1 00:00:08,047 --> 00:00:12,120 It's the depths of winter, 1941. 2 00:00:18,807 --> 00:00:21,526 Pablo Picasso is living and working 3 00:00:21,607 --> 00:00:25,236 on the top floor of an old house in Left Bank Paris. 4 00:00:27,047 --> 00:00:30,323 The Third Reich owns Europe. 5 00:00:33,167 --> 00:00:37,126 Every so often, Picasso gets visits from the Gestapo. 6 00:00:37,207 --> 00:00:43,077 They mutter about degenerate art and drop dark hints he's hiding Jewish friends. 7 00:00:43,167 --> 00:00:45,920 Then they trash the studio a bit. 8 00:00:46,807 --> 00:00:51,198 One day, there's a visit that passes into the Picasso legend. 9 00:00:59,407 --> 00:01:02,956 The unwelcome visitor snoops around a bit. 10 00:01:03,047 --> 00:01:06,756 Then he notices there are postcards lying around 11 00:01:06,847 --> 00:01:09,315 of Picasso's most famous work. 12 00:01:11,487 --> 00:01:15,799 His epic depiction of what happened when German bombs 13 00:01:15,887 --> 00:01:20,324 fell on a small Basque town in the Spanish Civil War. 14 00:01:24,367 --> 00:01:25,641 Guernica. 15 00:01:28,527 --> 00:01:30,722 ''Did you do this?'' he says. 16 00:01:30,807 --> 00:01:36,359 ''Oh, no,'' says Picasso. ''You did. Go on, take one. Souvenir.'' 17 00:01:36,447 --> 00:01:39,120 Great comeback, good story, 18 00:01:39,207 --> 00:01:42,404 but what can art really do in the face of atrocity? 19 00:01:56,167 --> 00:01:58,920 Shouldn't art just stick to what it does best, 20 00:01:59,007 --> 00:02:04,206 the delivery of pleasure, and forget about being a paintbrush warrior? 21 00:02:04,287 --> 00:02:06,926 Or is it, when the bombs are dropping, 22 00:02:07,007 --> 00:02:10,204 that we find out what art is really for? 23 00:02:44,727 --> 00:02:47,605 Paris in the 1920s. 24 00:02:50,167 --> 00:02:54,877 Pablo Picasso was the sovereign of modern painting. 25 00:02:54,967 --> 00:02:58,846 He was living in a fancy apartment near the Champs Elysees 26 00:02:58,967 --> 00:03:04,041 with his Russian ballerina wife, Olga, and their little boy. 27 00:03:06,287 --> 00:03:09,643 He showed his paintings in a classy gallery, 28 00:03:10,927 --> 00:03:14,442 and all of art was his kingdom. 29 00:03:16,527 --> 00:03:22,284 Drunk on self-confidence and cleverness, he could take it wherever he fancied. 30 00:03:27,367 --> 00:03:33,715 One day, in January, 1927, he noticed something he definitely fancied. 31 00:03:41,207 --> 00:03:45,519 Blonde, vaguely Nordic, statuesque, 16. 32 00:03:47,807 --> 00:03:50,275 She's called Marie Thérese Walter, 33 00:03:50,367 --> 00:03:55,202 and Picasso sees her one afternoon outside Galeries Lafayette, a department store. 34 00:04:01,247 --> 00:04:04,000 He loses no time, goes up to her and says, 35 00:04:04,087 --> 00:04:07,557 ''Mademoiselle, you have a most interesting face" 36 00:04:07,647 --> 00:04:09,717 ''and I should like to paint it." 37 00:04:09,807 --> 00:04:11,559 ''I am Picasso.'' 38 00:04:22,087 --> 00:04:25,159 Marie Therése would become his lover 39 00:04:25,247 --> 00:04:28,796 and a compulsive obsession in his art. 40 00:04:33,567 --> 00:04:38,925 In 1932, he poses Marie Therése in a languid reverie. 41 00:04:45,407 --> 00:04:50,845 Gently masturbating, she's literally got sex on her mind. 42 00:04:57,287 --> 00:05:03,601 Pictures like this do what they show, stroking us into a playful trance. 43 00:05:06,807 --> 00:05:11,562 The colour and wit of the thing, a drowsy, sensual entertainment. 44 00:05:15,287 --> 00:05:18,916 It's the provocative work of a cocky, self-obsessed, 45 00:05:19,007 --> 00:05:21,760 self-indulgent genius. 46 00:05:24,367 --> 00:05:28,645 And it's all a long way from Guernica. 47 00:05:44,087 --> 00:05:48,558 Picasso had arrived in Paris at the turn of the century, 48 00:05:48,647 --> 00:05:53,482 a small, pugnacious and frighteningly gifted Andalusian. 49 00:05:56,487 --> 00:05:59,843 In the city of the avant-garde, wherever you looked 50 00:05:59,927 --> 00:06:05,320 all the rules of poetry, music, painting, were being junked. 51 00:06:06,967 --> 00:06:10,323 Young Picasso living like a bohemian 52 00:06:10,407 --> 00:06:16,164 with his oil-slick hair, huge black eyes and big rabbit's nose. 53 00:06:16,247 --> 00:06:20,081 He knew he had to be part of the giddy liberty. 