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 drop dark hints he's hiding Jewish friends.
Then they trash the studio a bit.
One day, there's a visit that passes into the Picasso legend.
The unwelcome visitor snoops 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?
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 Thérese Walter,
and Picasso sees her one afternoon outside Galeries 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 Therése would become his lover
and a compulsive obsession in his art.
In 1932, he poses Marie Therése 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 colour 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 avant-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.
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.
The message was, if the sovereign can handle the 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 bare-backed 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 line-up.
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 juddering 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 revelled 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 criticise hypocrisy and injustice.
George Grosz, the German artist,
was busy having a go at the military dinosaurs and Nazi sympathisers
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 Thérese,
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.
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 turn the ideal forms of art,
the beauty of a human body, into a sick joke.
So much butcher's chops.
Goya's obsessions infected Picasso.
The old master's bullfights, with their rituals of slaughter,
pulling him inexorably back to Spain.
In 1934, Picasso crossed the Pyrenees for a tour of his homeland.
For part of the trip, he was joined by Marie Thérese.
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 bullring.
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 Premonition of Civil War
is a Surrealist's 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 bullring.
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 altarpiece,
a mural or reworking of an ancient frieze.
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 is 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 favoured 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 and 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 defences of the Prado museum,
home to Spain's precious art collection.
When Picasso hears about it, he feels personally assaulted.
The great iconoclastic modernist, Senor Cubism,
suddenly protective of his own ancestry.
All those Spanish masters, especially Goya,
witness to the disasters of war.
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 Therése is pregnant.
He feels creatively paralysed.
''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 a 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.
And 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
at 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.
Seven thousand 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.
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.
Waves of German and Italian aircraft,
flying in formation, created a relentless storm of havoc.
Over 5,000 bombs were dropped on the defenceless 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.
1,645 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 levelled 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 terrorise defenceless 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 slithered and crashed 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 bloodstained 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 1st, 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 Thérese, and their new baby on the weekend.
And he umpires a catfight 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 trapped with arteries of excruciating pain,
punctured with tears, begin to appear in the Guernica drawings.
He's become the impresario of anguish.
Marie Thérese 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.
Twenty 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,
born out of the wound, as if to say,
something good may come from blood.
But it ends with a deep, black, lozenge-shaped hole in the horse,
right at the optical dead-centre 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, startlingly, 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 was 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 3rd 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 coloured by an ancient Christian hope,
especially deeply rooted in Spain,
that of salvation.
The defiant rebel is dying a saviour'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 alternation 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 gleam 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 candlelight, 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, yet also a classical monument,
with it's 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.
For 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 gruelling 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.
But afterwards, there was not much left in the creative tank.
He had 30 years of work ahead.
The longest, saddest anti-climax 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 goodwill.
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'd known him could ever have 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.
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 TVpeople. ''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 damned 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.