It's the depths of winter, 1941.
Pablo Picasso is living and working on the top floor of an old house in Left Bank Paris.
The Third Reich owns Europe.
Every so often Picasso gets visits from the Gestapo.
They mutter about degenerate art and dropped out hints he's hiding Jewish friends.
Then they trash the studio of his.
One day there's a visit that passes into the Picasso legend.
The unwelcome visitor sniffs around a bit,
then he notices there are postcards lying around of Picasso's most famous work.
His epic depiction of what happened when German bombs fell on a small Basque town
in the Spanish civil war.
Guernica.
"Did you do this?" he says.
"Oh no," says Picasso, "you did.
Go on, take one. Souvenir."
Great comeback. Good story.
But what can art really do in the face of atrocity?
Shouldn't art just stick to what it does best, the delivery of pleasure?
And forget about being a paintbrush warrior?
Or is it when the bombs are dropping that we find out what art is really for?
[tinkling music]
Paris in the 1920s.
Pablo Picasso was the sovereign of modern painting.
He was living in a fancy apartment near the Champs Elysees, with his Russian ballerina wife, Olga,
and their little boy.
He showed his paintings in a classy gallery,
and all of art was his kingdom.
Drunk on self-confidence and cleverness
he could take it wherever he fancied.
One day, in January 1927, he noticed something he definitely fancied.
Blonde, vaguely Nordic, statuesque, 16.
She's called Marie-Therese Walter,
and Picasso sees her one afternoon outside Galerie Lafayette, a department store.
He loses no time, goes up to her and says,
"Mademoiselle, you have a most interesting face, and I should like to paint it.
I am Picasso."
Marie-Therese would become his lover, and a compulsive obsession in his art.
In 1932 he poses Marie-Therese in a languid reverie.
Gently masturbating, she's literally got sex on her mind.
Pictures like this do what they show, stroking us into a playful trance.
The color and wit of the thing, a drowsy sensual entertainment.
It's the provocative work of a cocky, self-obsessed, self-indulgent genius.
And it's all a long way from Guernica.
Picasso had arrived in Paris at the turn of the century,
a small, pugnacious, and frighteningly gifted Andalusian.
In the city of the avante-garde, wherever you looked, all the rules of poetry, music, painting
were being junked.
Young Picasso, living like a Bohemian with his oil-slick hair, huge black eyes, and big rabbit's nose,
he knew he had to be part of the giddy liberty.
[rushing water]
And he knew what he didn't want.
The hoary old pantomimes of the mighty.
Modern art was modern because it had turned its back on those grandstanding histories,
painted for aristocrats and kings.
Here's power on a horse.
The omnipotence of the ruler displayed by nonchalant control.
Just one hand on the reins.
Message was - if the sovereign can handle a great horse he can certainly manage affairs of state,
critical matters of war and peace.
It was the most enduring image of pure power.
And here's what Picasso does.
Instead of a prince in the saddle, a naked boy leading a barebacked horse
through an eerily empty primordial landscape.
There's no hero to identify here
no story, no subject.
Just the modern coming straight out of the archaic,
as if there had never been anything in between.
History down for the count, then.
Next stop for obliteration - beauty.
The classical ideal of art itself
made visible in the luscious form of the female nude.
And this is Picasso's ferocious attack on that sacred cow, in 1907.
This is how all those centuries of gazing at nudes and muttering demurely about graceful form end.
A brothel lineup.
They strip. You check them out.
Everything ever associated with nude women in European art,
beauty, obliging sensuality, tenderness
all brutally sheared away.
And then, around 1910, having seen off beauty and history,
Picasso goes for the hat trick.
Something even more mind-blowing.
Something that for most people over the centuries
had been the entire point of art.
Bye-bye resemblance.
If a two-dimensional duplicate of the world is what you want,
then photography is going to do that job much more efficiently.
This is Picasso's art dealer, Ambroise Vollard.
This is how Picasso saw him.
A different vision of the way things really are.
Cubism.
Deep inside his Slinky toy cascades of form seen jauntering through moments in time was, he insisted,
something compact, solid and firm.
By blowing up the look of things Picasso was saying, "I'm getting beyond surface appearances
to the core."
