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It's the depths of winter, 1941.

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Pablo Picasso is living and working on the top floor of an old house in Left Bank Paris.

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The Third Reich owns Europe.

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Every so often Picasso gets visits from the Gestapo.

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They mutter about degenerate art and dropped out hints he's hiding Jewish friends.

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Then they trash the studio of his.

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One day there's a visit that passes into the Picasso legend.

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The unwelcome visitor sniffs around a bit,

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then he notices there are postcards lying around of Picasso's most famous work.

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His epic depiction of what happened when German bombs fell on a small Basque town

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in the Spanish civil war.

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Guernica.

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"Did you do this?" he says.

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"Oh no," says Picasso, "you did.

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Go on, take one. Souvenir."

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Great comeback. Good story.

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But what can art really do in the face of atrocity?

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Shouldn't art just stick to what it does best, the delivery of pleasure?

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And forget about being a paintbrush warrior?

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Or is it when the bombs are dropping that we find out what art is really for?

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[tinkling music]

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Paris in the 1920s.

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Pablo Picasso was the sovereign of modern painting.

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He was living in a fancy apartment near the Champs Elysees, with his Russian ballerina wife, Olga,

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and their little boy.

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He showed his paintings in a classy gallery,

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and all of art was his kingdom.

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Drunk on self-confidence and cleverness

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he could take it wherever he fancied.

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One day, in January 1927, he noticed something he definitely fancied.

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Blonde, vaguely Nordic, statuesque, 16.

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She's called Marie-Therese Walter,

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and Picasso sees her one afternoon outside Galerie Lafayette, a department store.

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He loses no time, goes up to her and says,

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"Mademoiselle, you have a most interesting face, and I should like to paint it.

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I am Picasso."

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Marie-Therese would become his lover, and a compulsive obsession in his art.

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In 1932 he poses Marie-Therese in a languid reverie.

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Gently masturbating, she's literally got sex on her mind.

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Pictures like this do what they show, stroking us into a playful trance.

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The color and wit of the thing, a drowsy sensual entertainment.

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It's the provocative work of a cocky, self-obsessed, self-indulgent genius.

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And it's all a long way from Guernica.

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Picasso had arrived in Paris at the turn of the century,

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a small, pugnacious, and frighteningly gifted Andalusian.

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In the city of the avante-garde, wherever you looked, all the rules of poetry, music, painting

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were being junked.

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Young Picasso, living like a Bohemian with his oil-slick hair, huge black eyes, and big rabbit's nose,

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he knew he had to be part of the giddy liberty.

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[rushing water]

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And he knew what he didn't want.

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The hoary old pantomimes of the mighty.

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Modern art was modern because it had turned its back on those grandstanding histories,

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painted for aristocrats and kings.

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Here's power on a horse.

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The omnipotence of the ruler displayed by nonchalant control.

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Just one hand on the reins.

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Message was - if the sovereign can handle a great horse he can certainly manage affairs of state,

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critical matters of war and peace.

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It was the most enduring image of pure power.

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And here's what Picasso does.

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Instead of a prince in the saddle, a naked boy leading a barebacked horse

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through an eerily empty primordial landscape.

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There's no hero to identify here

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no story, no subject.

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Just the modern coming straight out of the archaic,

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as if there had never been anything in between.

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History down for the count, then.

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Next stop for obliteration - beauty.

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The classical ideal of art itself

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made visible in the luscious form of the female nude.

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And this is Picasso's ferocious attack on that sacred cow, in 1907.

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This is how all those centuries of gazing at nudes and muttering demurely about graceful form end.

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A brothel lineup.

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They strip. You check them out.

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Everything ever associated with nude women in European art,

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beauty, obliging sensuality, tenderness

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all brutally sheared away.

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And then, around 1910, having seen off beauty and history,

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Picasso goes for the hat trick.

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Something even more mind-blowing.

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Something that for most people over the centuries

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had been the entire point of art.

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Bye-bye resemblance.

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If a two-dimensional duplicate of the world is what you want,

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then photography is going to do that job much more efficiently.

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This is Picasso's art dealer, Ambroise Vollard.

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This is how Picasso saw him.

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A different vision of the way things really are.

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Cubism.

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Deep inside his Slinky toy cascades of form seen jauntering through moments in time was, he insisted,

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something compact, solid and firm.

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By blowing up the look of things Picasso was saying, "I'm getting beyond surface appearances

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to the core."

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It wasn't for those who wanted something easy on the eye.

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But then Picasso wasn't interested in pleasuring the public.

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He positively reveled in the cult of difficulty.

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"Too hard?" you can almost hear him sneering.

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"Tough."

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In the 1920s there's something else he doesn't lose much sleep over.

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The state of the world.

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He's doing fine, thank you.

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But Europe is in deep trouble.

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Fascism beginning to strong-arm its way into power.

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But of the chaos and hatred, riot and revolution,

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there's not a hint in Picasso's work.

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For some artists it was no problem, obligation even,

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to combine radical politics and radical painting.

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to have modern art criticize hypocrisy and injustice.

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George Grosz, the German artist, was busy having a go at the military dinosaurs

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and Nazi sympathizers who were busy subverting Germany's fragile democracy.

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Creatively, of course, Grosz is no Picasso.

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But he never pretends that art can stay immune from ideology

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high above the fray.

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He knows there's a war to be fought

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and his brushes are armed to take the offensive.

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The only wars Picasso had ever fought had been against the conventions of art.

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Oh yes, he'd mostly been on the side of freedom,

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but that had always been creative, not political freedom.

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No wonder one of his best friends called Picasso "the least political person I've ever known."

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What's happening in Picasso's studio is about as far from the barricades as you can get.

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It's all very self-obsessed.

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Politics and social conflict doesn't interest him at all in the 1920s.

