are looking at what's been put down on the canvas. And so Picasso wanted to show the Sort of the stages of creation, if you like, in the Cubist paintings. And to show that we can look even at the same painting in different ways and see different aspects of the subject or the object. Because of course, he painted guitars and other musical instruments and tram tickets and bottles and glasses. And the other fascinating thing about Cupism was that it was instantly successful. It really made his fortune because his production of these paintings coincided with a time when there were new dealers coming to the Left bank and setting up little galleries from places like Germany. And Picasso's Cupism just appealed to their eye because they were looking out for something new. They were looking out for something very, very modern. They traveled all the way to Paris to sort of keep up their artistic credentials and they were looking for something new and they found it. They found something that nobody had ever quite seen before. So it was very successful. And Picasso started making money from that point on.
- [14:07]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
And for the benefit of listeners who may not be familiar with this period of art history, what time are we talking about here? When was Cubism really taking off?
- [14:14]
Sue Rowe
About the end of the first decade of the 20th century. 1910ish. So quite early. Yes, earlier than we normally think.
- [14:25]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
It is an astonishing fact because you do think of that time as being quite Edwardian.
- [14:28]
Sue Rowe
Oh, exactly, Exactly. And in 1910 and again in 1912, Roger Fry brought his post Impressionist French paintings over, exhibited them in London, and he called those exhibitions Manet and the Post Impressionists. I mean that was 1910, 1912, while in Paris, Picasso was already painting Cubistart.
- [14:54]
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Interviewer (Danny Bird)
now. Picasso's career was astonishingly restless. Painting, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, stage design, you name it. Was this constant reinvention driven by curiosity, ego, competition, fear of stagnation or something else entirely. Do you think?
- [18:04]
Sue Rowe
I think as an artist he would always want to go forward and having created something, he would then push it further or in new directions or push it to the limits and find something else. Every inch of him was an artist to the core and he looked at the world the way a very good artist looks at the world. Just registering things anew and taking new ideas and pushing them as far as he could. And he too was interested in materials at different times. I mean when he was doing metallic sculptures, he knew Giacometti well, and was influenced by him. When he was interested in experimenting with color, he'd been talking to Matisse. He let people influence him, but he never copied them. I mean, the closest to another artist he ever got in terms of the work he produced was Braque. That was very unusual. Normally, Picasso is out there ahead on his own ceramics. That's another story. In the 40s, with Francoise, he went over to the south of France, and they were exploring the area, and they found a little house there. He had a friend there called Louis Four, who was an engraver, and they borrowed his house and explored the region. And Picasso was very fascinated by this and, of course, wanted to do something new with it. And he had a vision that maybe pottery, ceramics did not need just to be little bowls of flowers around the edges or that kind of sort of Romani art that ceramics used at that time. He thought, well, you know, you could use a piece of ceramic like a painting. You could paint a face. I mean, you must have seen his owls, his extraordinary owls on ceramic pottery and his bull fights. Surely a pot could show anything. And actually, he's a bit like Grayson Perry saying, well, I can tell a story on a pot. I can look at the current world and tell a story. It doesn't have to just be decorative in the traditional sense. And Picasso had already had that idea in the 40s.
- [20:25]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
You've already alluded to them, of course, or some of them, at least. But Picasso's romantic relationships are impossible to separate from his art. How did the women in his life shape different phases of his work? And how should we think about the tension between his artistic genius and what has sometimes been seen as his often troubling treatment of those women?