It wasn't for those who wanted something easy on the eye.
But then Picasso wasn't interested in pleasuring the public.
He positively reveled in the cult of difficulty.
"Too hard?" you can almost hear him sneering.
"Tough."
In the 1920s there's something else he doesn't lose much sleep over.
The state of the world.
He's doing fine, thank you.
But Europe is in deep trouble.
Fascism beginning to strong-arm its way into power.
But of the chaos and hatred, riot and revolution,
there's not a hint in Picasso's work.
For some artists it was no problem, obligation even,
to combine radical politics and radical painting.
to have modern art criticize hypocrisy and injustice.
George Grosz, the German artist, was busy having a go at the military dinosaurs
and Nazi sympathizers who were busy subverting Germany's fragile democracy.
Creatively, of course, Grosz is no Picasso.
But he never pretends that art can stay immune from ideology
high above the fray.
He knows there's a war to be fought
and his brushes are armed to take the offensive.
The only wars Picasso had ever fought had been against the conventions of art.
Oh yes, he'd mostly been on the side of freedom,
but that had always been creative, not political freedom.
No wonder one of his best friends called Picasso "the least political person I've ever known."
What's happening in Picasso's studio is about as far from the barricades as you can get.
It's all very self-obsessed.
Politics and social conflict doesn't interest him at all in the 1920s.
Instead, he's brooding on his calling.
So, lots of complicated super-subtle images of the artist in the studio.
Lots of reflections of, and in, mirrors.
Lots of models pulled this way and that.
Body parts artfully rearranged.
He's also brooding on his increasingly tangled love life.
On their harrowing beach vacations Picasso and his wife, Olga, were in constant conflict.
And when he was feeling imprisoned by the relationship
his artistic distortions are grotesque.
Meet Praying Mantis Woman.
With her frighteningly toothed all purpose orifice.
Not all of his images of women were brutal and predatory.
When he starts painting Marie-Therese, Picasso's jagged lines
suddenly become as curvy and voluptuous as his lover's body.
We are deep in Picasso's world, where his principal inspirations are his art,
his women, and himself.
Picasso often said, "This is how modern art is supposed to be,
free of sentimental attachments to place and memory."
But even Pablo Picasso can't escape history.
[war noises]
In his homeland, Spain, the old certainties were collapsing.
The country had voted to throw out the royal family.
A new golden age of social justice and political liberty was supposed to dawn.
But the eight years of the Spanish Republic would be a prolonged torment
for its defenders and enemies alike.
Violence regularly erupted between factions on the political right and left.
Between the past and the present.
In his Parisian exile, the modernist virtuoso finds himself haunted by a past master,
the darkest genius of Spanish painting.
Francisco Goya.
Goya was the first to make art look squarely into the nightmare of cruelty
that was modern warfare.
His Disasters of War turned the ideal forms of art, the beauty of the human body,
into a sick joke.
So much butcher's chops.
Goya's obsessions infected Picasso.
The old master's bull fights with their rituals of slaughter
pulling him inexorably back to Spain.
[bullfight noises]
In 1934 Picasso crossed the Pyrenees for a tour of his homeland.
For part of the trip he was joined by Marie-Therese.
Inevitably, here in Madrid, they went to a bullfight.
The poet Federico Lorca described Spain as the only country where death is a national spectacle.
In the mid-1930s the spectacle was threatening to spill from the bull ring.
Spain was about to be torn apart.
It was already hopelessly divided.
There was a modern Spain - urban, secular, industrial.
A Spain of thriving socialist movements and agitating anarchists.
But there was another, more ancient, Spain.
A country of immense landed estates and a poverty-stricken peasantry.
A Spain suffocated by the heavy presence of the Catholic Church.
Picasso called this the black Spain.
The problem was that both Spains claimed to be the true nation.
Neither was prepared to accept the verdict of elections.
Had they thought of themselves as just rival political parties,
well, then, hostile but peaceful coexistence would have been possible.
But they didn't.
Each side, left and right, old and new,
believed the other not just to be the opposition
but the enemy of reborn Spain itself.
Each side demanded the other's annihilation.
Some Spanish artists had more than an inkling of what was coming.
None more theatrically than Salvador Dali.