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Instead, he's brooding on his calling.

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So, lots of complicated super-subtle images of the artist in the studio.

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Lots of reflections of, and in, mirrors.

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Lots of models pulled this way and that.

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Body parts artfully rearranged.

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He's also brooding on his increasingly tangled love life.

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On their harrowing beach vacations Picasso and his wife, Olga, were in constant conflict.

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And when he was feeling imprisoned by the relationship

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his artistic distortions are grotesque.

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Meet Praying Mantis Woman.

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With her frighteningly toothed all purpose orifice.

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Not all of his images of women were brutal and predatory.

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When he starts painting Marie-Therese, Picasso's jagged lines

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suddenly become as curvy and voluptuous as his lover's body.

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We are deep in Picasso's world, where his principal inspirations are his art,

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his women, and himself.

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Picasso often said, "This is how modern art is supposed to be,

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free of sentimental attachments to place and memory."

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But even Pablo Picasso can't escape history.

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[war noises]

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In his homeland, Spain, the old certainties were collapsing.

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The country had voted to throw out the royal family.

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A new golden age of social justice and political liberty was supposed to dawn.

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But the eight years of the Spanish Republic would be a prolonged torment

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for its defenders and enemies alike.

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Violence regularly erupted between factions on the political right and left.

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Between the past and the present.

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In his Parisian exile, the modernist virtuoso finds himself haunted by a past master,

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the darkest genius of Spanish painting.

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Francisco Goya.

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Goya was the first to make art look squarely into the nightmare of cruelty

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that was modern warfare.

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His Disasters of War turned the ideal forms of art, the beauty of the human body,

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into a sick joke.

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So much butcher's chops.

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Goya's obsessions infected Picasso.

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The old master's bull fights with their rituals of slaughter

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pulling him inexorably back to Spain.

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[bullfight noises]

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In 1934 Picasso crossed the Pyrenees for a tour of his homeland.

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For part of the trip he was joined by Marie-Therese.

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Inevitably, here in Madrid, they went to a bullfight.

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The poet Federico Lorca described Spain as the only country where death is a national spectacle.

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In the mid-1930s the spectacle was threatening to spill from the bull ring.

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Spain was about to be torn apart.

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It was already hopelessly divided.

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There was a modern Spain - urban, secular, industrial.

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A Spain of thriving socialist movements and agitating anarchists.

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But there was another, more ancient, Spain.

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A country of immense landed estates and a poverty-stricken peasantry.

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A Spain suffocated by the heavy presence of the Catholic Church.

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Picasso called this the black Spain.

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The problem was that both Spains claimed to be the true nation.

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Neither was prepared to accept the verdict of elections.

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Had they thought of themselves as just rival political parties,

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well, then, hostile but peaceful coexistence would have been possible.

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But they didn't.

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Each side, left and right, old and new,

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believed the other not just to be the opposition

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but the enemy of reborn Spain itself.

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Each side demanded the other's annihilation.

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Some Spanish artists had more than an inkling of what was coming.

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None more theatrically than Salvador Dali.

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His Premonitions of Civil War is a surrealist epic phantasmagoria of catastrophe.

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Dali himself sided with the conservatives and Fascists.

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Right wing intellectuals made overtures to Picasso, hoping he might join Dali in their camp.

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Picasso stayed aloof.

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But there must have been a day when he woke up and found he'd fallen into the abyss of native hatreds.

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A Spanish fever begins to take hold of Picasso's deepest creative imagination.

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Into the prints and drawings come all the old ancient antagonists,

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who, once summoned, never really go away.

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The bull

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The horse

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and the bearer of light.

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It's not pretty. It is scary.

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We're in the bull ring.

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Entrails spill from gored horses.

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Sometimes toreadors die.

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Sometimes bulls.

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251
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But we're also in a more ancient world of the minotaur and the labyrinth of Picasso's mind.

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In 1935, with Spain on the brink of catastrophe

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Picasso suddenly stops playing around with all those jumbled images of horses and bulls.

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And resolves them into an etching, which somehow has the weight, solemnity,

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and monumental power of an altar piece,

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a mural, or reworking of an ancient friese.

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He calls it The Minotauromachy.

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It has all the quality of a dream or memory.

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Sexual and scriptural.

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Weirdly frozen but disturbingly vivid.

263
00:22:54,678 --> 00:22:58,115
A horse, its mouth agape in death agony,

264
00:22:58,115 --> 00:23:01,150
is spilling its guts.

265
00:23:01,150 --> 00:23:10,377
Over its back is draped the half-naked body of a woman matador.

266
00:23:10,377 --> 00:23:15,916
A minotaur advances threateningly,

267
00:23:15,916 --> 00:23:23,342
but is stopped in its tracks by a single candle held by a small girl.

268
00:23:23,342 --> 00:23:28,556
So the beast can be stopped, by light.

269
00:23:28,556 --> 00:23:35,268
The light that comes from the power of art.

270
00:23:35,268 --> 00:23:37,841
It's Picasso the modernist who's doing this,

271
00:23:37,841 --> 00:23:42,337
bringing back all the old ancient myths, dreams and nightmares.

272
00:23:42,337 --> 00:23:45,432
"You think they belong to the remote past," he's saying.

273
00:23:45,432 --> 00:23:51,673
"Wrong, look around. They're still with us."

274
00:23:51,673 --> 00:23:57,714
We've gone back to our future, and it is again a savage age.

275
00:23:57,714 --> 00:24:02,608
The beasts are out.

276
00:24:02,608 --> 00:24:04,643


277
00:24:04,643 --> 00:24:05,010


278
00:24:05,010 --> 00:24:08,407
General Francisco Franco once said

279
00:24:08,407 --> 00:24:18,429
that to save Spain from Marxism he was prepared to shoot half the country.