54 00:06:25,847 --> 00:06:28,645 And he knew what he didn't want, 55 00:06:28,727 --> 00:06:32,766 the hoary old pantomimes of the mighty. 56 00:06:32,847 --> 00:06:37,602 Modern art was modern because it had turned its back 57 00:06:37,687 --> 00:06:40,485 on those grandstanding histories, 58 00:06:40,567 --> 00:06:43,923 painted for aristocrats and kings. 59 00:06:48,327 --> 00:06:53,401 Here's power on a horse, the omnipotence of the ruler 60 00:06:53,487 --> 00:06:56,285 displayed by nonchalant control. 61 00:06:57,487 --> 00:07:01,446 Just one hand on the reins. 62 00:07:01,527 --> 00:07:05,361 The message was, if the sovereign can handle the great horse, 63 00:07:05,447 --> 00:07:08,086 he can certainly manage affairs of state, 64 00:07:08,167 --> 00:07:10,806 critical matters of war and peace. 65 00:07:10,887 --> 00:07:15,278 It was the most enduring image of pure power. 66 00:07:19,447 --> 00:07:22,245 And here's what Picasso does. 67 00:07:23,327 --> 00:07:29,163 Instead of a prince in the saddle, a naked boy leading a bare-backed horse 68 00:07:29,247 --> 00:07:33,206 through an eerily empty primordial landscape. 69 00:07:34,607 --> 00:07:38,839 There's no hero to identify here, no story, no subject, 70 00:07:38,927 --> 00:07:43,125 just the modern coming straight out of the archaic, 71 00:07:43,207 --> 00:07:46,836 as if there had never been anything in-between. 72 00:07:49,487 --> 00:07:54,481 History down for the count, then. Next stop for obliteration, beauty, 73 00:07:54,567 --> 00:07:57,400 the classical ideal of art itself 74 00:07:57,487 --> 00:08:01,366 made visible in the luscious form of the female nude. 75 00:08:08,007 --> 00:08:14,116 And this is Picasso's ferocious attack on that sacred cow in 1907. 76 00:08:15,807 --> 00:08:19,516 This is how all those centuries of gazing at nudes 77 00:08:19,607 --> 00:08:23,282 and muttering demurely about graceful form end, 78 00:08:24,727 --> 00:08:26,604 a brothel line-up. 79 00:08:28,007 --> 00:08:30,680 They strip, you check them out. 80 00:08:30,767 --> 00:08:35,443 Everything ever associated with nude women in European art, 81 00:08:35,527 --> 00:08:40,760 beauty, obliging sensuality, tenderness, 82 00:08:40,847 --> 00:08:43,998 all brutally sheared away. 83 00:08:45,607 --> 00:08:50,920 And then, around 1910, having seen off beauty and history, 84 00:08:51,007 --> 00:08:53,475 Picasso goes for the hat trick. 85 00:08:53,567 --> 00:08:57,560 Something even more mind-blowing, something that, for most people 86 00:08:57,647 --> 00:09:01,959 over the centuries, had been the entire point of art. 87 00:09:02,047 --> 00:09:03,958 Bye-bye, resemblance. 88 00:09:05,487 --> 00:09:09,400 If a two-dimensional duplicate of the world is what you want, 89 00:09:09,487 --> 00:09:13,116 then photography is going to do that job much more efficiently. 90 00:09:15,527 --> 00:09:19,486 This is Picasso's art dealer, Ambroise Vollard. 91 00:09:22,767 --> 00:09:25,998 This is how Picasso saw him, 92 00:09:26,087 --> 00:09:29,318 a different vision of the way things really are. 93 00:09:30,207 --> 00:09:31,322 Cubism. 94 00:09:32,927 --> 00:09:36,442 Deep inside his Slinky-toy cascades of form 95 00:09:36,527 --> 00:09:41,237 seen juddering through moments in time, was, he insisted, 96 00:09:41,327 --> 00:09:44,956 something compact, solid and firm. 97 00:09:46,927 --> 00:09:50,283 By blowing up the look of things, Picasso was saying, 98 00:09:50,367 --> 00:09:54,246 I'm getting beyond surface appearances, to the core. 99 00:09:57,447 --> 00:10:01,326 It wasn't for those who wanted something easy on the eye. 100 00:10:01,407 --> 00:10:05,195 But then Picasso wasn't interested in pleasuring the public. 101 00:10:05,287 --> 00:10:08,802 He positively revelled in the cult of difficulty. 102 00:10:08,887 --> 00:10:12,402 ''Too hard?'' you can almost hear him sneering. ''Tough.'' 103 00:10:17,047 --> 00:10:18,765 In the 1920s, 104 00:10:18,847 --> 00:10:22,999 there's something else he doesn't lose much sleep over, 105 00:10:24,047 --> 00:10:26,277 the state of the world. 