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- [00:00]
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Narrator
Shopify.com promo it is May 27, 1906, in the high Pyrenees, Spain. A young man and woman are mounted on mules, picking their way up a mountain pass. With each step, stones tumble over the sheer drop. The woman called Fernande, is wrapped by the view. Her companion, Pablo, is worried about his luggage that teeters over the side as the pack animal steps unsteadily around hairpin bends. Only their fox terrier puppy is relaxed. Yapping around their heels, they reach their destination, a village hanging off the face of the mountain. The mules clop over cobblestones as they enter Gozel. The travelers dismount and stretch their stiff legs. Entering the only inn, the Hostel Cal Tampanada, they are shown to a room. Fernande throws open the windows that overlook the Plaza Mehor. It is so peaceful in the main square that Fernande, a Parisian model, is concerned that she might get bored over the coming weeks. But Pablo is already unpacking an easel and paints and unrolling paper and canvases. He has traveled all this way to get away from the noise and distractions of the city. Soon the couple go out to explore the narrow streets. They hear music and follow it. Around a corner, they stumble upon a religious festival. A group of robed priests carry a cross. Then come drummers and musicians, and finally, children dancing. Some hold aloft Catholic icons, skulls, crucifixes, an emaciated figure of Christ with an angular ribcage. Pablo is struck by the spectacle, the joyous atmosphere that contrasts with the macabre imagery of death. He produces a pad and makes sketches. As the festival sets off in a procession, the couple follow the celebrants out of the village and up another path towards a tumbledown church. This is Santa Maria del Castel, a chapel built in the year 1010, with a square tower and rose window. Inside the dim interior, their eyes adjust from the bright sunshine. It is decorated in ornate Romanesque style with frescoes of skulls and crucifixes. As Pablo turns, a woman catches his eye. She is a small wooden figurine of the Madonna with the infant Jesus sitting neatly on her lap. The figure is polychrome, painted in the dark colors of the earth. But her face is so pale it is luminous in the darkness. Pablo is transfixed when Fernanda tugs his sleeve to go. Pablo springs into action. He rushes back to their hostel, urgent to reach his easel. He always works quickly, but now he is caught up in a kind of religious rapture. He rifles through boxes for a stick of charcoal and uses it to make sweeping lines that form into human figures. He discards that piece of paper and starts drawing faces on another. Like the ancient frescoes in the chapel, his images have no perspective. He works for hours. When Pablo is finally exhausted and the bedroom is littered with sketches, it is late. Fernand has gone to bed. He packs up for the night and signs his name in the bottom corner of a finished piece. It says simply, Picasso. Pablo Picasso was one of the most celebrated and radical artists of the 20th century. His distinctive styles, which often shocked and outraged contemporaries, are instantly recognizable. He was also prolific, leaving some 50,000 works of art. But his productivity makes him no less valuable. In 2015, his most expensive painting to be sold at auction was went for almost $180 million. Exiled from his homeland of Spain for most of his adult life, Picasso played a unique role in documenting the political conflicts of his turbulent times. But while the artist was publicly feted behind closed doors, his genius came at a cost to those around him. Some of his female companions, his muses, protested at his cruel treatment. So what drove Picasso to master the rules of art and then break them? Why did a man who claimed he didn't do politics become a poster boy for revolution? And what makes him one of the most valuable artists of all time, second only to Leonardo da Vinci? I'm John Hopkins from the Noiser Network. This is a short history of Pablo Picasso. On October 25, 1881, a woman called Maria Picasso y Lopez gives birth to her first child. The boy is born into a middle class family who live in a comfortable apartment in a yellow stucco building in the old town of Malaga, on the south coast of Spain. His father, Jose Ruiz Blasco, is a painter and art tutor, and both he and his wife are delighted by their son. They name him Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispin Crispiano Maria Remedios de la Santissima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso. He is known in the family as Pablo. He will be known to the world as Picasso. As the eldest child, he is doted upon by the women in his family. Soon he has two younger sisters who also look up to him. But Pablo, in turn, admires his father. He spends hours watching him produce art that graces the homes of wealthy buyers. As well as teaching drawing, he specializes in painting pigeons. The young Pablo is awestruck by the painstaking process of capturing their complex plumage. And inevitably, the boy picks up a pencil himself. At first, he scribbles caricatures and one line representations of animals. Perhaps a dog drawn from nose to tail. But soon he starts to observe the wider world. Especially when he accompanies his father to the Plaza de Toros to watch the bullfight. In the bright sunlight, the red and yellow costume of the matador stands out against the dusty ground of the bullring. Pablo is struck by the brutal power and tragic vulnerability of the bull. A figure that will be a lifelong symbol in his artwork. Suzanne Preston Blier is a professor of fine art and African Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Picasso's Demoiselle. The True Origins of a Modern Masterpiece.
