I'm in Malaga, birthplace of the painter Pablo Picasso. And this is where he came to love the bullfight.
(BULL LOWING)
(CROWD CHEERING)
In Spain it's known as the corrida. Picasso was a passionate devotee of the matador's ballet of death.
Pirouetting with the ferocious bull. Those images haunt Picasso's long life as artist and lover.
During the Spanish Civil War, he painted the terror of the aerial bombardment of a small town
called Guernica. In a painting that featured a bull and a disembowelled horse dying in agony.
Picasso drew those powerful images directly from the bullring but hideously distorted by war
into a nightmare of slaughter and grief.
My father fought in that war and like the painter became a political exile,
yearning for Spain.
Without the bombing of Guernica, I wouldn't exist and my perspective on Picasso is shaped by my father.
91 million. 92 million. Three of the twelve most expensive paintings in the world are Picassos.
And selling at $95 million.
Nick, your bidder at $95 million.
With more than 50,000 artworks to his name, Picasso was one of the most prolific and influential artists
of all time. The total value of his art today runs into billions of pounds.
Picasso was one of the 20th century's greatest icons. He gave a new meaning to the colour blue
with his melancholy blue period canvases.
And he was a pioneer of Cubism, an extraordinary technique that allowed the artist to portray his subject
from multiple viewpoints layered on top of each other.
But Picasso was also a philanderer, famed for innumerable relationships with women
that began in his teens and lasted into old age.
Without exception, these women filled his canvases as much as his bed.
I've come to Malaga, in the deep south of Spain, where Picasso was born and brought up.
Although Picasso spent much of his life in France, my experience of my father's exile inclines me to believe
that Picasso's Spanishness defines the man and his art to the end.
For the Spaniard, family is all important as I learnt from my Spanish father, Luis, while growing up
in Stanmore, Middlesex, in the 1950s.
I am immensely influenced by my father. And, I think, influenced by his Spanishness.
I was very aware when I was growing up in England that my father was something different.
Literally foreign. He spoke with a foreign accent. My father was quite eccentric. When he was crossing
a street in Britain he would sometimes bullfight the cars. He would pretend the car was a bull
and have the imaginary cape. So, I was terribly aware, when I was growing up, that I was half Spanish.
I was hearing the Spanish language all the time.
Picasso was raised in an apartment in this bourgeois block of mansion flats
on the corner of the Plaza de la Merced.
It's quite a bit block of apartments here, isn't it? Yes, four floors. I'm shown around by local guide,
Rosa Lopes. Let's come in. Thank you.
The family living room is top of my list of things to see because it explains how it was that the young
Pablo first picked up a brush and started to paint.
This is by Picasso's father. Yes. This is the signature, here, in the corner.
His father Jose Ruiz Blasco was an art teacher. He painted pigeons.
And they're exquisitely rendered but utterly lacking in ambition.
Perhaps it was because of this that his son chose not to adopt his father's surname
but to use his mother's instead. Picasso.
I think Picasso once said that in life you have to kill your father. In the sense that you have to go beyond
your father's achievements. Is that right? Yes. This is the reason why Picasso chose the surname
of this mother, Picasso. Not like his father's, Ruiz.
To be different in the painting and also in the way of life.
Amongst the family bric-a-brac, culled from far and wide for this little museum
is a fascinating family photograph.
With a teenage Pablo sitting at the head of the table.
It's a very interesting photo. Partly because of the distinctive face of Picasso, but also it tells us
everything about their lifestyle. This is a very elegant lunch party. Yes.
What's so extraordinary about Picasso are the eyes. Huge eyes.
The adventurous, young Picasso stole away to explore this city of bulls, gypsies, guitars, flamenco dancers
and those mournful flamenco songs that speak of love, blood and death.
I've got a postcard of sketches that Picasso made when he was nine years old. And it's interesting because
along one side he's been doing his father's thing, sketching pigeons.
And then on the other side, or turning it around he's done a bullfight.
The bullfight is very, very good. The bull's well done the matador is being tossed by the bull.