- [20:44]
Sue Rowe
When he met Fernande, he discovered his Rose period through that change of palette, through responding to her looks and red hair and color of her skin. And he then when he met Olga Kokoschka, who, fascinatingly, was one of Diaghilev's dancers in the Ballet Russes, she was Russian, and he met her in Rome when the Ballet Russes was rehearsing a dance called Parade, Parade and Cocteau, Jean Cocteau persuaded Picasso to go over with him and meet Diaghilev, who persuaded Picasso to do the sets, the scenery for that ballet. She was rehearsing the ballet, and Diaghilev said to Picasso, look, you know, what you need to know is if you want a Russian woman, you have to marry her. So Picasso thought, oh, well, I better do that then. And he got involved with Olga, and they were really working as Two creative people. She dancing, him creating the sets for the dance she was rehearsing. And then he took her to Spain to meet his mother. He said, well, I don't hold up much hope for you. He's interested mainly in himself. And we don't know how much tongue in cheek that was. Anyway, Olga fell in love with Picasso and eventually, when they could get visas, because, remember this is during the Russian Revolution, they went back to Paris and they got married in 1918. Olga was certainly to some extent a very bourgeois, very traditional sort of person, certainly by Russian standards. She was unusual in the Ballets Russes because her father was quite high up in the military. She was from a very respectable family. And Picasso responded to that sort of classical sense of her, even though she's doing very, very avant garde dance work. He responded to the sort of classical, traditional Russian in her. And for her engagement portrait, he painted a painting of her, which has been regarded as his sort of slight reversal into classical painting. If you look closely at the painting, it's actually quite modernist. But at first glance she's got all the accoutrements of, you know, she's got the lace and the grand dress and everything in the grand posture. And the same in the painting he did of her a year later, which was her to celebrate their marriage. So she got him sort of looking again at classical art. Marie Therese he met when she was 27. She was very young. He left Olga for her. Effectively, he would have divorced Olga and married Marie Therese. He was deeply in love with her. He had a child with her. But Olga refused him a divorce. And he painted the very, very bold, very expressive portraits in primary colors of Marie Therese reclining or looking a bit like a beach ball or he was experimenting with shape and with the female form with Marie Therese. And those were exhibited in 1932. That shocked the public because they were so. Didn't look like conventional women. Then there was Dora Maher, who was already a successful professional commercial photographer by the time she met Picasso. And he met her in, at the end of 1935, beginning of 36, and they worked together. She was very significant as an artist, a fellow artist in his life. And apart from Braque, was the only one ever allowed to work alongside him in his studio. She worked in his studio, he worked in hers. And they together worked on Guernica. And Dora, it was, who had the idea to paint it in black and white so that it looked like a huge piece of newspaper reportage or photojournalism. So they worked together on that they also worked on etchings on glass, which she taught him how to do, and worked together as fellow artists. And she was socially his companion in a way that Marie Therese had not been. In 1943, he met Francoise Gillot, whom we know from her memoirs and we know from her art, which has been very successful in France. Picasso, sort of. That was a bit of a lull for him. He painted her most famously as a plant. The painting is called Femme Fleur, Woman as Flower. And he first had her sitting nude, then standing. Then he developed this painting further using his imagination, and he said if she had to be animal, vegetable or mineral, she was vegetable. And he painted her with leaves. And that was a very imaginative interpretation of her. That was a period in which he was quite willing to learn new things, as you say, doing engravings, learning about ceramics, that he was moving into a new field. And the final woman, Jacqueline, he painted and drew in charcoal, heavy black charcoal. She had a black rocking chair, which she used to sit in his studio, rocking and watching him work. And he painted her in that many times. He painted people with Jacqueline's face and features and coloring her nudes twisted into all sorts of contortions for which she did not pose. Again, he had her image, her face and her form in his head all the time to use as the basis of his ongoing experimental with the female form. And he told one of his fellow artists that he wasn't really ever interested in painting a particular woman. He wanted to paint the essence of woman, and that's what he was seeking to present in his work. And I think that was true of all of his work from the start to the end, just trying to get at the essence of the thing or person. He was looking at people, look at the whole trajectory and think, well, he kept moving from one woman to the next, which he did, but so do many artists. I won't name names, but I can think of quite a few off the top of my head who've done the same and left grieving women in his wake. I think the one who found his moving on very difficult was Olga, because she expected, as a respectable Russian woman, that marriage would be forever. She was horrified when he asked for a divorce. Who can explain the workings of another person's heart, particularly an artist? He was very much in love with young Marie Therese. I suppose one interpretation might be he needed to move on in his art, and here was a new subject. I have no idea whether we can claim that on his behalf, but Dora Maar once told him that he seemed to Need a new woman every time he was working in a new artistic phase. And there is something in that. Definitely, definitely. As for treating them badly, I mean, there was an exhibition in Brooklyn a few years ago at which one of the curators, who I'm sure I have this right, one of the curators was also a comedian, and she stood up and said, I hate Picasso, I hate him, I hate him, I hate him, and nobody's ever going to make me change my mind. And everybody took it seriously. And it was reported in the press here as kind of news. Difficult to explain. I mean, I think the thing is, when Picasso met Jacqueline, the last of the six women whom he married, this was the 1950s. It was still only the 1950s. And it was very unusual to divorce, to declare that you had a mistress. It was a much more discreet society then people, much more discreet about their personal life, even at that point. And Picasso had been entering into new relationships for 50 years by then. He treated his women very well. He was very adoring when he fell in love. He also, certainly by his standards, treated them well when he left them. When he left Fernande, his first love in Montmartre, he said to Gertrude Stein, I'm waiting for some money that one of the dealers owes me for some paintings because I can't leave her until I've sort of settled something on her. He left Olga a massive chateau, and on he went. Dora got a big, leaking, drafty house. The final one, Jacqueline got him. I am genuinely puzzled about this Picasso, the monster stuff. I am genuinely puzzled. The last time I did a talk, a lady in the audience approached me crossly afterwards and said, well, you know, you didn't really say enough about Picasso and what a monster he was to women. And I said, well, what exactly do you mean? He wasn't violent? And she said, oh, well, that's hardly a credential. So it's how you judge it, isn't it?