- [09:04]
Art Historian
Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, which is on the coast and very close to Africa. His father was an art instructor. And very soon Picasso himself came under his tutelage. And we know that he was a prodigious talent early on. The first major work that we know of from Picasso, he was only eight or nine years old. It's called Le Picador. And it's a wonderful work that shows a yellow attired picador horse rider in a bullfight context. A really strong sense of perspective and almost elements of caricature of the people in the audience who are watching. That not only makes it clear what a remarkable talent he was, but also his ability to capture movement and detail and personalities. And a few years later, you know, by the age of 13, he'd already surpassed his father's abilities.
- [10:13]
Narrator
Around this time, tragedy strikes. One of Pablo's younger sisters, Conchita, is infected with diphtheria. The girl, who is only seven, is confined to bed. As her condition worsens, Pablo prays for her life and even makes a pact with God. It if Conchita can be saved, he will give up his art. But it is not to be. She dies and Picasso is left haunted by the loss. Shortly afterwards, in 1895, the family moved to Barcelona for a fresh start. Pablo applies to the city's School of Art. While most students spend months preparing a portfolio for the entrance process, he completes the necessary work in a day. He is an excellent student, but though he spends two years at the school, by 1897 he has grown restless and rebellious. His father sees that Pablo needs a bigger challenge and sends him to the most prestigious art school in Spain, in Madrid. But even here, he is frustrated with formal study of the classics and soon starts skipping classes to seek his own education.
- [11:37]
Art Historian
Picasso is very self aware at this moment. When he moves to Madrid at the age of 16 to attend the Royal Academy of San Fernando, he's spending an awful lot of time in the Prado and in that museum and really communicating in a real sense with the great Spanish masters like Velazquez and El Greco and Goya. And in a certain sense, he's competing throughout his life, not only with those artists around him, but with a whole history of art, with the whole legacy of the brilliant masters of the past, beginning with those in Spain.
- [12:16]
Narrator
Picasso drops out and never graduates. He is impatient to start his own career. Little does he know that one day he will be named director of the Prado and the Royal Academy will award him an honorary scholarship. But not for another 70 years. In the meantime, as the end of the 19th century approaches, he heads back to Barcelona. The bustling streets and cafes are packed with a bohemian crowd of poets, painters, dancers and writers, an atmosphere better suited to the curious and charismatic young artist.
- [12:58]
Art Historian
Spain has long been an important center of art, and it certainly is in this era as well. And there are a number of artists in this broader area, around Barcelona and in Barcelona itself, with whom he becomes very close. Perhaps most famous here is Gaudi, who's at work on the famous cathedral. And there's a cafe there, a famous cafe, the Four Cats, that Picasso joins. They're the first to actually exhibit Picasso's work, and he meets a number of friends there. And this is around the time when he's really thinking about himself as an individual and an independent artist. But still, today, Gaudi's Cathedral is an absolutely stunning, incredibly innovative work. And to some degree, Picasso, although more largely a painter and a sculptor, is falling in line with the just brilliance of what's transforming Spain in this period.
- [14:00]
Narrator
For the first time, Picasso's work goes on public display. In February 1900, a collection of his charcoal portraits, mostly sketches of friends and fellow bohemians, are strung along the walls of the Four Cats cafe. The images are hung without frames, pinned one above the other. With no catalog to identify them. The exhibition is amateur, but it announces Pablo to fin de siecla Barcelona. The owner of the four Cats even asks him to design a new menu. Pablo Picasso has arrived.