280
00:24:18,429 --> 00:24:23,491
In July 1936 he fired his opening salvo,

281
00:24:23,491 --> 00:24:34,673
leading an army rebellion against the democratically elected government of socialists and liberals.

282
00:24:34,673 --> 00:24:41,649
A favored rallying cry of the rebels was, "Viva la muerte" - long live death.

283
00:24:41,649 --> 00:24:45,618
And to help the generals deliver it, they get enthusiastic assistance

284
00:24:45,618 --> 00:24:49,855
out of the German luftwaffe that provides air support,

285
00:24:49,855 --> 00:24:56,425
and the army that General Franco will use to conquer Spain includes 40,000 Italian troops

286
00:24:56,425 --> 00:25:02,188
on loan from Mussolini.

287
00:25:02,188 --> 00:25:07,954
For the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis, the Spanish civil war is a dry run

288
00:25:07,954 --> 00:25:15,854
for their own coming global battle with degenerate democracy - socialism.

289
00:25:15,854 --> 00:25:21,622
The civil war is vicious, but Franco's armies sweep through Spain,

290
00:25:21,622 --> 00:25:28,553
overwhelming the idealistic militias defending the democratic government.

291
00:25:28,553 --> 00:25:35,476
Somehow, the besieged capital, Madrid, holds out.

292
00:25:35,476 --> 00:25:49,487
But then a shell breaches the defenses of the Prado Museum, home to Spain's precious art collection.

293
00:25:49,487 --> 00:25:54,923
When Picasso hears about it, he feels personally assaulted.

294
00:25:54,923 --> 00:26:04,453
The great iconoclastic modernist, suddenly protective of his own ancestry.

295
00:26:04,453 --> 00:26:08,865
All those Spanish masters, especially Goya,

296
00:26:08,865 --> 00:26:15,854
witness to the disasters of war.

297
00:26:15,854 --> 00:26:24,452
[thunder, electricity]

298
00:26:24,452 --> 00:26:29,481
So when he's asked to accept the honorific position of Director of the Prado

299
00:26:29,481 --> 00:26:32,269
he doesn't hesitate to say yes.

300
00:26:32,269 --> 00:26:36,555
It's a signal to the world he's chosen to stand with the Republic.

301
00:26:36,555 --> 00:26:44,690
Picasso has got politics.

302
00:26:46,767 --> 00:26:55,916
And he's forced to join the struggle, practically as well as symbolically.

303
00:26:55,916 --> 00:27:00,648
It's decided that the endangered masterpieces have to be evacuated

304
00:27:00,648 --> 00:27:08,011
from the Prado to Valencia.

305
00:27:08,011 --> 00:27:13,556
El Director Picasso helps select the vulnerable cargo,

306
00:27:13,556 --> 00:27:18,736
and waits nervously for news, as a convoy carrying Spain's art treasures

307
00:27:18,736 --> 00:27:24,212
trundles to its safe haven.

308
00:27:24,212 --> 00:27:32,896
Picasso's thoughts and passions are now locked into the Spanish struggle.

309
00:27:32,896 --> 00:27:38,674


310
00:27:38,674 --> 00:27:43,600
Back in Paris, Picasso is confronted by another crisis.

311
00:27:43,600 --> 00:27:48,511
This time it's personal.

312
00:27:49,819 --> 00:27:55,774
He's in the midst of an acrimonious split from his wife, Olga.

313
00:27:55,774 --> 00:28:01,715
His lover, Marie-Therese, is pregnant.

314
00:28:01,715 --> 00:28:07,941
He feels creatively paralyzed.

315
00:28:07,941 --> 00:28:15,048
"It is," he says, "the worst time of my life."

316
00:28:15,048 --> 00:28:19,201


317
00:28:19,201 --> 00:28:27,757
Then, in January 1937, Spain comes knocking at his studio door.

318
00:28:27,757 --> 00:28:31,991
A group responsible for designing the Spanish Pavilion at the World's Fair

319
00:28:31,991 --> 00:28:34,704
to be held in Paris the following summer,

320
00:28:34,704 --> 00:28:37,483
comes to visit Picasso in his studio.

321
00:28:37,483 --> 00:28:39,840
"Politically committed artists," they tell him,

322
00:28:39,840 --> 00:28:42,469
"have agreed to do work for that pavilion."

323
00:28:42,469 --> 00:28:44,463
Would Picasso join them?

324
00:28:44,463 --> 00:28:46,548
Well, yes, he would.

325
00:28:46,548 --> 00:28:49,417
Just what he was going to paint he had no idea.

326
00:28:49,417 --> 00:28:57,049
But while he was waiting for inspiration to hit, he took a day off to do his bit for the cause.

327
00:28:57,049 --> 00:29:00,417


328
00:29:00,417 --> 00:29:03,513
It was his first stab at popular art, drawn to raise funds

329
00:29:03,513 --> 00:29:10,092
for the Spanish war refugee relief fund.

330
00:29:10,092 --> 00:29:20,111
It's a comic strip satire on Franco's pretensions to be Spain's knight crusader.

331
00:29:20,111 --> 00:29:23,735
So instead of a valiant hero on a stallion,

332
00:29:23,735 --> 00:29:29,377
he rides a giant phallus.

333
00:29:29,377 --> 00:29:33,108
He's also a polyp, bristling and squishy,

334
00:29:33,108 --> 00:29:42,384
a creature Picasso himself called a turd.

335
00:29:42,384 --> 00:29:47,599
It takes our genius just one day to knock off this first sheet.

336
00:29:47,599 --> 00:29:52,026
So it's a bit soon to call him the Hero Artist of the Republic.

337
00:29:52,026 --> 00:29:56,477
Then, well, it's back to business as usual.