106 00:10:30,887 --> 00:10:35,358 He's doing fine, thank you, but Europe is in deep trouble, 107 00:10:36,607 --> 00:10:41,237 fascism beginning to strong-arm its way into power. 108 00:10:42,887 --> 00:10:47,119 But of the chaos and hatred, riot and revolution, 109 00:10:47,207 --> 00:10:50,165 there's not a hint in Picasso's work. 110 00:10:53,167 --> 00:10:56,762 For some artists, it was no problem, obligation even, 111 00:10:56,847 --> 00:11:00,078 to combine radical politics and radical painting, 112 00:11:00,167 --> 00:11:04,365 to have modern art criticise hypocrisy and injustice. 113 00:11:10,607 --> 00:11:12,962 George Grosz, the German artist, 114 00:11:13,047 --> 00:11:18,121 was busy having a go at the military dinosaurs and Nazi sympathisers 115 00:11:18,207 --> 00:11:22,041 who were busy subverting Germany's fragile democracy. 116 00:11:24,927 --> 00:11:29,159 Creatively, of course, Grosz is no Picasso. 117 00:11:29,247 --> 00:11:34,162 But he never pretends that art can stay immune from ideology, 118 00:11:34,247 --> 00:11:36,317 high above the fray. 119 00:11:37,007 --> 00:11:39,726 He knows there's a war to be fought, 120 00:11:39,807 --> 00:11:43,356 and his brushes are armed to take the offensive. 121 00:11:48,607 --> 00:11:51,679 The only wars Picasso had ever fought had been against 122 00:11:51,767 --> 00:11:53,962 the conventions of art. 123 00:11:54,047 --> 00:11:57,642 Oh, yes, he'd mostly been on the side of freedom, 124 00:11:57,727 --> 00:12:01,163 but that had always been creative, not political, freedom. 125 00:12:01,287 --> 00:12:04,404 No wonder one of his best friends called Picasso, 126 00:12:04,487 --> 00:12:07,763 ''The least political person I've ever known.'' 127 00:12:13,927 --> 00:12:17,317 What's happening in Picasso's studio 128 00:12:17,407 --> 00:12:21,036 is about as far from the barricades as you can get. 129 00:12:26,487 --> 00:12:29,081 It's all very self-obsessed. 130 00:12:29,167 --> 00:12:33,240 Politics and social conflict doesn't interest him at all in the 1920s. 131 00:12:33,327 --> 00:12:36,205 Instead, he's brooding on his calling. 132 00:12:39,567 --> 00:12:46,245 So, lots of complicated, super-subtle images of the artist in the studio. 133 00:12:49,287 --> 00:12:52,643 Lots of reflections of and in mirrors. 134 00:12:54,287 --> 00:12:57,359 Lots of models pulled this way and that. 135 00:12:59,127 --> 00:13:02,164 Body parts artfully rearranged. 136 00:13:14,607 --> 00:13:18,885 He's also brooding on his increasingly tangled love life. 137 00:13:20,567 --> 00:13:24,879 On their harrowing beach vacations, Picasso and his wife, Olga, 138 00:13:24,967 --> 00:13:27,083 were in constant conflict. 139 00:13:28,487 --> 00:13:31,718 And when he was feeling imprisoned by the relationship, 140 00:13:31,807 --> 00:13:34,844 his artistic distortions are grotesque. 141 00:13:38,287 --> 00:13:40,676 Meet praying mantis woman, 142 00:13:41,567 --> 00:13:46,163 with her frighteningly toothed all-purpose orifice. 143 00:13:50,287 --> 00:13:54,246 Not all of his images of women were brutal and predatory. 144 00:13:54,327 --> 00:13:56,602 When he starts painting Marie Thérese, 145 00:13:56,687 --> 00:13:59,918 Picasso's jagged lines suddenly become 146 00:14:00,007 --> 00:14:03,602 as curvy and voluptuous as his lover's body. 147 00:14:07,567 --> 00:14:10,035 We are deep in Picasso's world, 148 00:14:10,127 --> 00:14:15,759 where his principal inspirations are his art, his women and himself. 149 00:14:18,407 --> 00:14:22,764 Picasso often said, ''This is how modern art is supposed to be, 150 00:14:22,847 --> 00:14:26,556 ''free of sentimental attachments to place and memory. '' 151 00:14:30,767 --> 00:14:34,965 But even Pablo Picasso can't escape history. 152 00:14:57,807 --> 00:15:02,597 In his homeland, Spain, the old certainties were collapsing. 153 00:15:04,127 --> 00:15:08,006 The country had voted to throw out the royal family. 154 00:15:08,087 --> 00:15:12,319 A new golden age of social justice and political liberty 155 00:15:12,407 --> 00:15:14,204 was supposed to dawn. 156 00:15:15,847 --> 00:15:18,805 But the eight years of the Spanish Republic 157 00:15:18,887 --> 00:15:24,166 would be a prolonged torment for its defenders and enemies alike. 