- [14:43]
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Narrator
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- [15:29]
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- [15:43]
Narrator
One image from the exhibition, a painting called Last Moments, is selected for the Exposition Universelle in Paris, the World Fair of 1900. This work no longer exists, as Picasso later paints over it with a portrait of his best friend, Carlos Casagemas. It is Casagemas who accompanies Picasso to Paris to attend the exhibition in 1900. They arrive at Orsay train station in the autumn. After finding their way to the artists quarter of Montmartre, Picasso settles in and starts learning French.
- [16:21]
Art Historian
In Paris. He's really living the life of a very poor artist and it's not easy. He's living in an area and in a residence with a number of other artists and has really a hard time just getting enough food to eat.
- [16:39]
Narrator
But despite the privations of life in Paris, Picasso falls in love with the city. His friend Casa Haemas also falls in love with a young woman called Germaine, an artist's model, but she does not feel the same. While Picasso is away visiting his family in Malaga, Casahemus arranges a dinner for Germain and some friends at the Hippodrome Cafe in Paris. During the meal, he proposes to the young woman, but when she refuses, he produces a gun. He fires a shot at Germain, but misses and so he turns the pistol on himself. Picasso returns to Paris and the apartment he had shared with his friend. He even starts an affair with Germain, but the suicide of his fellow Spaniard affects his mental health and his work, leading to what will become known as his Blue Period.
- [17:41]
Art Historian
This deeply impacted Picasso, and as a result of that, his rich color palette becomes far more somber. And around this time he's really turning inward in key respects, but also his first real love. Who is Fernando Olivier, whom he meets in 1904 and becomes a sort of central figure in what art historians call his blue period, when the color blue dominates many of the works that he's engaging with.
- [18:18]
Narrator
In 1905, Picasso also meets Gertrude Stein, a wealthy Jewish American heiress with a discerning critical eye. Stein is a keen art collector and social magnet whose Saturday salons bring together the finest creative minds in the city. When Picasso is invited to join her circle, he steps out of his freezing garret and the precarious world of bohemian Montmartre and into the artistic elite of Paris.
- [18:48]
Art Historian
In the spring of 1906, one of the well known local dealers comes to Picasso's studio and purchases practically everything that is in it and provides Picasso with so much funding that he has enough, if he wants to, to live on it for the next couple of years. Pay the rent, buy the food, et cetera. And I think one of the most striking things about Picasso's life is his not only his willpower, but his devotion to the art. And he decides really not to spend that as such, but to use that money as a means of not working for particular patrons on particular subjects, but rather to go deeply inward, to discover the world anew.
- [19:47]
Narrator
Though he has by now begun work on a portrait of Stein, for the first time in his life, he is struggling for inspiration. Now a friend tells him about a remote refuge, a sanctuary in the Pyrenees called Goslar. The artist persuades his girlfriend, Fernand Olivier, to make the long journey with him. It takes days on a steam train, plus a perilous donkey ride along mountain paths, but away from the pressure and gossip of the bohemian set in Paris. With time to absorb the imagery of religious rituals in the village, Picasso refines his style. He is particularly struck by a polychrome or painted model of the Madonna in the ancient church of Santa Maria del Castel. He spends 10 weeks in the mountains and returns to Paris full of purpose.
- [20:45]
Art Historian
He wanted to forge a new path that was going to transform the whole of the history of art, which at that juncture, we're talking 1903, 6, 7, just after the turn of the century, with the invention of photography and with the development of a really striking 19th century form of realism, it's not clear how much further one could go within that realm of a realistic rendering of the world around one or key subjects. And so he decides to, frankly turn it on a tad.