338
00:29:56,477 --> 00:29:59,368


339
00:29:59,368 --> 00:30:04,022
Yet more muses and meditations on art.

340
00:30:04,022 --> 00:30:09,007
He even thinks one of those might do for the job he'd promised for the Spanish Pavilion

341
00:30:09,007 --> 00:30:13,285
of the International Exhibition.

342
00:30:13,285 --> 00:30:17,052


343
00:30:17,052 --> 00:30:29,741
And then, life caught up with art.

344
00:30:29,741 --> 00:30:34,721
It's about four in the afternoon in the little town of Guernica,

345
00:30:34,721 --> 00:30:40,634
15 miles from Bilbao, in the north of Spain.

346
00:30:40,634 --> 00:30:44,536
7000 souls going about their market-day business

347
00:30:44,536 --> 00:30:49,337
in the ancestral homeland of the Basques.

348
00:30:49,337 --> 00:30:57,432
A people with their own language, culture, and fierce sense of identity.

349
00:30:57,432 --> 00:31:08,567
In the raging civil war the Basques were stalwartly anti-Franco.

350
00:31:08,567 --> 00:31:11,837
[plane overhead]

351
00:31:11,837 --> 00:31:19,673
A black speck appears in the blue.

352
00:31:19,673 --> 00:31:28,431
The solitary plane is German, from the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion.

353
00:31:28,431 --> 00:31:32,953
It wheels over the town, then, almost casually,

354
00:31:32,953 --> 00:31:38,374
drops six bombs.

355
00:31:38,374 --> 00:31:43,275
[church bells]

356
00:31:43,275 --> 00:31:48,731


357
00:31:48,731 --> 00:31:52,632
Waves of German and Italian aircraft flying in formation

358
00:31:52,632 --> 00:31:59,165
created a relentless storm of havoc.

359
00:31:59,165 --> 00:32:06,821
Over 5000 bombs were dropped on the defenseless town.

360
00:32:06,821 --> 00:32:10,821
When the people of Guernica fled into the streets and fields,

361
00:32:10,821 --> 00:32:19,844
the pilots strafed them with machine gun fire.

362
00:32:19,844 --> 00:32:23,633
A rain of incendiary bombs finished the job,

363
00:32:23,633 --> 00:32:29,411
turning the town into an ashy cauldron.

364
00:32:29,411 --> 00:32:33,502


365
00:32:33,502 --> 00:32:41,642
1645 die. Thousands more are terribly wounded.

366
00:32:41,642 --> 00:32:46,135


367
00:32:46,135 --> 00:32:50,721
The commander of the Condor Legion, Colonel Wolfram Von Richthofen,

368
00:32:50,721 --> 00:32:54,332
was extremely gratified by the action,

369
00:32:54,332 --> 00:33:02,808
so surgically precise, so tremendously modern.

370
00:33:02,808 --> 00:33:06,712
"Guernica literally leveled to the ground.

371
00:33:06,712 --> 00:33:09,484
Bomb craters in the streets.

372
00:33:09,484 --> 00:33:11,967
Simply terrific.

373
00:33:11,967 --> 00:33:17,531
Perfect conditions for a great victory."

374
00:33:17,531 --> 00:33:22,642
There was nothing in Guernica that could possibly be designated a military target.

375
00:33:22,642 --> 00:33:28,330
What was special about Guernica was the brutality and clarity of the objective,

376
00:33:28,330 --> 00:33:32,091
to terrorize defenseless civilians from the air

377
00:33:32,091 --> 00:33:36,494
and to send a message to the rest of Spain and to the world -

378
00:33:36,494 --> 00:33:44,202
This is what we can do. And this is what we will do.

379
00:33:44,202 --> 00:33:50,179
George Steer, correspondent for the London Times, covering the Basque War from Bilbao.

380
00:33:50,179 --> 00:33:55,572
got himself to Guernica.

381
00:33:55,572 --> 00:34:00,877
"Blocks of wreckage slivered and crushed from the houses,

382
00:34:00,877 --> 00:34:08,935
and from their sides which were still erect, the polished heat struck at our cheeks and eyes.

383
00:34:08,935 --> 00:34:20,925
Throughout the night houses were falling, until the streets became long heaps of red impenetrable debris."

384
00:34:20,925 --> 00:34:27,387
Guernica had gone cubist.

385
00:34:27,387 --> 00:34:36,966
Steer's report is reprinted in the French paper, Ce Soir, with a dramatic front page picture.

386
00:34:36,966 --> 00:34:43,725
The nocturnal inferno burns itself into Picasso's visual imagination.

387
00:34:43,725 --> 00:34:47,758
That's why he pictures Guernica as a night massacre,

388
00:34:47,758 --> 00:34:53,794
even though it was actually death in the afternoon.

389
00:34:53,794 --> 00:35:05,810


390
00:35:05,810 --> 00:35:12,355
In his Paris studio Picasso summons art for the most serious thing he's ever attempted -

391
00:35:12,355 --> 00:35:14,403
telling the truth.

392
00:35:14,403 --> 00:35:19,252
Of course, he's not going to compete with Steer's gritty report from Guernica,

393
00:35:19,252 --> 00:35:24,795
but if the painting succeeds it will transcend mere factual chronicle.

394
00:35:24,795 --> 00:35:30,942
It will be cubism with a conscience.

395
00:35:34,035 --> 00:35:41,009
What Picasso was setting out to make was something foreign to the very nature of modern art,

396
00:35:41,009 --> 00:35:45,459
the art he had defined.

397
00:35:45,459 --> 00:35:50,617
He was about to try and make a truly modern history painting.

398
00:35:50,617 --> 00:35:53,887
It was the tallest order of his life,

399
00:35:53,887 --> 00:36:01,771
to turn from icon breaker to icon maker.