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Interviewer (Danny Bird)
We probably should mention the fact that he was also a father. So I don't know if you want, about his children and the circumstances of that.
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Sue Rowe
He was a devoted father. He adored his children. The first son was with Olga, Paolo. And Paolo got sort of set up posing in harlequin costumes. And as a little child, Picasso wanted to paint him and wanted to play with him. And what interests people quite a lot is that over the years, the women brought their children. Marie Therese brought her daughter to visit Francoise so that she could play with Francoise's children. And in the summer holidays, Picasso was always to be Found outside playing with the children, teaching them to draw. He drew them, was inspired by them. He was absolutely devoted, if you've seen the photographs of him with any of the babies, Marie Therese's daughter Maya, for example, he famously took some time off to sort of stay at home with Maja and help with the domestic issues children he loved. And there was no doubt about that.
- [32:18]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
Guernica has become one of the defining anti war artworks in all history. What was the political and personal significance of that painting for Picasso and why has it endured as such a universal symbol, do you think?
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Sue Rowe
Yes, partly because, as Dora advised him, it's large. It's the size of a quarter of a room. It's huge. People love to go and see something big. It has a big impact. It is in black and white, so it does have this sort of photojournalistic feel to it. The faces of the women show absolute horror and terror. The bomb has just been dropped on Guernica and they are fleeing for their lives and their lives and the lives of their children are at stake. The animals are being injured, the babies are being injured. This is a horrific incident. Of course, the. This was influenced by the bombing of Guernica in 1937, and the news of the horror just hit newspapers worldwide. And Picasso, who had never really been interested in politics, not really, although his friend Elouar tried to persuade him to show allegiance to the left. And he did eventually join the Communist Party, but he was never really interested in party politics. But the hit on Guernica touched him very, very deeply because it was his country, he was Spanish, it was his country, these were his people. And he wanted to show in the faces of the women just what an absolute brutal, ruthless disaster this was. And so he painted the faces after doing many, many sketches. And this is where the fragmented faces come from. He was still painting fragmented faces and weeping women when he was using Dora's features. And some of them are even called something like Dora Maher in an armchair. But he was painting the women of Guernica before that and sketching them before that and wanting to show that they had been smashed to smithereens and if they hadn't been, they were about to be. So the faces are like bits of broken glass. They are by no means melodramatic. They are absolutely full on images of destruction.
- [35:00]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
Do we know much about his actual personal take on the painting Guernica, what he thought of it in later years, perhaps?
- [35:06]
Sue Rowe
Yes, I think he was very proud of it. I think, you know, this is what he wanted to achieve. He wanted to shock people.
- [35:12]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
And for those listening who might want to find out more about the history of Picasso's masterpiece, Guernica, the Spanish Civil War, and the history behind the atrocity that inspired him to paint it, why not head over to the History Extra website where you can read a feature written by historian Paul Preston. You can find a link to it in the description of this podcast episode. Now, of course, Picasso cultivated a larger than life public Persona. He was a celebrity, a provocateur, a genius, even a myth maker. How consciously did he construct the legend of Picasso and how much of that image survives today?
- [35:43]
Sue Rowe
Well, I think until everybody suddenly decided he was a monster, it was surviving very well. And I think indeed it does still survive today. You don't have to go travel very far to see some paintings by Picasso. And he is still hugely revered by the experts, the art historians, and by the general public. And I think people still enjoy his playfulness. How conscious was he of being a celebrity? I think he sort of strutted around quite happily as long as he was being snapped by the paparazzi. But then they left him alone. I mean, I think he was very happy to appear in the public. He was photographed by people like Robert Duano and Michel Sima, and I think he enjoyed feeling that he was an important Persona. But then when they began to hassle him, he would just say, leave me alone. And I think particularly by the time he was married to Jacqueline, and particularly when he was ill and they had to take the train to hospital because that was the most anonymous form of transport. If they'd been seen in one of his big cars, which he was very fond of, everybody would have. The rumor would have gone around, picasso's ill, Picasso's ill. And he just didn't want that at all. And then finally a journalist got hold of it and approached him and said, well, I understand you've had some surgery. And he said, yes, I've been split open like a chicken, but at least I'm loved like a chicken. What he meant by that, I cannot say, but I think it meant, you know. Yeah, you've noticed. Well, as long as I'm still good to go in your eyes, that's okay. And I'm sure he would have been horrified by the current wave of indignation.