He's got the entire atmosphere and he's just done the crowd with little squiggles. A very mature approach
because he leaves all the detail to our imagination.
I'm drawn to the bullring because the blood and the sun energised Picasso.
(SPEAKING SPANISH)
Salvador Farelo was one of this city's greatest bullfighters, who ingested this passion
virtually with his mother's milk. I was asking Salvador how bullfighting appeals to children as it did to him,
as it did to Picasso as a child, and he was saying, 'That's the way we were brought up.' It was fundamental
in their education inside the home and even as children they were always pretending to be bullfighters.
They were seizing a tablecloth or their mother's apron and going through the motions of being
a bullfighter. (BOTH SPEAKING SPANISH)
Beautiful posture as the bull is coming past. I find this photograph terrifying because the bull
is bigger than Salvador by a long way.
But here, his leg is strapped up from a previous injury. (SPEAKING SPANISH)
On that day, two matadors were gored.
Salvador has repeatedly cheated death in this arena. Why would Picasso, pointing his paintbrush
at the canvas, be so drawn to the matador aiming his sword at the bull?
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
Bullfighting appears so much in Spanish art and it is because bullfighting is itself pure art.
If the corrida lies at the heart of the Spanish soul, it's no surprise that Picasso should continue
to draw so much inspiration from it. The symbolism of the corrida is central to Guernica,
a painting that stands as a landmark in Picasso's personal relationship with Spain.
Guernica was created as a public memorial to the most cataclysmic event in Spain's history,
the Spanish Civil War.
In league with Hitler and Mussolini, the fascist General Franco set about overthrowing the Spanish Republic.
The war lasted from 1936 until 1939 and Franco's victory would lead to the exile of both my father
and Picasso from their beloved homeland.
# RAVEL: Bolero
Forty years earlier, Picasso came to Madrid for the first time to study art. He was just 15.
But it was at the Prado Museum that Picasso's artistic education flourished because here
his extraordinary eyes could absorb some of the greatest paintings in world history
created by Spanish geniuses.
Images which, at a time when there weren't many reproductions, were probably completely unknown to him.
When he arrived in Madrid, Picasso had left his father behind in every sense and from now on he would
learn from the great masters.
El Greco, Ribera,
Velazquez, Murillo,
Zurbaran, Goya.
The walls of the Prado's grand portico proclaim the great names of Spanish art.
I want to stand before the great pictures that Picasso saw as a boy because was his lasting memory
of those paintings that continued to inspire his own work until the end of his days.
This painting by Goya shows the horror of war.
The hidden faces of the French invaders, Napoleon's robotic firing squad are sharply contrasted
with the horror and fear of a Spanish patriot at the moment of facing death.
Picasso was deeply moved by this painting, more than 50 years later he made direct reference to it
with Massacre In Korea, his response to the American invasion in the Korean War.
Again the firing squad is anonymous. We're drawn to the faces of the victims.
Vulnerable.
Naked.
Much to the disappointment of his father, who disliked the work of the 16th-century painter, El Greco,
Picasso became a passionate admirer of the distinctive, elongated figures depicted in these sacred scenes.
When Picasso's friend, Carlos Casagemas committed suicide because of a failed love affair,
Picasso painted a memorial in the style of El Greco but secularity replaces Catholicism.
Instead of angels and virgins, scantily-clad girls line the man's ascent to the hereafter.
The great images of Spanish art inhabited Picasso's imagination right up to his death.
My father used to talk to me about Spanish art. He was particularly a fan of Velazquez.
He told me Velazquez was actually the first impressionist ever. But I first heard about Picasso from my mother.
Because my eyes are not at the same level as each other and my right ear is a bit bigger than my left.
This showed up in childhood photographs. You can see, here, that the eyes are not level.
And my mother used to say to me, very affectionately, 'You're my little Picasso'.
Atocha station. It's time to leave the capital and head for the other Spanish city that made such a mark
on the young Picasso in his impressionable years.
Barcelona was the last Spanish city where Picasso set foot, although he didn't know it at the time.