400
00:36:01,771 --> 00:36:06,229
So, everything he'd ever touched in his art and his life

401
00:36:06,229 --> 00:36:11,561
had to come together for this one moment.

402
00:36:11,561 --> 00:36:14,001
The excitement of modernism,

403
00:36:14,001 --> 00:36:17,719
the obsession with the art of the past,

404
00:36:17,719 --> 00:36:25,511
and his own intimate experiences of love and grief.

405
00:36:25,511 --> 00:36:36,574


406
00:36:36,574 --> 00:36:39,610
He would need all the help he could get,

407
00:36:39,610 --> 00:36:44,347
but there was an accomplice waiting in the wings.

408
00:36:44,347 --> 00:36:57,101


409
00:36:57,101 --> 00:37:00,741
He'd met her in a Paris cafe.

410
00:37:00,741 --> 00:37:04,731
He could hardly have missed her.

411
00:37:04,731 --> 00:37:09,543
Her name is Dora Maar, a Croatian photographer, intellectual,

412
00:37:09,543 --> 00:37:14,277
and accomplished surrealist.

413
00:37:14,277 --> 00:37:23,695


414
00:37:23,695 --> 00:37:27,799
Picasso made an offer for the blood-stained glove.

415
00:37:27,799 --> 00:37:38,154
And won a fiery new lover and a creative partner.

416
00:37:40,954 --> 00:37:44,025
Dora became a fixture in the studio,

417
00:37:44,025 --> 00:37:49,699
and Picasso's unofficial photographer.

418
00:37:49,699 --> 00:37:57,075
Capturing him at work as Guernica evolved.

419
00:37:57,075 --> 00:38:02,253
On May 1, 1937, Picasso gets down to it.

420
00:38:02,253 --> 00:38:07,489
He starts with rough sketches, barely more than scribbles.

421
00:38:07,489 --> 00:38:10,544
Graphite on paper.

422
00:38:10,544 --> 00:38:14,743
Thoughts racing ahead of the hand.

423
00:38:14,743 --> 00:38:18,064
And the essential cast of characters so long on his mind,

424
00:38:18,064 --> 00:38:20,581
so deep in his psyche,

425
00:38:20,581 --> 00:38:23,465
reappear.

426
00:38:23,465 --> 00:38:25,756


427
00:38:25,756 --> 00:38:29,766
The wounded horse.

428
00:38:29,766 --> 00:38:34,525
The massive bull.

429
00:38:34,525 --> 00:38:42,423
The candlelight bearer.

430
00:38:42,423 --> 00:38:47,780
Don't imagine, though, that Picasso is in the remorseless grip of his new vision.

431
00:38:47,780 --> 00:38:52,666
All through the next week, with the deadline for the Paris fair coming on fast,

432
00:38:52,666 --> 00:38:55,249
he does no work at all on the painting.

433
00:38:55,249 --> 00:38:59,838
He goes to see his other lover, Marie-Therese, and their new baby on the weekend,

434
00:38:59,838 --> 00:39:05,562
and he umpires the cat fight between her and Dora.

435
00:39:05,562 --> 00:39:08,785


436
00:39:08,785 --> 00:39:11,803
Heady emotions swirl around Picasso,

437
00:39:11,803 --> 00:39:16,939
and he can't resist transferring the complicated agony of his personal life

438
00:39:16,939 --> 00:39:22,739
to his political art.

439
00:39:22,739 --> 00:39:27,089


440
00:39:27,089 --> 00:39:32,245
Heads of women tracked with arteries of excruciating pain,

441
00:39:32,245 --> 00:39:34,157
punctured with tears,

442
00:39:34,157 --> 00:39:38,974
begin to appear in the Guernica drawings.

443
00:39:38,974 --> 00:39:44,323
He's become the impresario of anguish.

444
00:39:44,323 --> 00:39:50,840


445
00:39:50,840 --> 00:39:58,921
Marie-Therese and his young daughter Maya visit the studio too,

446
00:39:58,921 --> 00:40:05,075
the toddler smearing her hands in the fresh paint of Guernica

447
00:40:05,075 --> 00:40:09,877
visions of domestic tragedy.

448
00:40:09,877 --> 00:40:14,326
Dead babies, distraught mothers

449
00:40:14,326 --> 00:40:19,164
process through his mind.

450
00:40:19,164 --> 00:40:37,588


451
00:40:37,588 --> 00:40:41,248
He begins working on the actual painting.

452
00:40:41,248 --> 00:40:43,589
20 feet long and 12 feet high

453
00:40:43,589 --> 00:40:49,423
the canvas is too tall to fit between the roof rafters and the floor of the studio.

454
00:40:49,423 --> 00:40:57,091
So it's propped up against the wall.

455
00:40:58,445 --> 00:41:10,848
Dora snaps Picasso as he perches on a ladder to reach the top of the painting.

456
00:41:13,172 --> 00:41:16,510
Picasso chain smokes his way through it.

457
00:41:16,510 --> 00:41:23,130
in a storm of furious creativity.

458
00:41:23,130 --> 00:41:28,535
In the early versions of the painting there are images of hope and defiance.

459
00:41:28,535 --> 00:41:34,837
But as Picasso gets deeper into Guernica those slight gestures of optimism collapse

460
00:41:34,837 --> 00:41:40,635
into the bleaker overwhelming tragedy.

461
00:41:44,605 --> 00:41:49,573
A clenched socialist fist of resistance rising from the pile of bodies

462
00:41:49,573 --> 00:41:53,481
appears in several early sketches.

463
00:41:53,481 --> 00:42:01,928
But this thought fades and disappears from the final painting.