- [21:21]
Narrator
As well as a technological revolution, there is also seismic cultural change sweeping through Europe. France is one of the superpowers plundering the continent of Africa for its resources and influence. African culture is starting to be noticed by Europeans and appreciated with fresh eyes. It is Spring, 1907. Pablo Picasso lights up a Galoise cigarette while reclining on a sofa inside a lavish Paris apartment. He blows smoke towards the open window. A busker is playing outside. This is the home of Pablo's patron, Gertrude Stein, who is still waiting for the portrait she's commissioned. Sitting opposite the artist, she looks typically bohemian in her flowing dress and Grecian sandals, a far cry from the corsets still worn by most women on the street. Her decor is maximalist, decadent, throws antiques from different eras, ornate lamps and rugs. And the walls jostle with paintings by Renoir, Matisse and Picasso himself. Now the doorbell rings and Gertrude rises to answer it. She returns, chattering with a small, bearded man, the artist Henri Matisse. He is known for scandalous paintings. One of his exhibitions caused such a furore that someone put a sign on the door saying, Gallery of lunatics. Enter at your own risk. Today he is excited to show his friends Pablo and Gertrude, an item he purchased in a flea market. He unwraps the paper to reveal a small figure of a man sitting on a stool. It is made of ebony wood, almost black and so densely grained that it is smooth. Pablo takes it reverently and turns it in the light. The doorbell signals the arrival of more guests, but Pablo is rapt by the figurine, even sniffing its musty smell. It's unlike anything he's seen before, and Henri explains that it comes from the Congo in Africa, from the Vili people. Gertrude reappears with absinthe and canapes, followed by a clutch of fabulously dressed acquaintances. As the party starts, Henri tries to take back his objet d'art, which he treasures even though it only cost a few francs. But Pablo won't give it up. He keeps the figure by his side all evening Hours later, after the party burns itself out, he goes home to his easel. He snatches up a paintbrush, sending a pot of water crashing onto the tiles. He thinks of the African sculpture and also the naive figurines from his own culture. The polychrome Madonna, ancient Iberian effigies. On the paper, he paints a single curve. He adds to it, switching lines from convex to concave. In the African style, what emerges is a human figure with A single ear. He prepares the brush again, but stops hand in the air. No, it is done. The paintbrush rattles into a glass and he collapses onto a chair to.
- [25:13]
Art Historian
And the next morning his friends arrive at his studio to find strewn across the floor, a series of drawings and color renderings on drawings in which he's portrayed the head and bust of a figure with a large ear. And those are really the beginning point of his venture into Cubism because he's realizing that there's certain parts of the physiognomy that in his eye, in his mind, following akin to the ways in which physiognomy is portrayed in Africa that are more important than others. And so that's again a wonderful grappling with a key intellectual. Gertrude Stein, who he is in part his patron and would continue to be and his competitor friend Henri Matisse, is a wonderful relationship that engages the two of them to compete with one another in ways that propel their own works and their own contributions to the history of art.
- [26:18]
Narrator
Now he embarks again on the portrait of Gertrude Stein, depicting her with heavy eyelids and mask like facial features. He draws on the dark hues of the Madonna from the ancient church in God and gives Stein a similarly pale, luminous face. He doesn't need his subject to sit for him. He doesn't consult photographs. He simply emphasizes her distinctive characteristics as he sees them. When someone later comments that Stein looks nothing like the portrait, he says, but she will. Stein is enchanted by her painting. It is, she says, the only portrait that is always I. For me. Picasso is invigorated and spends days at the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology exploring the extensive collection of African art.
- [27:14]
Art Historian
So Picasso, while he would famously say I don't do politics, he actually is engaged in politics a fair amount in one way or the other. Even in his engagement with African art is in many ways an important political and social statement. I think in Picasso's own sense, it's revolution. He has decided that he's going to burn the whole history of art and he's going to provide a new path forward. And so part of Picasso's revolution was to acknowledge African art, to draw from African art and to insist that it was art that in and of itself was revolutionary.