Barcelona was also the last city on my father's escape route out of the country before turning up
as a refugee in England.
By April 1939, General Franco had won the war and for those, like Picasso and my father,
who'd backed the losing side, to be in Spain was to invite imprisonment or death.
My father was a very gentle man. During the Civil War, although he served at the front, he refused
to carry arms in case he would kill a Spanish brother. And, of course, that could be literally because he had
brothers fighting on the other side.
At home we weren't even allowed to kill flies. He had such respect for life. But he was so angry
all the time about what happened in Spain. He hated Franco, talked about it obsessively.
Almost my earliest memory is of my father talking about General Franco. Despite his love of life,
his respect of life, one of my enduring memories is his whoop of triumph when one of Franco's
closest aides was blown up. It was most untypical but that's how much
he hated the men who'd done that to Spain.
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain but it's also the capital of Catalonia, an autonomous community
claiming a distinct nationality.
This is a city with a history of independent free thinkers. People like the artist, Salvador Dali,
and the architect, Antoni Gaudi, who's work is everywhere. Not least the Sagrada Familia, the great church
that they're still building 130 years on.
Day and night the city offered inspiration and titillation to artist and adolescent, Pablo Picasso.
You know, even today Barcelona is buzzy. This region of Spain, Catalonia, has it's own language
and in Picasso's day, people used to meet in bars to plot independence and they still do.
When the painter arrived in the city, the new revolutionary architecture of Gaudi set this place apart
from stuffy, old Madrid. The boy from Malaga had arrived.
Eat your heart out, Tom Cruise.
Respect.
This is the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. Five adjoining medieval palaces house one of the most
extensive collections of Picasso artworks in the world.
Amongst the treasures, a self portrait painted when Picasso was 15 years old, shortly after the family
first arrived in Barcelona.
It's fascinating to see the man emerging from the chrysalis of the boy. The foppish, devil-may-care
hair sits almost comically against those formal, stylish clothes.
But that penetrating gaze and the steely expression demand to be taken seriously.
Like many young men in Spain at the time, Picasso joined a tertulia,
a largely male, conversational gathering in this case of artists and writers. Strong friendships
were an important feature of Spanish society and endured for Picasso throughout his life.
The teenage Pablo Picasso became a frequent customer at the cafe of the Quatre Gats, the Four Cats.
He must've been thrilled to be admitted into the inner circle of intellectuals who used meet here
and debate. I'm going inside and I'm told that it looks unchanged since Picasso's day.
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
This is the famous El Quatre Gats. Yes. It looks just like the photos of Picasso's day.
But it closed in 1903, when was it reopened? It opened in 1977. And Picasso apparently sat in this chair.
This is Picasso's chair.
Fantastic.
This is a spectacular room.
It was in this room in 1900 that Picasso gave his first one-man show at just 18 years old.
More than a century on, portraits of adored members of his Barcelona tertulia still adorn the walls.
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
And these are reproductions of the pictures he had in that first exhibition.
That really is very historic. I notice that he is signing himself P. Ruiz Picasso.
He's still using his father's name followed by his mother's surname, Picasso. Then later he drops
the father's name and just goes with the mother's surname. Picasso is a much more unusual name than Ruiz.
In Picasso's day, the city's illustrious personalities and their effervescent debates
gave life to the cafe. Now visitors evoke that idealised age over a 'plato del dia' and the sparkle comes
from a glass of cava.
I like to think how much the young, unsophisticated Picasso would have had to learn when he first came
here to the Four Cats cafe. Unyet he became the dominant member for that intellectual circle.
And, of course, really the only one who's remembered today. And now, this place attracts not intellectuals
but tourists draw from the four corners of the globe by the magnetism of brand Picasso.
At the age of 23, Picasso exchanged Barcelona for the even brighter lights of Paris.
The artist's city.
Picasso would never live in Spain again.
30 years after his arrival in Paris, the ambitious youth from Barcelona had become the famous, wealthy
middle-aged artist creating the brash, idiosyncratic art that we identify as his without hesitation.
But just as Picasso had changed, so had Spain.