158 00:15:28,807 --> 00:15:35,485 Violence regularly erupted between factions on the political right and left, 159 00:15:35,567 --> 00:15:38,479 between the past and the present. 160 00:15:44,327 --> 00:15:48,206 In his Parisian exile, the modernist virtuoso 161 00:15:48,287 --> 00:15:52,246 finds himself haunted by a past master, 162 00:15:52,327 --> 00:15:55,876 the darkest genius of Spanish painting, 163 00:15:57,407 --> 00:15:58,965 Francisco Goya. 164 00:16:05,007 --> 00:16:10,559 Goya was the first to make art look squarely into the nightmare of cruelty 165 00:16:10,647 --> 00:16:12,877 that was modern warfare. 166 00:16:14,727 --> 00:16:18,322 His disasters of war turn the ideal forms of art, 167 00:16:18,407 --> 00:16:22,195 the beauty of a human body, into a sick joke. 168 00:16:24,727 --> 00:16:27,400 So much butcher's chops. 169 00:16:31,247 --> 00:16:34,637 Goya's obsessions infected Picasso. 170 00:16:36,167 --> 00:16:39,921 The old master's bullfights, with their rituals of slaughter, 171 00:16:40,007 --> 00:16:43,443 pulling him inexorably back to Spain. 172 00:17:01,087 --> 00:17:06,286 In 1934, Picasso crossed the Pyrenees for a tour of his homeland. 173 00:17:06,367 --> 00:17:09,484 For part of the trip, he was joined by Marie Thérese. 174 00:17:09,567 --> 00:17:13,446 Inevitably, here in Madrid, they went to a bullfight. 175 00:17:19,687 --> 00:17:23,521 The poet Federico Lorca described Spain 176 00:17:23,607 --> 00:17:27,805 as the only country where death is a national spectacle. 177 00:17:33,247 --> 00:17:34,965 In the mid-1930s, 178 00:17:35,047 --> 00:17:38,676 the spectacle was threatening to spill from the bullring. 179 00:17:42,487 --> 00:17:47,083 Spain was about to be torn apart. 180 00:17:47,167 --> 00:17:49,886 It was already hopelessly divided. 181 00:17:52,847 --> 00:17:55,077 There was a modern Spain, 182 00:17:55,167 --> 00:17:58,762 urban, secular, industrial. 183 00:18:01,687 --> 00:18:06,636 A Spain of thriving socialist movements and agitating anarchists. 184 00:18:12,167 --> 00:18:14,920 But there was another, more ancient Spain. 185 00:18:17,567 --> 00:18:22,595 A country of immense landed estates and a poverty-stricken peasantry. 186 00:18:24,927 --> 00:18:29,717 A Spain suffocated by the heavy presence of the Catholic Church. 187 00:18:32,087 --> 00:18:35,796 Picasso called this The Black Spain. 188 00:18:40,367 --> 00:18:44,758 The problem was that both Spains claimed to be the true nation. 189 00:18:44,847 --> 00:18:48,601 Neither was prepared to accept the verdict of elections. 190 00:18:48,687 --> 00:18:52,680 Had they thought of themselves as just rival political parties, 191 00:18:52,767 --> 00:18:57,522 well, then hostile but peaceful coexistence would have been possible. 192 00:18:57,607 --> 00:18:59,120 But they didn't. 193 00:19:01,007 --> 00:19:05,717 Each side, left and right, old and new, believed the other 194 00:19:05,807 --> 00:19:07,798 not just to be the opposition 195 00:19:07,887 --> 00:19:11,004 but the enemy of reborn Spain itself. 196 00:19:12,447 --> 00:19:16,520 Each side demanded the other's annihilation. 197 00:19:46,007 --> 00:19:47,838 Some Spanish artists 198 00:19:47,927 --> 00:19:50,646 had more than an inkling of what was coming. 199 00:19:53,887 --> 00:19:57,323 None more theatrically than Salvador Dali. 200 00:19:59,727 --> 00:20:02,560 His Premonition of Civil War 201 00:20:02,647 --> 00:20:07,516 is a Surrealist's epic phantasmagoria of catastrophe. 202 00:20:11,327 --> 00:20:15,559 Dali himself sided with the conservatives and fascists. 203 00:20:17,687 --> 00:20:21,726 Right-wing intellectuals made overtures to Picasso, 204 00:20:21,807 --> 00:20:24,321 hoping he might join Dali in their camp. 205 00:20:32,127 --> 00:20:35,005 Picasso stayed aloof, 206 00:20:35,087 --> 00:20:38,159 but there must have been a day when he woke up 207 00:20:38,247 --> 00:20:42,604 and found he'd fallen into the abyss of native hatreds. 208 00:20:58,567 --> 00:21:04,358 A Spanish fever begins to take hold of Picasso's deepest creative imagination. 