464
00:42:01,928 --> 00:42:07,095
In earlier versions, the shrieking horse with the fatal gash in its side

465
00:42:07,095 --> 00:42:13,466
had a little winged horse, Pegasus, the mythical symbol of the birth of art and poetry,

466
00:42:13,466 --> 00:42:16,168
borne out of the wound.

467
00:42:16,168 --> 00:42:22,908
As if to say - something good may come from blood.

468
00:42:22,908 --> 00:42:29,044
But it ends as a deep black lozinge-shaped hole in a horse

469
00:42:29,044 --> 00:42:36,347
right at the optical dead center of the painting.

470
00:42:36,347 --> 00:42:41,161
The fallen warrior originally was grander, stronger,

471
00:42:41,161 --> 00:42:48,053
his head helmeted like a classical hero.

472
00:42:48,053 --> 00:42:55,272
But Picasso has turned the warrior on his back, mouth open, gaping, slack jawed.

473
00:42:55,272 --> 00:42:57,586
Helpless.

474
00:42:57,586 --> 00:43:05,072
If he's a good partisan, Picasso ought to be delivering something upbeat amidst the carnage,

475
00:43:05,072 --> 00:43:12,518
but he hasn't the stomach for callow optimism.

476
00:43:12,518 --> 00:43:17,738
So the signs of redemption now are puny, though telling.

477
00:43:17,738 --> 00:43:20,289
A single daisy.

478
00:43:20,289 --> 00:43:23,763
And on the fallen warrior's hand, startingly,

479
00:43:23,763 --> 00:43:29,512
an unmistakable puncture mark.

480
00:43:29,512 --> 00:43:34,720
The stigmata of the martyred Christ.

481
00:43:34,720 --> 00:43:37,913
What brought this into Picasso's head?

482
00:43:37,913 --> 00:43:41,038
Wasn't he supposed to be the worldly modernist?

483
00:43:41,038 --> 00:43:44,639
Wasn't it General Franco who's supposed to be the Christian soldier?

484
00:43:44,639 --> 00:43:46,597
Well that was the point, of course.

485
00:43:46,597 --> 00:43:50,996
The idea was to turn the tables on all those holy rollers.

486
00:43:50,996 --> 00:43:55,426
What was in Picasso's head now was one more indelible image

487
00:43:55,426 --> 00:43:57,900
of the agony of his nation.

488
00:43:57,900 --> 00:44:00,385
And one which every Spaniard would have known,

489
00:44:00,385 --> 00:44:04,782
Goya's Third of May 1808.

490
00:44:06,089 --> 00:44:14,452
This, too, was the response of an artist seething at cruelty and massacre.

491
00:44:14,452 --> 00:44:24,278
In this case, the execution in Madrid of the rebels who had risen against Napoleon's invading army.

492
00:44:24,278 --> 00:44:30,682
But it's colored by an ancient Christian hope, especially deeply rooted in Spain,

493
00:44:30,682 --> 00:44:34,186
that of salvation.

494
00:44:34,186 --> 00:44:37,870
The defiant rebel is dying a savior's death.

495
00:44:37,870 --> 00:44:43,614
Arms flung wide, like the crucified Christ.

496
00:44:43,614 --> 00:44:50,072
The stigmata appearing on his opened palm.

497
00:44:50,072 --> 00:44:54,780
There's something else that ties Goya's Execution to Picasso's Slaughter,

498
00:44:54,780 --> 00:44:58,796
something that turns the conventions of art on their head.

499
00:44:58,796 --> 00:45:03,658
And that's the alteration of light from good to evil.

500
00:45:03,658 --> 00:45:08,360
In everything ever written about art, everything ever done in painting,

501
00:45:08,360 --> 00:45:16,400
light is the bringer of beauty, of sublime dignity.

502
00:45:16,400 --> 00:45:18,808
Not here.

503
00:45:18,808 --> 00:45:22,629
Here, it's the instrument of slaughter.

504
00:45:22,629 --> 00:45:28,907
The sallow glean in which the machine men go about their dirty business in the dead of night.

505
00:45:28,907 --> 00:45:33,096
Just obeying orders.

506
00:45:33,096 --> 00:45:36,516
Now, look at Guernica.

507
00:45:36,516 --> 00:45:42,074
You feel the heave and swell of that pyramid of writhing bodies thrusting up through the painting,

508
00:45:42,074 --> 00:45:44,153
don't you?

509
00:45:44,153 --> 00:45:48,341
But what do they strain towards?

510
00:45:48,341 --> 00:45:50,736
An evil eye.

511
00:45:50,736 --> 00:46:01,392
And within that evil eye, the merciless glare of a single electric light bulb.

512
00:46:01,392 --> 00:46:05,982
It's the incandescence of the exterminating angel,

513
00:46:05,982 --> 00:46:11,055
the searchlight of the death squad and the targeting bomber.

514
00:46:11,055 --> 00:46:19,714
The bare bulb of the torturer's cell.

515
00:46:19,714 --> 00:46:27,376
Against it is the candle light held straight out by a heroically beautiful arm.

516
00:46:27,376 --> 00:46:32,675
An epic battle, then, of the good and the wicked lights.

517
00:46:32,675 --> 00:46:39,611
Art versus evil.

518
00:46:39,611 --> 00:46:45,176


519
00:46:45,176 --> 00:46:47,468
It's almost done.

520
00:46:47,468 --> 00:46:56,134
But there's one more necessary touch.

521
00:46:56,134 --> 00:47:04,836
He and Dora cover the body of the dying horse with a field of sharp little downward strokes

522
00:47:04,836 --> 00:47:09,513
that make the body dissolve into a sea of newsprint

523
00:47:09,513 --> 00:47:13,553
or the light of a newsreel projector.

524
00:47:13,553 --> 00:47:16,167
The marks are unreadable.