In 1936, the country was plunged into civil war.
My father was on the Republican side, which drew support
from the Soviet Union fighting Franco's fascist forces.
Picasso hadn't visited Spain since 1934 and was reluctant to leave Paris,
which was now his permanent home.
In the midst of brewing unrest throughout Europe, a world fair was being planned in Paris.
Picasso was asked by the Spanish Republic to create an artwork for the event to help bring his country's
desperate plight to international attention.
It's hard for me to believe that here in Paris in 1937, just two years before the outbreak of World War Two,
they held a world fair. Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany milked it for propaganda.
Here stood the Soviet pavilion with enormous figures toiling with hammer and sickle.
And an eagle and a swastika on the Nazi building symbolically barred the path for the communists.
And in between stood the pavilion of the beleaguered Spanish Republic on who's territory Russia and Germany
were fighting a proxy war.
Meanwhile, barely a couple of miles away in his studio Picasso was mulling over how to respond
to one of the most important commissions of his life.
Then, without warning, on the 26th of April 1937, the little town of Guernica, in the Basque region
of Spain's north coast, was brutally attacked.
Franco had enlisted the help of the Nazi Luftwaffe in a ruthless aerial bombing raid on this proudly defiant
part of the country.
The Basque government reported more than 1600 deaths. Picasso was outraged.
But his shock and anger galvanised his powers of visual invention and within days he had the picture
in his head. For the next six weeks, he worked with tireless passion. Uniquely, a series of photographs
was taken during the creation of the painting. We see how Picasso introduced his symbols
then erased them, moved them, rotated them. Finally arriving at a noble simplicity.
But it wasn't only images from the war that found their way onto the canvas. Guernica was also created
in the midst of the turmoil of Picasso's personal life.
Since the late 1920s, Picasso had a lover called Marie-Therese Walter.
Characterised in his art as sunny, curvaceous, sexy and often asleep.
But, in 1936, Picasso met French photographer Dora Maar who was portrayed as a much darker,
spikier presence and most famously as the weeping woman.
Guernica was created during the overlap when a new relationship had started but before the old one
had ended. The arena for this conflict between the women
was the studio in the Rue des Grands Augustins, Paris.
It's quite emotional for me to visit the studio where Picasso painted Guernica in an ancient building
who's history was very attractive to Picasso. We're lucky that it survived. It's now owned
by the bailiffs of Paris and restored by the National Committee for Education.
I'm joined by Picasso's granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso, who's grandmother
was Marie-Therese Walter.
This is really quite moving. What a wonderful space. Yes, very much so.
This was big enough to paint Guernica? Well, that's where he started making all the preparatory
studies and he started working here. Then he realised that the work, which was quite significantly large,
it was 3.5 by 7.8 which is 26 square metres.
He had to incline the work and it was too inclined in order to work so he decided to work downstairs.
But unfortunately these days the place has been transformed into offices.
During the course of the film, I've been thinking about the horse and the bull that are in Guernica
but what other influences do you see in the painting? Well, there is Marie-Therese. Your grandmother.
Mm-hm. My grandmother, who he had met in 1927. Despite the fact that in 1936 he meets Dora Maar,
they continue to have a relationship and his heart and work is torn between those two major muses.
If you look carefully at Guernica, you can see evocations of both Marie-Therese, Diana's grandmother,
so often portrayed as the woman with the lamp in Picasso's works, and on the far left the other woman
in his life at this time, Dora Maar, translated into the weeping woman.
After six weeks of working continuously, with few hours for sleep, the canvas was finally
complete and ready to take it's place in the newly finished Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Fair.
The original Spanish pavilion has long since gone but in more recent years a replica has been built
in Barcelona as a tribute to the doomed Spanish Republic of the 1930s.
By going in here today, I'll be able to appreciate how the world first saw Guernica, which proclaimed
to the world the desperate struggle for survival of the Republic during the Civil War.
Hello, Michael. Welcome. I'm met by Lydia Martinez Altariba. This is an extraordinary piece of architecture
for the 1930s. The pavilion was designed so that visitors walked up a steep ramp to enter the exhibition
at the top of the building on the second floor.