His Premonitions of Civil War is a surrealist epic phantasmagoria of catastrophe.
Dali himself sided with the conservatives and Fascists.
Right wing intellectuals made overtures to Picasso, hoping he might join Dali in their camp.
Picasso stayed aloof.
But there must have been a day when he woke up and found he'd fallen into the abyss of native hatreds.
A Spanish fever begins to take hold of Picasso's deepest creative imagination.
Into the prints and drawings come all the old ancient antagonists,
who, once summoned, never really go away.
The bull
The horse
and the bearer of light.
It's not pretty. It is scary.
We're in the bull ring.
Entrails spill from gored horses.
Sometimes toreadors die.
Sometimes bulls.
But we're also in a more ancient world of the minotaur and the labyrinth of Picasso's mind.
In 1935, with Spain on the brink of catastrophe
Picasso suddenly stops playing around with all those jumbled images of horses and bulls.
And resolves them into an etching, which somehow has the weight, solemnity,
and monumental power of an altar piece,
a mural, or reworking of an ancient friese.
He calls it The Minotauromachy.
It has all the quality of a dream or memory.
Sexual and scriptural.
Weirdly frozen but disturbingly vivid.
A horse, its mouth agape in death agony,
is spilling its guts.
Over its back is draped the half-naked body of a woman matador.
A minotaur advances threateningly,
but is stopped in its tracks by a single candle held by a small girl.
So the beast can be stopped, by light.
The light that comes from the power of art.
It's Picasso the modernist who's doing this,
bringing back all the old ancient myths, dreams and nightmares.
"You think they belong to the remote past," he's saying.
"Wrong, look around. They're still with us."
We've gone back to our future, and it is again a savage age.
The beasts are out.
General Francisco Franco once said
that to save Spain from Marxism he was prepared to shoot half the country.
In July 1936 he fired his opening salvo,
leading an army rebellion against the democratically elected government of socialists and liberals.
A favored rallying cry of the rebels was, "Viva la muerte" - long live death.
And to help the generals deliver it, they get enthusiastic assistance
out of the German luftwaffe that provides air support,
and the army that General Franco will use to conquer Spain includes 40,000 Italian troops
on loan from Mussolini.
For the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis, the Spanish civil war is a dry run
for their own coming global battle with degenerate democracy - socialism.
The civil war is vicious, but Franco's armies sweep through Spain,
overwhelming the idealistic militias defending the democratic government.
Somehow, the besieged capital, Madrid, holds out.
But then a shell breaches the defenses of the Prado Museum, home to Spain's precious art collection.
When Picasso hears about it, he feels personally assaulted.
The great iconoclastic modernist, suddenly protective of his own ancestry.
All those Spanish masters, especially Goya,
witness to the disasters of war.
[thunder, electricity]
So when he's asked to accept the honorific position of Director of the Prado
he doesn't hesitate to say yes.
It's a signal to the world he's chosen to stand with the Republic.
Picasso has got politics.
And he's forced to join the struggle, practically as well as symbolically.
It's decided that the endangered masterpieces have to be evacuated
from the Prado to Valencia.
El Director Picasso helps select the vulnerable cargo,
and waits nervously for news, as a convoy carrying Spain's art treasures
trundles to its safe haven.
Picasso's thoughts and passions are now locked into the Spanish struggle.
Back in Paris, Picasso is confronted by another crisis.
This time it's personal.
He's in the midst of an acrimonious split from his wife, Olga.
His lover, Marie-Therese, is pregnant.
He feels creatively paralyzed.
"It is," he says, "the worst time of my life."
Then, in January 1937, Spain comes knocking at his studio door.
A group responsible for designing the Spanish Pavilion at the World's Fair
to be held in Paris the following summer,
comes to visit Picasso in his studio.
"Politically committed artists," they tell him,
"have agreed to do work for that pavilion."
Would Picasso join them?
Well, yes, he would.
Just what he was going to paint he had no idea.
But while he was waiting for inspiration to hit, he took a day off to do his bit for the cause.
It was his first stab at popular art, drawn to raise funds
for the Spanish war refugee relief fund.
It's a comic strip satire on Franco's pretensions to be Spain's knight crusader.
So instead of a valiant hero on a stallion,
he rides a giant phallus.