525
00:47:16,167 --> 00:47:20,307
They're the visual equivalent of static.

526
00:47:20,307 --> 00:47:23,439
Towering above them is the force of art,

527
00:47:23,439 --> 00:47:28,143
breaking through the drone of news.

528
00:47:28,143 --> 00:47:32,252


529
00:47:32,252 --> 00:47:37,159
When he's finished painting he knows he's done the impossible,

530
00:47:37,159 --> 00:47:40,960
created something that reaches deep into modern nightmares.

531
00:47:40,960 --> 00:47:45,698
Hectic, terrifying, burning, screaming.

532
00:47:45,698 --> 00:47:49,553
There's no way out.

533
00:47:49,553 --> 00:47:56,170


534
00:47:56,170 --> 00:48:03,184
It's defiantly modern, but it also pulls us back into the tragedy of the ages.

535
00:48:03,184 --> 00:48:05,532
A cubist commotion.

536
00:48:05,532 --> 00:48:13,006
It's also a classical monument with its wailing women flanking the massive pyramid of death.

537
00:48:13,006 --> 00:48:19,138
It's just paint and canvas, but it has the authority of stone.

538
00:48:19,138 --> 00:48:21,478
It's unbombable.

539
00:48:21,478 --> 00:48:27,121
It's indestructible.

540
00:48:27,121 --> 00:48:30,375
This picture achieves a miracle.

541
00:48:30,375 --> 00:48:35,111
Despite all the images of violence and disaster with which we're bombarded

542
00:48:35,111 --> 00:48:37,444
it makes us feel it.

543
00:48:37,444 --> 00:48:41,189
It gets under our skin.

544
00:48:41,189 --> 00:48:44,203


545
00:48:44,203 --> 00:48:48,829
This, for me, is what all great art has to do,

546
00:48:48,829 --> 00:48:55,497
crash into our lazy routines.

547
00:48:55,497 --> 00:49:02,163
The routine that Guernica tears into is a sickness of our - as well as Picasso's - time.

548
00:49:02,163 --> 00:49:07,033
The habit of taking violent evil in our stride,

549
00:49:07,033 --> 00:49:09,657
The yawn at the massacre.

550
00:49:09,657 --> 00:49:12,684
Seen it before. Go away.

551
00:49:12,684 --> 00:49:16,826
Don't spoil the fun of art.

552
00:49:16,826 --> 00:49:19,649


553
00:49:19,649 --> 00:49:23,134
But Guernica isn't with us for fun.

554
00:49:23,134 --> 00:49:26,307
It's there to rip away the scar tissue,

555
00:49:26,307 --> 00:49:31,205
to make us bleed, to rob us of our sleep.

556
00:49:31,205 --> 00:49:36,070
So, what can art do when the bombs start dropping?

557
00:49:36,070 --> 00:49:44,935
It can instruct us on the obligations of being human.

558
00:49:44,935 --> 00:49:49,421
In all the ways that really counted, Picasso had won.

559
00:49:49,421 --> 00:49:54,124
Art had won. Humanity had won.

560
00:49:54,124 --> 00:49:59,582


561
00:49:59,582 --> 00:50:06,276
So, does Guernica storm the Paris World Fair and the world of art?

562
00:50:06,276 --> 00:50:09,617
Well, no. Not really.

563
00:50:09,617 --> 00:50:14,281
The response is devastatingly polite.

564
00:50:14,281 --> 00:50:18,058
Critics are more bemused than blown away.

565
00:50:18,058 --> 00:50:21,609
Left-wing visitors to the fair from Spain and beyond

566
00:50:21,609 --> 00:50:27,487
looked in vain for muscular proletarians in heroic attitudes.

567
00:50:27,487 --> 00:50:34,923
Or even the grim-faced bad guys in malevolent poses.

568
00:50:34,923 --> 00:50:41,254
One critic described the painting as nothing more than a private brainstorm.

569
00:50:41,254 --> 00:50:46,913
which of course it partly was.

570
00:50:46,913 --> 00:50:50,443


571
00:50:50,443 --> 00:50:54,733
Whilst Guernica is bathed in rather lukewarm praise,

572
00:50:54,733 --> 00:51:02,681
Picasso is off to the Cote d'Azur with Dora and his posse of friends.

573
00:51:02,681 --> 00:51:08,269
But there is now more to Picasso than the Bohemian beach bum act.

574
00:51:08,269 --> 00:51:11,802
He is an artist transformed.

575
00:51:11,802 --> 00:51:20,035
An artist who believes his art has a political purpose and a political message.

576
00:51:20,097 --> 00:51:20,097


577
00:51:20,097 --> 00:51:36,435
>> In Guernica, and all my art, I express my revulsion of the military caste who have sunk Spain into an ocean of pain.

578
00:51:36,435 --> 00:51:42,216
Two years after Guernica Franco was victorious in Spain.

579
00:51:42,216 --> 00:51:47,739
And fascism was eviscerating Europe.

580
00:51:47,739 --> 00:51:55,165
Guernica was not just a painting, it was a prophecy.

581
00:51:55,165 --> 00:52:15,186


582
00:52:15,186 --> 00:52:19,885
In 1944, after four years of grueling war,

583
00:52:19,885 --> 00:52:23,323
Paris was liberated from Nazi occupation,

584
00:52:23,323 --> 00:52:29,179
and Picasso was free to meet an adoring public.

585
00:52:29,179 --> 00:52:30,063


586
00:52:30,063 --> 00:52:33,354
And how they flocked to the studio!

587
00:52:33,354 --> 00:52:40,929
Hungry for stories about Guernica's creation.

588
00:52:40,929 --> 00:52:50,299
He obliges the fans and groupies lingering on those years like an old field marshal reliving his finest campaign.