Once inside, visitors would have been hit not just with wonderful Spanish art but with Republican propaganda
claiming credit for social reforms and progress against poverty and illiteracy.
Look at the pillars, the colour. The building is now the library of the Spanish Civil War,
a subject still painful and divisive for Spanish people. Prominently exhibited are the most extraordinary
pro-Republican posters mocking Franco, Hitler, Mussolini and the rest of the fascist hierarchy.
Visitors in 1937 would then have made their way out to an open ground floor and there in front of them
was the climax of the exhibition.
And this is Guernica.
So this is where Guernica was when the building was in Paris.
Exposed to the elements. Yes, it's true. But it was like that. And the size of the painting is dictated
by that space. Exactly. It was commissioned. That's why the size is this.
This is nothing more than a faded copy but it's exactly the same size as the original painting
and it gives you a sense of how Picasso's Guernica was first revealed to a stunned world
more than 70 years ago.
The original work now rests permanently in Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum and I'm about to see
the actual painting for the very first time.
So, now I meet Guernica face to face.
And although I've see all these figures so often in representation, each of them is itself colossal.
The screaming figures.
The woman with the baby, the fallen soldier.
The horse, of course, and the bull.
All on an enormous scale. Everywhere is suffering and distress.
Very, very bleak,
For me, this is Picasso's greatest work. not because it represents the bombing of a small town in 1937
but because it has a universality. It's depiction of blood, horror, death, fire and grief
are in no way limited to one place and one date.
In this single canvas there's more eloquence than in 1000 volumes of words.
Gijs van Hensbergen helps me to understand some of the symbolism.
There was a moment after the Second World War when an American soldier came and visited Picasso and said,
'Pablo, what does the bull mean? Does that mean Franco?'
And he said...
He didn't like it when people tried to close down the meanings and make it too literal.
He said, 'For me the bull is brutality.'
The horse, is it a victim?
For the Basques, they feel the horse is one of their totem images.
So they felt very strongly a sense of ownership about the wounded horse and, of course, in a bullfight,
in the early days of the bullfight at the beginning of the 20th century the horse always got disembowelled
by the bull. But again the bull is there in a... It's almost like a silent witness
on this strange scene that's gone on. It's terrifying.
Picasso's insight into the horrors of war didn't stop with Guernica.
These are the vast store rooms of the Tate Gallery, somewhere in England.
I've brought with me Antony Penrose who knew Picasso when he was a little boy.
Antony's father, Roland Penrose was Picasso's friend and biographer.
I want to understand how Picasso continued to channel his pain and anger at the Spanish Civil War
through the harrowing image of his new lover.
This painting was owned by the Penrose family for years before it passed to the Tate.
It was completed just four months after Guernica.
Well, there's no mistaking it. Absolutely none.
Oh, my goodness.
So, Antony, that is a very familiar sight to you. Very familiar but whenever I see her
there is still a shockwave, a fizz of excitement.
The most staggering thing for me are the eyes.
When I was little I asked my mum, 'Why is the lady crying?'
And she said to me, 'She was living in a town called Guernica and bombers came over and dropped bombs
on the town and killed lots of people. Maybe they even killed her little boy.' For a long time
afterwards I was very cautions when an aeroplane went over. It was a frightening event. But what
stayed with me... In her eyes, do you think they look like aeroplanes? The silhouettes?
That's like he's saying this memory was seared into her, that was absolutely indelible in her.
That moment that the bombers came over. To some extent this painting puzzles me. She's not in the open,
as in Guernica, suffering a bombardment. She's in a room with wallpaper, she's wearing a bright
coloured hat, she's got a flower. This doesn't seem to relate to that experience of the bombing.
What do you make of that. Oh, it does. It's absolutely spot on because it was market day
when the bombers came over. She's dressed in her best hat. She's going out to the market to have
a wonderful time. Meet her old friends and so on and then suddenly this absolute cataclysm occurs.