209 00:21:05,127 --> 00:21:10,406 Into the prints and drawings come all the old ancient antagonists, 210 00:21:10,487 --> 00:21:13,285 who, once summoned, never really go away. 211 00:21:14,807 --> 00:21:16,479 The bull, 212 00:21:17,487 --> 00:21:19,284 the horse 213 00:21:19,887 --> 00:21:21,843 and the bearer of light. 214 00:21:25,327 --> 00:21:28,637 It's not pretty, it is scary. 215 00:21:29,327 --> 00:21:31,477 We're in the bullring. 216 00:21:35,007 --> 00:21:37,999 Entrails spill from gored horses, 217 00:21:41,567 --> 00:21:43,683 sometimes toreadors die, 218 00:21:47,647 --> 00:21:49,444 sometimes bulls. 219 00:21:53,087 --> 00:21:57,478 But we're also in a more ancient world of the Minotaur, 220 00:21:57,567 --> 00:22:00,684 and the labyrinth of Picasso's mind. 221 00:22:09,327 --> 00:22:13,240 In 1935, with Spain on the brink of catastrophe, 222 00:22:13,327 --> 00:22:15,887 Picasso suddenly stops playing around 223 00:22:15,967 --> 00:22:19,118 with all those jumbled images of horses and bulls, 224 00:22:19,207 --> 00:22:21,721 and resolves them into an etching, 225 00:22:21,807 --> 00:22:24,401 which somehow has the weight, 226 00:22:24,487 --> 00:22:28,719 solemnity and monumental power of an altarpiece, 227 00:22:28,807 --> 00:22:33,164 a mural or reworking of an ancient frieze. 228 00:22:33,247 --> 00:22:36,159 He calls it The Minotauromachy. 229 00:22:40,727 --> 00:22:44,720 It has all the quality of a dream or memory, 230 00:22:44,807 --> 00:22:47,526 sexual and scriptural. 231 00:22:47,607 --> 00:22:51,600 Weirdly frozen, but disturbingly vivid. 232 00:22:54,287 --> 00:22:59,202 A horse, its mouth agape in death agony, is spilling its guts. 233 00:23:00,567 --> 00:23:06,119 Over its back is draped the half-naked body of a woman matador. 234 00:23:09,967 --> 00:23:13,118 A minotaur advances threateningly, 235 00:23:15,607 --> 00:23:20,920 but is stopped in its tracks by a single candle held by a small girl. 236 00:23:22,967 --> 00:23:27,245 So, the beast can be stopped by light. 237 00:23:28,287 --> 00:23:31,962 The light that comes from the power of art. 238 00:23:34,887 --> 00:23:37,481 It's Picasso the modernist who is doing this, 239 00:23:37,567 --> 00:23:41,845 bringing back all the old ancient myths, dreams and nightmares. 240 00:23:41,927 --> 00:23:44,919 You think they belong to the remote past, he's saying. 241 00:23:45,007 --> 00:23:48,317 Wrong, look around, they're still with us. 242 00:23:51,407 --> 00:23:57,243 We've gone back to our future, and it is again a savage age. 243 00:23:57,327 --> 00:23:59,443 The beasts are out. 244 00:24:04,287 --> 00:24:07,677 General Francisco Franco once said 245 00:24:07,767 --> 00:24:13,364 that to save Spain from Marxism, he was prepared to shoot half the country. 246 00:24:18,087 --> 00:24:23,115 In July, 1936, he fired his opening salvo, 247 00:24:23,207 --> 00:24:25,323 leading an army rebellion 248 00:24:25,407 --> 00:24:30,322 against the democratically elected government of socialists and liberals. 249 00:24:34,447 --> 00:24:38,998 A favoured rallying cry of the rebels was, ''Viva la muerte. '' 250 00:24:39,087 --> 00:24:41,203 ''Long live death.'' 251 00:24:41,287 --> 00:24:45,121 And to help the generals deliver it, they get enthusiastic assistance 252 00:24:45,207 --> 00:24:49,519 out of the German Luftwaffe that provides air support. 253 00:24:49,607 --> 00:24:52,838 And the army that General Franco will use to conquer Spain 254 00:24:52,927 --> 00:24:58,160 includes 40,000 Italian troops on loan from Mussolini. 255 00:25:01,887 --> 00:25:05,277 For the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis, 256 00:25:05,367 --> 00:25:09,997 the Spanish Civil War is a dry run for their own coming global battle 257 00:25:10,087 --> 00:25:13,443 with degenerate democracy and socialism. 258 00:25:15,447 --> 00:25:21,158 The Civil War is vicious, but Franco's armies sweep through Spain, 259 00:25:21,247 --> 00:25:26,002 overwhelming the idealistic militias defending the democratic government. 