- [28:03]
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- [28:33]
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- [28:58]
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- [28:59]
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- [29:00]
Narrator
Days by 1907, Picasso is aged 25 and working at a furious pace. His studio is in the Bateau Lavoie district of Montmartre, a former piano workshop where the huge space has been carved up by rickety wooden partitions into smaller artists ateliers. The whole neighborhood is steeped in artistic history. Just a few steps away, Van Gogh painted his views of Paris and Renoir, his portraits and street scenes. But Picasso has an idea for something drastically new. He erects a huge canvas some eight feet high and almost eight feet across, and starts to sketch five naked women, four standing and one squatting on a stool. When it is completed, the picture is called Les Demoiselles d'avignon, or the Young Ladies of Avignon. It breaks conventions. The subject's staring out at the viewer with confrontational frankness and draws again on African forms, with two of the women having masks for faces. Though it shocks some of his contemporaries, the painting is now considered to mark the beginning of modern art. Les Demoiselles d'avignon now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It has been valued at up to a billion dollars, but ironically, Picasso doesn't manage to sell it until almost two decades later. It is too large to impose in, perhaps also too challenging for many buyers.
- [30:39]
Art Historian
Les Demoiselles d'avignon is painted in March of 1907, just before Easter. Scholars have assumed to be portraying a bordello, a brothel, and it is not. It's clearly representing something entirely different. In that painting, he's really showing the five mothers of the five races, and it's more a painting that's engaging with this critical new theory of evolution and how all these world's races came together. And what he's done in his mind is to bring the mothers of these races back into the same canvas. But I think the fact that people have assumed that that painting is about sexual encounter within the context of prostitution is in part what led people to focus so extensively on Picasso and the woman in his life.
- [31:36]
Narrator
And there are many women in Picasso's life. He is as restless in private as he is in public. Fernand Olivier, who traveled with him to Gozel and modeled for many works, including Les Demoiselles, is left in poverty when they later split. After Picasso makes his name, Olivier writes a revealing memoir about their time together. Six excerpts are printed in newspapers, but Picasso uses legal action to block the series and prevent her from publishing a book. He eventually pays her a monthly pension, but only in exchange for her agreeing not to publish more details of their controlling relationship. Her account only sees the light. Long after Picasso's death in 1917, he meets a Ukrainian ballet dancer called Olga Hochlova while he is designing costumes for her show. In the first classical style portraits of this woman who will become his wife, Picasso draws her as a beautiful maiden. She is often shown as pensive or melancholy, a reflection of the time she spends writing letters to her parents back home in Ukraine while her homeland and family are being devastated by the First World War. After their son is born in 1921, Hochlover inspires Picasso to paint domestic scenes, and he embraces softer Renaissance styles. But soon his depiction of his wife transforms again. Picasso turns her into a monstrous creature in the art that accompanies the tempestuous final years that the couple live together. In 1932, he takes her to his new exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, taking in the dozens of sensual portraits of another young woman. She realizes that her husband has a new lover. The couple separate, but Hochlover always refuses to divorce him, and they remain legally married until her death. The young woman he'd been painting, Marie Therese Valtaire, was just 17 when she met Picasso, who is almost 30 years older. And though they stayed together for almost a decade, it's not long after she gives birth to his child in 1935 that Picasso is moving on again. One day on the streets of Paris, he sees a young woman sitting at a cafe, stabbing a penknife between her outspread fingers, occasionally drawing blood. This is Dora Matthew, a successful artist in her own right and an intense character. The performance with the knife may be designed to catch the famous painter's attention. They start an affair, and Ma opens the older man's eyes to left wing politics. A radical figure in Paris, she takes part in Anti fascism marches and joins the October Group, an artists collective that uses new forms of popular culture, such as the burgeoning film industry, to spread leftist ideology. She introduces Picasso to groundbreaking photography techniques that soon grace his works.
- [34:52]
Art Historian
His relationships with women, often in a more or less serial way. Having a relationship with one and following that with another. And they provided, in a certain sense, key inspiration. Each of them in their own way. Many of them were themselves artists and at the same time had loving relationships with them. But he also could be very controlling, so he could be both nurturing and destructive. And that kind of paradox is found throughout his life and is somewhat complicated in how he's addressing women as well as others.