It's totally beyond her comprehension. It's the first time aerial warfare has been used against
civilians like this. It's this incomprehension. This horror, this shock is so best contrasted against
the flamboyance of the colour. It's a woman who's life, in one split second, has been totally destroyed
along with that of 2000 other people.
This is a photograph that my mum, Lee Miller, took very soon, it was just a few weeks, before Picasso
painted this picture. And when you look, do you see Dora's hair. It's so obvious, isn't it?
And then look at the profile. You can see a sense of that really strong nose and chin.
You can see this is an intelligent, really determined woman and he's used her very beautifully
to portray this tragic figure here. Your father met Picasso in the year that the Spanish Civil War began.
Do you know whether your father had a view about where Guernica stood in the works of Picasso?
Did he regard it as one of the greatest of his works? He certainly regarded it as probably the most
important painting in the world.
But in many ways, the creation of Guernica marked only the beginning
of Picasso's reignited passion for Spain.
Picasso was educated here, in Madrid, over a century ago.
Today it's hard to understand the suffering endured by the city under three years of siege
and 35 of dictatorship.
Virtually every trace of General Franco's presence has been obliterated, except one.
The Spanish Civil War ended at this spot when after three years of appalling siege, Madrid finally
fell to the forces of General Franco. Later he built this triumphal arch.
(TRUMPET FANFARE)
Picasso would not return to his native land while Franco was alive. Nor would he allow his painting,
Guernica, to come to Spain. Today, the picture is in Madrid, the triumphal arch is neglected,
marooned on a traffic island, almost inaccessible and daubed in graffiti demanding that it be demolished.
Franco's victory at the end of the Civil War marked the beginning of Picasso's and my father's exiles
from their homeland.
During their banishment, they held Spain evermore deeply in their hearts.
Without the bombing of Guernica, I wouldn't exist. You may be wondering how I can make such a claim.
I've come back to London to meet a very old friend of my family who's better qualified than anyone
to tell the story.
Erminio Martinez was one of the children evacuated from war-torn Spain in 1937.
Hello, Erminio. How lovely to see you. How are you?
His heart rending refugee's story comes straight from the horror of Picasso's Guernica.
That is the Habana docking at Southampton
with very nearly 4000 children, no parents, just 4000 children onboard. How old were you?
I was seven a week before we left Spain.
Your parents had sent you on this ship and presumably you didn't know if you'd ever see them again.
They didn't know whether they'd see you again. Well, when one is young like this, one takes things
as they come. I was young.
However horrific Erminio's separation from his family must have been, he was lucky in that without
the widespread condemnation of the bombing of Guernica the British government wouldn't have allowed
the children to enter the United Kingdom.
This is your father...
When my father, a university lecturer, arrived in England
he helped to teach the displaced Spanish children like Erminio. I remember that your father
was eking out a living peeling potatoes and washing dishes in a restaurant.
My father loved to dress well. And it is interesting that somehow in his poverty he turns out so smartly.
He even has clean and beautifully polished shoes here. Yes.
Amazing. Yes.
Here you can see my mother very clearly. I remember your mother, Cora, very clearly.
Beautiful smile. Yes. Your mother, of course, was doing Spanish at Oxford. That's right.
And she couldn't got to Spain to have the usual practice of spoken Spanish so she turned up
at the colony helping with some of the younger children to give them a bath and so forth.
Joining in the life of the colony and, of course, that's where she met your father.
Yeah.
The unlikely encounter of my Scottish mother and my Spanish father
and the subsequent creation of my brothers and me was one of the few fortunate consequences
of the Spanish Civil War. Picasso's painting reminds us that their happy meeting contrasted
with the horror of mother's rendered childless and children orphaned.
So, Erminio, tell me, as a painter yourself, how do you rate this painting amongst paintings,
let's say, of the 20th century. How important is this painting? I always say to people in this country,
'Do you know Picasso?' 'Oh, yes, Picasso.' 'Do you know Guernica?' 'No.' So I say, 'It's the most
famous painting of the last century.' Still very, very relevant today.