260 00:25:28,207 --> 00:25:31,802 Somehow, the besieged capital, Madrid, holds out. 261 00:25:35,207 --> 00:25:39,120 But then a shell breaches the defences of the Prado museum, 262 00:25:41,287 --> 00:25:44,802 home to Spain's precious art collection. 263 00:25:49,167 --> 00:25:53,240 When Picasso hears about it, he feels personally assaulted. 264 00:25:54,647 --> 00:25:58,765 The great iconoclastic modernist, Senor Cubism, 265 00:25:58,847 --> 00:26:02,317 suddenly protective of his own ancestry. 266 00:26:03,887 --> 00:26:08,199 All those Spanish masters, especially Goya, 267 00:26:08,287 --> 00:26:11,279 witness to the disasters of war. 268 00:26:24,247 --> 00:26:29,162 So when he's asked to accept the honorific position of Director of the Prado, 269 00:26:29,247 --> 00:26:31,841 he doesn't hesitate to say yes. 270 00:26:31,927 --> 00:26:36,159 It's a signal to the world he's chosen to stand with the Republic. 271 00:26:36,247 --> 00:26:38,317 Picasso has got politics. 272 00:26:46,327 --> 00:26:51,401 And he's forced to join the struggle practically as well as symbolically. 273 00:26:55,407 --> 00:27:00,242 It's decided that the endangered masterpieces have to be evacuated 274 00:27:00,327 --> 00:27:02,204 from the Prado to Valencia. 275 00:27:07,567 --> 00:27:12,641 El Director Picasso helps select the vulnerable cargo, 276 00:27:12,727 --> 00:27:15,366 and waits nervously for news 277 00:27:15,447 --> 00:27:20,885 as a convoy carrying Spain's art treasures trundles to its safe haven. 278 00:27:23,687 --> 00:27:29,557 Picasso's thoughts and passions are now locked into the Spanish struggle. 279 00:27:38,247 --> 00:27:45,119 Back in Paris, Picasso is confronted by another crisis. This time, it's personal. 280 00:27:49,367 --> 00:27:53,440 He's in the midst of an acrimonious split from his wife, Olga. 281 00:27:55,407 --> 00:27:58,285 His lover Marie Therése is pregnant. 282 00:28:01,367 --> 00:28:04,404 He feels creatively paralysed. 283 00:28:07,687 --> 00:28:11,760 ''It is'', he says, ''the worst time of my life. '' 284 00:28:18,607 --> 00:28:21,724 Then in January, 1937, 285 00:28:21,807 --> 00:28:25,356 Spain comes knocking at his studio door. 286 00:28:27,567 --> 00:28:30,718 A group responsible for designing the Spanish pavilion 287 00:28:30,807 --> 00:28:34,277 at a world's fair, to be held in Paris the following summer, 288 00:28:34,367 --> 00:28:37,006 comes to visit Picasso in his studio. 289 00:28:37,087 --> 00:28:39,396 Politically committed artists, they tell him, 290 00:28:39,487 --> 00:28:43,844 have agreed to do work for that pavilion. Would Picasso join them? 291 00:28:43,927 --> 00:28:49,081 Well, yes, he would. Just what he was going to paint, he had no idea. 292 00:28:49,167 --> 00:28:53,126 But while he was waiting for inspiration to hit, he took a day off 293 00:28:53,207 --> 00:28:55,357 to do his bit for the cause. 294 00:28:58,527 --> 00:29:02,406 It was his first stab at popular art, drawn to raise funds 295 00:29:02,487 --> 00:29:06,082 for the Spanish War Refugee Relief Fund. 296 00:29:09,767 --> 00:29:13,203 It's a comic strip satire on Franco's pretensions 297 00:29:13,287 --> 00:29:16,165 to be Spain's knight crusader. 298 00:29:19,847 --> 00:29:23,123 So instead of a valiant hero on a stallion, 299 00:29:23,207 --> 00:29:26,244 he rides a giant phallus. 300 00:29:28,967 --> 00:29:32,357 He's also a polyp, bristling and squishy, 301 00:29:32,447 --> 00:29:36,645 a creature Picasso himself called a turd. 302 00:29:42,167 --> 00:29:47,366 It takes our genius just one day to knock off this first sheet, 303 00:29:47,447 --> 00:29:51,565 so it's a bit soon to call him the hero artist of the Republic. 304 00:29:51,647 --> 00:29:54,445 And then, well, it's back to business as usual. 305 00:29:58,967 --> 00:30:02,926 Yet more muses and meditations on art. 306 00:30:03,647 --> 00:30:05,717 He even thinks one of those might do 307 00:30:05,807 --> 00:30:08,526 for the job he'd promised for the Spanish pavilion 308 00:30:08,607 --> 00:30:10,916 at the international exhibition. 309 00:30:16,527 --> 00:30:19,997 And then life caught up with art. 310 00:30:29,487 --> 00:30:34,356 It's about four in the afternoon in the little town of Guernica, 311 00:30:34,447 --> 00:30:37,757 15 miles from Bilbao, in the north of Spain. 