- [35:36]
Narrator
For Picasso, male relationships are also vital. His friend Henri Matisse, who inspires him with the African figurine, is also a fierce rival. While Matisse remains calmly paternal towards the young firebrand, Picasso is challenging and critical of the older artist, perhaps even creating his famous Les Demoiselles painting in an attempt to be more controversial than his competitor. But nevertheless, it is a friendly feud, and the two remain close for over 50 years. Similarly, his fellow artist and collaborator, Georges Braque, provides a counterbalance to Picasso's artistic temperament. He met braque back in 1907, the year he created Les Demoiselles, and together the men devised what is now known as Cubism, in which one artwork may depict several perspectives in the same image. They are credited with inventing collage, a method of putting together different source materials, such as newspaper headlines, in order to question reality. The influence of Cubism shakes up the art world, but also ripples through the world of music, resulting in complex and fragmented new rhythms of jazz. And in dance, where Picasso produces avant garde costumes for the Russian ballet. In literature, Cubism inspires experimental storytelling involving multiple perspectives. It even affects architecture, prompting designers to play with unusual angles and structures. While Braque's artistic career is interrupted by his involvement in the First World War, Picasso himself doesn't fight because Spain is neutral in that conflict. But he becomes more politically engaged when his homeland faces ideological strife that drags the country into internal conflict. He opposes the fascist General Francisco Franco, who is a leader of the uprising of 1936 that sparks a civil war and the eventual overturn of the democratically elected republican government. Picasso's opposition means that, due to safety concerns and in defiance, he never returns to his homeland. Even when he is named director of the Prado Museum in 1936, he holds the position in exile. He works on his first overtly political work of art the year after Franco's uprising, entitling the piece the Dream and Lie of Francois. Images from the comic book style grid of cartoon drawings satirizing the dictator are intended to be sold as postcards to raise money for the Republican cause. And his political engagement is only growing in intensity. It is late April 1937. Picasso is sitting in the Cafe de Flor in Paris. He has been commissioned to represent his homeland of Spain in this summer's World Fair, but he is struggling for inspiration. He hasn't been home due to the civil war that is raging there. At the next table, a lady gets up, drops a few coins for a tip and leaves her newspaper. Picasso leans over to pick it up, then shakes it out to read. The headline screams one word. Guernica. A name he recognizes. A town in northern Spain. But why has this sleepy place made the front pages? As Picasso reads on with a growing sense of horror, his artist mind vividly pictures the scene. He is transported to market day in Guernica. Stallholders shout their wares. Horses pull over laden carts. A child running an errand for her mother calls to someone in Basque, the regional language. The Basque people stand in opposition to fascist General Franco, who has seized control of the country in a military coup. But the fighting is far from here. People are relaxed, going about their lives, and the girl understands little of the political situation now. The girl stops hearing a droning sound. It comes from far away, high in the sky. And as she stares into the distance, it seems that a flock of large birds is approaching. But the noise grows louder and soon it is clear that these are no birds. They are moving too fast. The marketplace falls quiet as people watch the squadron of aircraft close in. Suddenly the silence is shattered. A huge boom is followed by a surreal sight. The church of San Juan puffs up a cloud of brick dust and collapses. The girl drops to the ground and throws her arms over her head as people cry out all around her. The planes roar low overhead, dropping their bombs. More explosions are followed by the screams of people and horses. Someone grabs the girl by the shoulder and pushes her into a side street. They tell her to run. She is fast and lucky. She speeds downhill and takes cover under a cart. But terrible sounds follow her from the marketplace as more bombs land directly onto civilians, far from the scene of horror. Safely in Paris, Picasso puts down the newspaper. He checks the date. This atrocity happened two days ago. An entire town devastated. Hundreds dead. And he didn't even know he was going about his mundane life while his compatriots were dying. He throws down some coins for his coffee, takes the newspaper and rushes towards his studio in the worst possible way. He has his inspiration for the Spanish exhibit at the World Fair. The attack on Guernica is ordered by General Franco against the Basque people who oppose his fascist government. It is carried out by his allies in the Nazi German and fascist Italian air forces. Picasso's girlfriend, Dora Ma, as well as other Spanish artists in exile, encourage him to condemn the attack. He decides that the atrocity deserves a painting on an epic scale. Ma sets about finding a studio large enough to house a vast canvas, almost 8 meters wide and over 3 meters high. Picasso uses a palette of gray, white and black, perhaps inspired by newspaper images and certainly by Marr's surrealist photography. She is in the studio with him throughout the 35 days it takes to produce the work that he calls simply Guernica. It features different a bull, a dead soldier, a mother holding a dying child, a woman crying to the heavens. The center of the frame is dominated by a wounded horse screaming in agony.