Because Picasso never returned to Spain after he painted Guernica, I believe that, like my father,
he dwelt more and more on the memories of his Spanish homeland.
After the Second World War, Picasso move to the south of France where the climate and the customs recalled
his native Spain. Picasso's piercing gaze was often to be seen amongst the crowd in the French bullrings
of Vallauris and Arles.
But attending the corrida was not enough. In 1957, he embarked on a series of lithographs
to illustrate the Tauromaquia, a famous Spanish handbook on the art of the matador.
Twenty years after Guernica, Picasso imbued these images with a powerful nostalgia for his Spanish homeland.
To gauge how potent Picasso's Spanishness was after decades of exile, I've come to meet two people
who've become modern icons of classic Spanish culture.
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
Javier Conde is Malaga's most celebrated matador, his wife, Estrella Morente,
is one of Spain's greatest flamenco singers. In terms of fame, they're the Posh and Becks of Spain.
But for me they represent the duende, the very spirit of the Spanish soul.
This is a poster of Estrella by a very well-known poster maker. It's a very fine piece of work.
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
I want to know whether, after 20 years in exile, Picasso could still capture the spirit of the bullfight.
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
Javier says that these black and white drawings really capture, with the simplest black and white lines,
the whole essence of the bullfight. Which, in a sense, is very simple
but that Picasso, just with these few daubs, manages to capture the essence of the whole thing.
It's clear from these images that 70 years after he drew his first
bullfight as a nine year old
in Malaga, Picasso never lost his cultural and national identity.
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
I asked Estrella if she could recognise, in any Picasso painting, flamenco song?
Without any hesitation she said, 'Guernica. There can't be a painting which is more expressive
of a flamenco song than Guernica. Because it is this massive lament.'
Estrella normally sings to crowded auditoriums in Paris, London and New York so I feel very privileged
that she's offered to give me a private recital in her beautiful home.
She's going to sing a piece written by her father.
(SINGS IN SPANISH)
Adios Malaga is dedicated to Picasso's childhood.
At the end of his life, Picasso turned full circle back to his formative years in Spain
when, as a young artist, he was exposed to the great masters of Spanish art in the Prado.
One painting in particular was seared on to his brain.
By his mid 70s, the memory of it and of the artist who created it demanded his attention.
Painted 350 years ago, and a favourite of my father's, Velazquez's Las Meninas was a breathtaking
originality. Defying convention, the great, royal portrait artist, Diego Velazquez had depicted himself
at work on a portrait of the king and queen, who seem to be standing where you, the viewer, are standing.
And their majesty is reduced to a small reflection in a distant mirror.
As original in it's day as Picasso's cubism, Velazquez forced people to see the world from new perspectives.
Las Meninas is one of the most influential paintings in the history of western art.
This painting is so charming.
So enigmatic. So Spanish.
I can imagine that if I were in exile, like my father or like Picasso, I would miss it.
I would yearn for it. And if you're an artist like Picasso you would become obsessive about it.
You'd want to paint it again and again.
I'd like to see now, what Picasso did with it. Did he add to it?
If you can add to such a masterpiece.
So obsessed was he with Las Meninas, that Picasso painted 45 different versions over a period of six months.
He was 75 and still exiled in the south of France.
His homeland, Malaga, the Prado, all were evermore distant memories.
Here is Picasso reworking obsessively the painting by Velazquez, Las Meninas, that he'd seen as a child.
It's fascinating the way Picasso reproduces details from the original. Here's the back of the canvas
as in the original. This is the artist, Velazquez, with the cross on his chest. Nice and prominent.
The king and queen reflected in the mirror have been reduced to two dots. The princess is clear enough.
The figure in the doorway. Two figures behind kicking the dog.
Picasso did not suffer from modesty.
It's perfectly clear that he sees himself alongside Velazquez. He has the right to take one of the greatest
pieces of Spanish art, one of the most famous paintings in the world and rearrange it.
Picasso, 23 years in exile, still absolutely, quintessentially Spanish.
And claiming his position amongst the greatest artists of Spanish history, of world history.
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