312 00:30:40,287 --> 00:30:41,720 Seven thousand souls 313 00:30:41,807 --> 00:30:47,279 going about their market-day business in the ancestral homeland of the Basques. 314 00:30:48,967 --> 00:30:54,325 A people with their own language, culture and fierce sense of identity. 315 00:30:57,087 --> 00:31:02,639 In the raging Civil War, the Basques were stalwartly anti-Franco. 316 00:31:11,087 --> 00:31:13,999 A black speck appears in the blue. 317 00:31:19,207 --> 00:31:24,679 The solitary plane is German, from the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion. 318 00:31:27,927 --> 00:31:29,883 It wheels over the town, 319 00:31:29,967 --> 00:31:34,438 then, almost casually, drops six bombs. 320 00:31:48,407 --> 00:31:50,762 Waves of German and Italian aircraft, 321 00:31:50,847 --> 00:31:55,398 flying in formation, created a relentless storm of havoc. 322 00:31:58,807 --> 00:32:03,483 Over 5,000 bombs were dropped on the defenceless town. 323 00:32:06,447 --> 00:32:10,235 When the people of Guernica fled into the streets and fields, 324 00:32:10,327 --> 00:32:13,558 the pilots strafed them with machine-gun fire. 325 00:32:19,487 --> 00:32:22,923 A rain of incendiary bombs finished the job, 326 00:32:23,007 --> 00:32:26,158 turning the town into an ashy cauldron. 327 00:32:32,927 --> 00:32:35,919 1,645 die. 328 00:32:36,007 --> 00:32:39,124 Thousands more are terribly wounded. 329 00:32:45,847 --> 00:32:50,238 The commander of the Condor Legion, Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, 330 00:32:50,327 --> 00:32:53,842 was extremely gratified by the action. 331 00:32:53,927 --> 00:32:58,478 So surgically precise, so tremendously modern. 332 00:33:02,447 --> 00:33:06,281 Guernica literally levelled to the ground. 333 00:33:06,367 --> 00:33:10,360 Bomb craters in the streets. Simply terrific. 334 00:33:11,327 --> 00:33:14,046 Perfect conditions for a great victory. 335 00:33:17,087 --> 00:33:22,286 There was nothing in Guernica that could possibly be designated a military target. 336 00:33:22,367 --> 00:33:27,964 What was special about Guernica was the brutality and clarity of the objective, 337 00:33:28,047 --> 00:33:31,756 to terrorise defenceless civilians from the air, 338 00:33:31,847 --> 00:33:36,159 and to send a message to the rest of Spain and to the world, 339 00:33:36,247 --> 00:33:40,684 ''This is what we can do and this is what we will do.'' 340 00:33:43,887 --> 00:33:47,323 George Steer, correspondent for The London Times, 341 00:33:47,407 --> 00:33:51,400 covering the Basque war from Bilbao, got himself to Guernica. 342 00:33:55,127 --> 00:33:58,722 Blocks of wreckage slithered and crashed from the houses. 343 00:34:00,447 --> 00:34:02,961 And from their sides, which were still erect, 344 00:34:03,047 --> 00:34:06,244 the polished heat struck at our cheeks and eyes. 345 00:34:08,567 --> 00:34:10,842 Throughout the night, houses were falling, 346 00:34:10,927 --> 00:34:15,239 until the streets became long heaps of red, impenetrable debris. 347 00:34:20,567 --> 00:34:23,320 Guernica had gone Cubist. 348 00:34:27,047 --> 00:34:31,996 Steer's report is reprinted in the French paper Ce Soir, 349 00:34:32,087 --> 00:34:34,647 with a dramatic front-page picture. 350 00:34:36,567 --> 00:34:41,960 The nocturnal inferno burns itself into Picasso's visual imagination. 351 00:34:43,247 --> 00:34:47,286 That's why he pictures Guernica as a night massacre, 352 00:34:47,367 --> 00:34:51,280 even though it was actually death in the afternoon. 353 00:35:05,407 --> 00:35:09,036 In his Paris studio, Picasso summons art 354 00:35:09,127 --> 00:35:13,803 for the most serious thing he's ever attempted, telling the truth. 355 00:35:13,887 --> 00:35:18,881 Of course, he's not going to compete with Steer's gritty report from Guernica. 356 00:35:18,967 --> 00:35:24,360 But if the painting succeeds, it will transcend mere factual chronicle. 357 00:35:24,447 --> 00:35:26,961 It will be Cubism with a conscience. 