He's also a polyp, bristling and squishy,
a creature Picasso himself called a turd.
It takes our genius just one day to knock off this first sheet.
So it's a bit soon to call him the Hero Artist of the Republic.
Then, well, it's back to business as usual.
Yet more muses and meditations on art.
He even thinks one of those might do for the job he'd promised for the Spanish Pavilion
of the International Exhibition.
And then, life caught up with art.
It's about four in the afternoon in the little town of Guernica,
15 miles from Bilbao, in the north of Spain.
7000 souls going about their market-day business
in the ancestral homeland of the Basques.
A people with their own language, culture, and fierce sense of identity.
In the raging civil war the Basques were stalwartly anti-Franco.
[plane overhead]
A black speck appears in the blue.
The solitary plane is German, from the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion.
It wheels over the town, then, almost casually,
drops six bombs.
[church bells]
Waves of German and Italian aircraft flying in formation
created a relentless storm of havoc.
Over 5000 bombs were dropped on the defenseless town.
When the people of Guernica fled into the streets and fields,
the pilots strafed them with machine gun fire.
A rain of incendiary bombs finished the job,
turning the town into an ashy cauldron.
1645 die. Thousands more are terribly wounded.
The commander of the Condor Legion, Colonel Wolfram Von Richthofen,
was extremely gratified by the action,
so surgically precise, so tremendously modern.
"Guernica literally leveled to the ground.
Bomb craters in the streets.
Simply terrific.
Perfect conditions for a great victory."
There was nothing in Guernica that could possibly be designated a military target.
What was special about Guernica was the brutality and clarity of the objective,
to terrorize defenseless civilians from the air
and to send a message to the rest of Spain and to the world -
This is what we can do. And this is what we will do.
George Steer, correspondent for the London Times, covering the Basque War from Bilbao.
got himself to Guernica.
"Blocks of wreckage slivered and crushed from the houses,
and from their sides which were still erect, the polished heat struck at our cheeks and eyes.
Throughout the night houses were falling, until the streets became long heaps of red impenetrable debris."
Guernica had gone cubist.
Steer's report is reprinted in the French paper, Ce Soir, with a dramatic front page picture.
The nocturnal inferno burns itself into Picasso's visual imagination.
That's why he pictures Guernica as a night massacre,
even though it was actually death in the afternoon.
In his Paris studio Picasso summons art for the most serious thing he's ever attempted -
telling the truth.
Of course, he's not going to compete with Steer's gritty report from Guernica,
but if the painting succeeds it will transcend mere factual chronicle.
It will be cubism with a conscience.
What Picasso was setting out to make was something foreign to the very nature of modern art,
the art he had defined.
He was about to try and make a truly modern history painting.
It was the tallest order of his life,
to turn from icon breaker to icon maker.
So, everything he'd ever touched in his art and his life
had to come together for this one moment.
The excitement of modernism,
the obsession with the art of the past,
and his own intimate experiences of love and grief.
He would need all the help he could get,
but there was an accomplice waiting in the wings.
He'd met her in a Paris cafe.
He could hardly have missed her.
Her name is Dora Maar, a Croatian photographer, intellectual,
and accomplished surrealist.
Picasso made an offer for the blood-stained glove.
And won a fiery new lover and a creative partner.
Dora became a fixture in the studio,
and Picasso's unofficial photographer.
Capturing him at work as Guernica evolved.
On May 1, 1937, Picasso gets down to it.
He starts with rough sketches, barely more than scribbles.
Graphite on paper.
Thoughts racing ahead of the hand.
And the essential cast of characters so long on his mind,
so deep in his psyche,
reappear.
The wounded horse.
The massive bull.
The candlelight bearer.
Don't imagine, though, that Picasso is in the remorseless grip of his new vision.
All through the next week, with the deadline for the Paris fair coming on fast,
he does no work at all on the painting.
He goes to see his other lover, Marie-Therese, and their new baby on the weekend,
and he umpires the cat fight between her and Dora.
Heady emotions swirl around Picasso,
and he can't resist transferring the complicated agony of his personal life
to his political art.
Heads of women tracked with arteries of excruciating pain,
punctured with tears,
begin to appear in the Guernica drawings.