- [43:25]
Art Historian
Guernica again. It's a massively large canvas. It's created in grisaille, which are grays and whites and blacks. Ben draws on various elements, including evoking the actual bombing and the screams of horses and humanity as they are being hit. But he's also, in this case, drawing on imagery from cave paintings and wall paintings in Africa.
- [43:51]
Narrator
Guernica goes on display in Paris at the Spanish Pavilion in the Trocadero Gardens in 1937. It causes a sensation with its overtly political message and receives mixed reviews. But the huge canvas is designed to be rolled up and transported. And after the World Fair, Guernica goes on tour around Europe and then the United States. It stays there for decades at Picasso's request, as he did not want it to go to Spain while Franco remained in charge. The General lives until 1975, so it's not until 1981 that the painting makes its triumphant return to Picasso's homeland. The original now resides in the National Art center in Madrid.
- [44:46]
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- [45:24]
Narrator
Soon after Guernica is created, Europe is in the grip of another conflict. In 1939, just before Nazi Germany declares war on France, Picasso takes Dora Maher to the relative safety of Royan on the French Atlantic coast. His other mistress, Marie Therese Valtaire, also lives there with their five year old daughter Maya. Picasso continues to paint and send work back to Paris where his art is received by an influential dealer, the gallery owner Paul Rosenberg. This man has his own problems. First, he is a Jew in a city that is expected to come under Nazi control. Secondly, the Nazis have declared Picasso's work degenerate art. If it falls into their hands, it will be destroyed. Rosenberg starts smuggling Picasso's canvases to safe locations such as New York and London. And the rest he hides as best he can before he flees the city. Remarkably, his son, Alexandre Rosenberg later rescues hundreds of pieces of his father's collection that were seized by the Nazis. He stays behind to fight when his father leaves. By 1944, Alexandre is Lt. Rosenberg and joins the D Day invasion in which thousands of Allied troops cross the Channel from England to France. He marches on Paris and weeks later carries out a mission based on intelligence from the French Resistance. Their operatives managed to stop a Nazi train leaving Paris laden with arts and antiques plundered from Jewish homes and businesses. Lt. Rosenberg boards the hijacked train and finds hundreds of works, including the so called degenerate art of Picasso which his father Thiad had been burned by the Nazis. The hoard includes a painting of Dora Ma that Picasso created in the coastal town of Royan. A portrait that will later sell at auction for $45 million. It is not known how many works by Picasso are looted or destroyed by the Germans. But many survive the conflict by the skin of their teeth, as does the man himself. Although the Nazis take control of Paris in 1940, Picasso returns to the war torn capital from his brief stay on the coast and holes up in his studio on the rue des Grands Augustins. It is more comfortable than his first impoverished digs when he lived in the backstreets of Montmartre. But nonetheless, during the dangerous years of Nazi occupation, his studio becomes a hideout. His decision to stay is an act of defiance and solidarity. But he cannot exhibit and is kept under strict surveillance by the Germans. On one occasion he has on display a photograph of his famous work, Guernica. The Nazi officer who comes to inspect his studio sneers at the dramatic anti war Image and asks Picasso if he is responsible for it. No, the artist replies, you are. By now, Picasso is world famous. His reputation protects him. The Nazis do not want the revolutionary artist to become a martyr, so they leave him unharmed by the end of the war. When the liberation of Paris comes in 1944, Picasso is aged 63. He becomes interested in far left politics and joins the Communist Party. Also, the revelations of atrocities like the Holocaust and Hiroshima deepen his anti war stance. In later years, the Korean War and the Cold War also inspire his politically charged works, as do his women. His relationship with Dora Ma ended during the war and Ma has turned to religious seclusion, famously saying, after Picasso, there can be only God. But for Picasso, after Marre there will only be more young women with the new love interests often overlapping with their predecessors. He met 21 year old Francoise Gilloux, 40 years his junior while in Nazi occupied Paris and fathers two children with her. His style softens when he paints her and he brings in floral motifs, a contrast with his angular portraits of Dora Ma towards the end of their relationship. Even so, after 10 years, he and Gillou split up, thanks again to his cruel treatment and infidelity. Gillou, like Fernand Olivier before her, writes a biography that highlights his narcissistic, vindictive behavior. She also claims to be the only woman to have left him. Picasso meets Jacqueline Roque in 1952 when she comes to work at his pottery. He brings her one rose every day until she agrees to date him. Their relationship is tempestuous at first, as Picasso expects complete devotion. But the pair live together from 1954, when she is 28 and he is 72. He starts to paint her that same year and his work takes on a classical quality. With his new muse given feline facial features, his appetite for painting rock hardly wanes. In 1963 alone, he paints her portrait 160 times. The couple stay together and Picasso remains prolific until his death from a heart attack in 1973, aged 91. Though he has put down his brushes for the last time, the mark he has made on the world of art is truly indelible.