- [37:36]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
One of the remarkable things about Picasso is how prolific he was into old age. What do his later works reveal about him as a man confronting fame, mortality, sexuality, and perhaps his legacy.
- [37:48]
Sue Rowe
When we say his later work, we're talking about Picasso in his 70s, 80s, he's elderly and he's tired and he needs to keep people completely away from him to achieve the kind of concentration that he needs to paint. By that time, he was particularly interested in being inspired by the Old Masters. You know, he would take a Velasquez painting, Las Meninas, he did in many, many, many variants, in his own style. Again, this is about what he can learn, what he can still learn, what he can push himself forwards to discover. And at his age, he can discover more in the Old Masters than he can in what was then a current wave of abstractionism, which he didn't become interested in. And I think you could say that there's an abstract element in Picasso's art and has been all along. So the kind of abstract art that was popular in the 70s was never going to lure him on onwards. He would rather go back to Ingres, as I say, Velasquet, Delacroix, and learn from previous artists, who, in his eyes, were great at what they did. So he was doing the Musketeers, which the idea he took from Rembrandt. He was looking at former experts in the genre and wanting to look at those again, to still move forward, trying to improve and hopefully perfect everything he had learned and could still learn. I would probably say he died of old age. He was unwell and Jacqueline had tended him for 20 years and made sure he was in the best possible health. And he just caught something. I think he had some maybe intestinal problem, but it wasn't anything mega dramatic. And certainly he died a natural death. He wasn't murdered or anything. One of the last paintings he was painting, on the day of his death, or at least up to the day of his death, was regarded at his sort of painting of his own death, his own face, his own mortality. And that is a pretty ruthless sort of painting. I don't know whether you saw the recent exhibition at the Tate Modern. There was some of his theatrical works and pictures of acrobats and things, and, you know, his old subjects, the circus and among the crowds, there's this little old man who obviously resembles Picasso. And then there's a baby who's also got Picasso's face. And he is playing with the sense of time will defeat him in the end, whatever he does to try and stop it. He was aware of that. He was 91 when he died, and it was a very, very long and full and amazingly productive lifespan.
- [41:12]
Interviewer (Danny Bird)
And for people who may only know a handful of the very famous paintings, what would you say are the Lesser known works, moments or anecdotes that you think really reveal the most surprising or human side of Picasso for you.
- [41:24]
Sue Rowe
I've always loved the metallic structure of Francoise pushing a. The pram in which she is sort of. You can't tell whether she's enjoying pushing the pram or not. She's just sort of flat. And there's the baby in the pram. That is a fun one. All of those metallic structures are fun. The other one I really love, there's a lot of Marie Therese in reds and yellows, but this one is predominantly blue and she's lying on her front reading a book. And I love that because she's always thought of as the shocking secret lover who inspired all these reclining nudes. And I've even read somewhere, you know, heard it said that Marie Therese spent most of her time asleep. You know, this is based on the evidence of one or two paintings where she's got her eyes shut. You know, I mean, it's not amusing so much as fascinating. The number of times he had to paint Gertrude Stein's head on her shoulders. And a number of times poor Gertrude Stein had to trek up the steps of Montmartre, up the hillside to his very, very unsalubrious studio to sit among the sort of pails of dirty water and, you know, half squeezed tubes and white mice and piles of clothing to sit there having her portrait painted. She said 90 times. That we think is possibly an exaggeration, but it probably felt like it and still he hadn't got it. It was the set of the head on her shoulders that he just couldn't get right. And in the end she went to, you know, went and on holiday to Florence or something and abandoned him with this, saying it was finished enough for her. And while she was, while she was away he worked on it more and, you know, kept on and on and on, got it finished. But he was never satisfied with that one. And you can see that in, I think it's in MoMA in New York. And you just think, yeah, it's sort of. It says, yeah, the painter's still not satisfied with me. It somehow says that probably because I know that. But no, there are very few paintings that were so important that he had to work on them again and again and again, but still he never felt they were right. And that was one of them.
- [43:58]
Danny Bird
That was Sue Rowe speaking to Danny Bird. Sue is a New York Times best selling author whose books include Hidden Portraits, the Untold Stories of Six Women who Love Picasso, which is out now published by Faber.