589
00:52:50,299 --> 00:52:56,778
Well, this was his finest campaign.

590
00:52:56,778 --> 00:53:02,913
Picasso once described the creative process as a kind of complete emptying.

591
00:53:02,913 --> 00:53:07,362
He'd put so much of everything he had to offer in the world into Guernica

592
00:53:07,362 --> 00:53:11,171
during those few feverish months of 1937.

593
00:53:11,171 --> 00:53:15,719
That afterwards there was not much left in the creative tank.

594
00:53:15,719 --> 00:53:25,317
He had 30 years of work ahead, the longest, saddest anticlimax in the history of art.

595
00:53:25,317 --> 00:53:32,393


596
00:53:32,393 --> 00:53:35,952
Pablo Picasso becomes Comrade Picasso,

597
00:53:35,952 --> 00:53:39,538
the Cote d'Azur communist, knocking off hack work

598
00:53:39,538 --> 00:53:43,248
for the party of peace and good will.

599
00:53:43,248 --> 00:53:46,313
And what's worse than being a poster boy for Stalin?

600
00:53:46,313 --> 00:53:49,956
Well, just being a poster boy.

601
00:53:49,956 --> 00:53:54,390
Settling into celebrity, the Riviera tan ever deepening,

602
00:53:54,390 --> 00:54:02,237
Picasso leaps from the pages of Marxist critiques to the fashion glossies.

603
00:54:02,237 --> 00:54:06,190


604
00:54:06,190 --> 00:54:12,113
In contrast, Guernica accumulates symbolic power.

605
00:54:12,113 --> 00:54:17,267
The painting takes up residence in New York City, where, for three decades,

606
00:54:17,267 --> 00:54:25,362
it burns with moral heat on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art.

607
00:54:25,362 --> 00:54:31,057
Its creator had done something no one who had known him could have ever predicted.

608
00:54:31,057 --> 00:54:35,766
He'd rescued modern art from the curse of its own cleverness,

609
00:54:35,766 --> 00:54:41,542
from the curse of novelty.

610
00:54:41,542 --> 00:54:45,083
Guernica's always been bigger than art,

611
00:54:45,083 --> 00:54:48,559
uncontainable by mere museum walls.

612
00:54:48,559 --> 00:54:56,425
It's one of those very rare creations that gets into the bloodstream of the common culture.

613
00:54:56,425 --> 00:55:00,957
It's become the shared heritage of an appalled humanity,

614
00:55:00,957 --> 00:55:08,442
and a mirror of the suffering of civilians in every conflict.

615
00:55:08,442 --> 00:55:31,217


616
00:55:31,217 --> 00:55:39,413
[church bells]

617
00:55:39,413 --> 00:55:45,455
In 1981, with Franco dead and democracy at last alive,

618
00:55:45,455 --> 00:55:52,120
Guernica found its way home to Spain.

619
00:55:52,120 --> 00:55:56,266
Picasso never saw its return, having died eight years before,

620
00:55:56,266 --> 00:56:06,700
but he relished the prospect that his painting would outlast Franco.

621
00:56:06,700 --> 00:56:10,925
Here's the old thing, comfortably settled in Madrid.

622
00:56:10,925 --> 00:56:15,248
And just when you think, well, it's a magnificent relic,

623
00:56:15,248 --> 00:56:21,563
what can it possibly have to say to us in our video-saturated, digitally-enhanced age?

624
00:56:21,563 --> 00:56:27,192
Something comes along to awaken from those old black and white characters

625
00:56:27,192 --> 00:56:34,062
the tempestuous force of their original creation.

626
00:56:35,647 --> 00:56:35,932


627
00:56:35,932 --> 00:56:41,764
In February 2003, the American Delegation to the United Nations

628
00:56:41,764 --> 00:56:50,431
decided to make its pessimistic case for the likelihood of armed intervention in Iraq.

629
00:56:50,431 --> 00:56:57,682
Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council was to be followed by a press conference.

630
00:56:57,682 --> 00:57:06,036
And then, at the last minute, someone noticed something inconvenient about the location.

631
00:57:06,036 --> 00:57:13,035
There was a tapestry reproduction of Guernica hanging on the wall.

632
00:57:13,035 --> 00:57:22,481
Oh dear, screaming women. Burning houses. Dead babies. Jagged lines.

633
00:57:22,481 --> 00:57:26,754
"Cover it up," said the TV people. "It's too distracting."

634
00:57:26,754 --> 00:57:35,526
So Guernica was shrouded by a big blue drape.

635
00:57:36,373 --> 00:57:36,484


636
00:57:36,484 --> 00:57:39,662
The news handlers could have said - hold on a minute!

637
00:57:39,662 --> 00:57:43,471
We could show the painting. After all, this is what tyrants do.

638
00:57:43,471 --> 00:57:46,423
Death. Suffering. Misery.

639
00:57:46,423 --> 00:57:50,552
But they didn't.

640
00:57:50,552 --> 00:57:55,936
However you massaged it, there was something about the way that damn picture would look on the news

641
00:57:55,936 --> 00:57:58,747
that would upset people.

642
00:57:58,747 --> 00:58:03,415
Much better to cover it up.

643
00:58:03,415 --> 00:58:04,865


644
00:58:04,865 --> 00:58:10,932
It was, I suppose, the ultimate backhand compliment to the power of art.

645
00:58:10,932 --> 00:58:13,425
You're the mightiest country in the world.

646
00:58:13,425 --> 00:58:15,247
You can throw your armies around.

647
00:58:15,247 --> 00:58:17,301
You can get rid of dictators.

648
00:58:17,301 --> 00:58:22,938
But hey - don't tangle with a masterpiece.

649
00:58:22,938 --> 00:58:26,938