- [51:35]
Art Historian
Picasso's fame, I think, comes from a combination of his brilliance, his intellectual sophistication and his artistic acumen and enormous skill. And the fact that he championed a revolution and he knew how to speak to the population at large, globally through his work. He was the outsider in France and his aim was to completely overturn our history. And in many respects he did do that. But also he never gave up. He continued to live in Paris during the period of the German takeover. And I think it's the stamina. I think it's his competitiveness. I think it's his enormous creativity and the ways in which he could look at anything and everything and transform it into his own celebration.
- [52:38]
Narrator
Even so, Picasso's lifestyle is troubling to many critics. Recent artists have staged protests about his treatment of Women. In 2018, the American Performance artist Michelle Hartney pins unofficial labels to the Picasso exhibits at New York's Museum of Modern Art to highlight allegations of abuse. Three years later, a Spanish art teacher and her students hold a silent sit in at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona to draw attention to this aspect of his legacy and his own granddaughter, Marina Picasso writes about his attitude to women in her memoir. He submitted them to his animal sexuality, she says. Tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. Once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them. But for many, the art speaks for itself and stands the test of time. Picasso is arguably the most influential and famous artist of the 20th century. As one of the most prolific, he leaves 50,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, and even costumes. He is the highest selling painter at auction and the most exhibited, with works in more museums around the world than any other artist. Perhaps the best indication of the legacy of Picasso is the way in which his work continues to make us think and critique the world. In the 1970s, Americans protesting against the Vietnam war carried placards depicting the dead soldier from Guernica. Such is its lasting power. In 2003, when the American Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United nations to call for an invasion of Iraq, the United States demanded that a reproduction of the famous anti war painting that overlooks the hall should be covered up. Many decades after its creation, the image holds the power to condemn acts of aggression through its empathy for those caught in the crossfire. Picasso's art is a dialogue between one person and the events of his lifetime. Having once said that a single line can represent an entire human being, his works, whether simple or complex, caught the attention of the watching world and held onto it. His skill was to interpret the cultural experience of so many and express it in a way so unique that his influence is still inescapable today.
- [55:14]
Art Historian
I think it is to champion the everyman, to champion the worker, to champion the diversity of cultures that make up the world and move forward and create a life that was profoundly important in its own way, but a set of works that really transformed the history of art.
- [55:45]
Narrator
Next time on short History Hub, we'll bring you a short history of the Battle of Stalingrad.
- [55:52]
History Narrator
Stalingrad is remembered, of course, as the symbol of the true horror of war, the suffering of the civilians, the total destruction of a city and all the rest of it. But also, it was a start, let's face it, of what we're seeing now. No armies really nowadays are large enough to have front lines. As in the old days, warfare is going to always be focused on cities. So urban warfare is the future. I'm afraid of warfare. And that is going to be the full focus in every single case.
- [56:24]
Narrator
That's next time. If you can't wait a week until the next episode, you can listen to it right away by subscribing to Noizur Plus. Head to www.noizur.comscriptions for more information.
- [56:44]
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