He's become the impresario of anguish.
Marie-Therese and his young daughter Maya visit the studio too,
the toddler smearing her hands in the fresh paint of Guernica
visions of domestic tragedy.
Dead babies, distraught mothers
process through his mind.
He begins working on the actual painting.
20 feet long and 12 feet high
the canvas is too tall to fit between the roof rafters and the floor of the studio.
So it's propped up against the wall.
Dora snaps Picasso as he perches on a ladder to reach the top of the painting.
Picasso chain smokes his way through it.
in a storm of furious creativity.
In the early versions of the painting there are images of hope and defiance.
But as Picasso gets deeper into Guernica those slight gestures of optimism collapse
into the bleaker overwhelming tragedy.
A clenched socialist fist of resistance rising from the pile of bodies
appears in several early sketches.
But this thought fades and disappears from the final painting.
In earlier versions, the shrieking horse with the fatal gash in its side
had a little winged horse, Pegasus, the mythical symbol of the birth of art and poetry,
borne out of the wound.
As if to say - something good may come from blood.
But it ends as a deep black lozinge-shaped hole in a horse
right at the optical dead center of the painting.
The fallen warrior originally was grander, stronger,
his head helmeted like a classical hero.
But Picasso has turned the warrior on his back, mouth open, gaping, slack jawed.
Helpless.
If he's a good partisan, Picasso ought to be delivering something upbeat amidst the carnage,
but he hasn't the stomach for callow optimism.
So the signs of redemption now are puny, though telling.
A single daisy.
And on the fallen warrior's hand, startingly,
an unmistakable puncture mark.
The stigmata of the martyred Christ.
What brought this into Picasso's head?
Wasn't he supposed to be the worldly modernist?
Wasn't it General Franco who's supposed to be the Christian soldier?
Well that was the point, of course.
The idea was to turn the tables on all those holy rollers.
What was in Picasso's head now was one more indelible image
of the agony of his nation.
And one which every Spaniard would have known,
Goya's Third of May 1808.
This, too, was the response of an artist seething at cruelty and massacre.
In this case, the execution in Madrid of the rebels who had risen against Napoleon's invading army.
But it's colored by an ancient Christian hope, especially deeply rooted in Spain,
that of salvation.
The defiant rebel is dying a savior's death.
Arms flung wide, like the crucified Christ.
The stigmata appearing on his opened palm.
There's something else that ties Goya's Execution to Picasso's Slaughter,
something that turns the conventions of art on their head.
And that's the alteration of light from good to evil.
In everything ever written about art, everything ever done in painting,
light is the bringer of beauty, of sublime dignity.
Not here.
Here, it's the instrument of slaughter.
The sallow glean in which the machine men go about their dirty business in the dead of night.
Just obeying orders.
Now, look at Guernica.
You feel the heave and swell of that pyramid of writhing bodies thrusting up through the painting,
don't you?
But what do they strain towards?
An evil eye.
And within that evil eye, the merciless glare of a single electric light bulb.
It's the incandescence of the exterminating angel,
the searchlight of the death squad and the targeting bomber.
The bare bulb of the torturer's cell.
Against it is the candle light held straight out by a heroically beautiful arm.
An epic battle, then, of the good and the wicked lights.
Art versus evil.
It's almost done.
But there's one more necessary touch.
He and Dora cover the body of the dying horse with a field of sharp little downward strokes
that make the body dissolve into a sea of newsprint
or the light of a newsreel projector.
The marks are unreadable.
They're the visual equivalent of static.
Towering above them is the force of art,
breaking through the drone of news.
When he's finished painting he knows he's done the impossible,
created something that reaches deep into modern nightmares.
Hectic, terrifying, burning, screaming.
There's no way out.
It's defiantly modern, but it also pulls us back into the tragedy of the ages.
A cubist commotion.
It's also a classical monument with its wailing women flanking the massive pyramid of death.
It's just paint and canvas, but it has the authority of stone.
It's unbombable.
It's indestructible.
This picture achieves a miracle.
Despite all the images of violence and disaster with which we're bombarded
it makes us feel it.
It gets under our skin.
This, for me, is what all great art has to do,
crash into our lazy routines.
The routine that Guernica tears into is a sickness of our - as well as Picasso's - time.
The habit of taking violent evil in our stride,
The yawn at the massacre.
Seen it before. Go away.
Don't spoil the fun of art.
But Guernica isn't with us for fun.
It's there to rip away the scar tissue,
to make us bleed, to rob us of our sleep.
So, what can art do when the bombs start dropping?
It can instruct us on the obligations of being human.
In all the ways that really counted, Picasso had won.
Art had won. Humanity had won.
So, does Guernica storm the Paris World Fair and the world of art?
Well, no. Not really.
The response is devastatingly polite.
Critics are more bemused than blown away.
Left-wing visitors to the fair from Spain and beyond
looked in vain for muscular proletarians in heroic attitudes.
Or even the grim-faced bad guys in malevolent poses.
One critic described the painting as nothing more than a private brainstorm.
which of course it partly was.
Whilst Guernica is bathed in rather lukewarm praise,
Picasso is off to the Cote d'Azur with Dora and his posse of friends.
But there is now more to Picasso than the Bohemian beach bum act.
He is an artist transformed.
An artist who believes his art has a political purpose and a political message.
>> In Guernica, and all my art, I express my revulsion of the military caste who have sunk Spain into an ocean of pain.
Two years after Guernica Franco was victorious in Spain.
And fascism was eviscerating Europe.
Guernica was not just a painting, it was a prophecy.
In 1944, after four years of grueling war,
Paris was liberated from Nazi occupation,
and Picasso was free to meet an adoring public.
And how they flocked to the studio!
Hungry for stories about Guernica's creation.
He obliges the fans and groupies lingering on those years like an old field marshal reliving his finest campaign.
Well, this was his finest campaign.
Picasso once described the creative process as a kind of complete emptying.
He'd put so much of everything he had to offer in the world into Guernica
during those few feverish months of 1937.
That afterwards there was not much left in the creative tank.
He had 30 years of work ahead, the longest, saddest anticlimax in the history of art.
Pablo Picasso becomes Comrade Picasso,
the Cote d'Azur communist, knocking off hack work
for the party of peace and good will.
And what's worse than being a poster boy for Stalin?
Well, just being a poster boy.
Settling into celebrity, the Riviera tan ever deepening,
Picasso leaps from the pages of Marxist critiques to the fashion glossies.
In contrast, Guernica accumulates symbolic power.
The painting takes up residence in New York City, where, for three decades,
it burns with moral heat on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art.
Its creator had done something no one who had known him could have ever predicted.
He'd rescued modern art from the curse of its own cleverness,
from the curse of novelty.
Guernica's always been bigger than art,
uncontainable by mere museum walls.
It's one of those very rare creations that gets into the bloodstream of the common culture.
It's become the shared heritage of an appalled humanity,
and a mirror of the suffering of civilians in every conflict.
[church bells]
In 1981, with Franco dead and democracy at last alive,
Guernica found its way home to Spain.
Picasso never saw its return, having died eight years before,
but he relished the prospect that his painting would outlast Franco.
Here's the old thing, comfortably settled in Madrid.
And just when you think, well, it's a magnificent relic,
what can it possibly have to say to us in our video-saturated, digitally-enhanced age?
Something comes along to awaken from those old black and white characters
the tempestuous force of their original creation.
In February 2003, the American Delegation to the United Nations
decided to make its pessimistic case for the likelihood of armed intervention in Iraq.
Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council was to be followed by a press conference.
And then, at the last minute, someone noticed something inconvenient about the location.
There was a tapestry reproduction of Guernica hanging on the wall.
Oh dear, screaming women. Burning houses. Dead babies. Jagged lines.
"Cover it up," said the TV people. "It's too distracting."
So Guernica was shrouded by a big blue drape.
The news handlers could have said - hold on a minute!
We could show the painting. After all, this is what tyrants do.
Death. Suffering. Misery.
But they didn't.
However you massaged it, there was something about the way that damn picture would look on the news
that would upset people.
Much better to cover it up.
It was, I suppose, the ultimate backhand compliment to the power of art.
You're the mightiest country in the world.
You can throw your armies around.
You can get rid of dictators.
But hey - don't tangle with a masterpiece.