358 00:35:33,607 --> 00:35:36,326 What Picasso was setting out to make 359 00:35:36,407 --> 00:35:40,400 was something foreign to the very nature of modern art, 360 00:35:40,487 --> 00:35:42,842 the art he had defined. 361 00:35:45,087 --> 00:35:49,319 He was about to try and make a truly modern history painting. 362 00:35:50,207 --> 00:35:53,199 It was the tallest order of his life, 363 00:35:53,287 --> 00:35:56,996 to turn from icon-breaker to icon-maker. 364 00:36:01,487 --> 00:36:05,844 So everything he'd ever touched in his art and his life 365 00:36:05,927 --> 00:36:09,124 had to come together for this one moment. 366 00:36:10,887 --> 00:36:13,526 The excitement of modernism, 367 00:36:13,607 --> 00:36:17,122 the obsession with the art of the past 368 00:36:17,207 --> 00:36:22,361 and his own intimate experiences of love and grief. 369 00:36:36,127 --> 00:36:39,005 He would need all the help he could get. 370 00:36:39,087 --> 00:36:42,238 But there was an accomplice waiting in the wings. 371 00:36:56,447 --> 00:37:00,122 He'd met her in a Paris cafe. 372 00:37:00,207 --> 00:37:02,562 He could hardly have missed her. 373 00:37:04,247 --> 00:37:07,876 Her name is Dora Maar, a Croatian photographer, 374 00:37:07,967 --> 00:37:10,765 intellectual and accomplished Surrealist. 375 00:37:23,087 --> 00:37:26,477 Picasso made an offer for the bloodstained glove, 376 00:37:27,087 --> 00:37:31,285 and won a fiery new lover and a creative partner. 377 00:37:40,367 --> 00:37:43,245 Dora became a fixture in the studio, 378 00:37:43,327 --> 00:37:46,080 and Picasso's unofficial photographer, 379 00:37:48,847 --> 00:37:52,601 capturing him at work as Guernica evolved. 380 00:37:56,527 --> 00:38:00,679 On May 1st, 1937, Picasso gets down to it. 381 00:38:01,847 --> 00:38:05,999 He starts with rough sketches, barely more than scribbles. 382 00:38:06,847 --> 00:38:08,565 Graphite on paper. 383 00:38:09,567 --> 00:38:12,559 Thoughts racing ahead of the hand. 384 00:38:14,207 --> 00:38:17,404 And the essential cast of characters, so long on his mind, 385 00:38:17,487 --> 00:38:20,797 so deep in his psyche, reappear. 386 00:38:24,407 --> 00:38:26,125 The wounded horse. 387 00:38:29,167 --> 00:38:30,805 The massive bull. 388 00:38:34,127 --> 00:38:36,038 The candlelight bearer. 389 00:38:41,967 --> 00:38:47,360 Don't imagine, though, that Picasso is in the remorseless grip of his new vision. 390 00:38:47,447 --> 00:38:52,202 All through the next week, with the deadline for the Paris fair coming on fast, 391 00:38:52,287 --> 00:38:54,596 he does no work at all on the painting. 392 00:38:54,687 --> 00:38:59,317 He goes to see his other lover, Marie Thérese, and their new baby on the weekend. 393 00:38:59,407 --> 00:39:02,444 And he umpires a catfight between her and Dora. 394 00:39:08,447 --> 00:39:11,280 Heady emotions swirl around Picasso, 395 00:39:11,367 --> 00:39:16,395 and he can't resist transferring the complicated agony of his personal life 396 00:39:16,487 --> 00:39:18,318 to his political art. 397 00:39:26,727 --> 00:39:31,676 Heads of women trapped with arteries of excruciating pain, 398 00:39:31,767 --> 00:39:35,999 punctured with tears, begin to appear in the Guernica drawings. 399 00:39:38,407 --> 00:39:42,116 He's become the impresario of anguish. 400 00:39:50,487 --> 00:39:54,560 Marie Thérese and his young daughter, Maya, visit the studio, too. 401 00:39:58,567 --> 00:40:02,924 The toddler smearing her hands in the fresh paint of Guernica. 402 00:40:04,567 --> 00:40:07,127 Visions of domestic tragedy. 403 00:40:09,247 --> 00:40:10,680 Dead babies, 404 00:40:12,647 --> 00:40:15,684 distraught mothers process through his mind. 405 00:40:37,047 --> 00:40:40,562 He begins working on the actual painting. 406 00:40:40,647 --> 00:40:42,956 Twenty feet long and 12 feet high, 407 00:40:43,047 --> 00:40:48,201 the canvas is too tall to fit between the roof rafters and the floor of the studio, 408 00:40:49,007 --> 00:40:51,521 so it's propped up against the wall. 409 00:40:58,007 --> 00:41:04,242 Dora snaps Picasso as he perches on a ladder to reach the top of the painting. 410 00:41:12,687 --> 00:41:18,842 Picasso chain-smokes his way through it in a storm of furious creativity. 411 00:41:22,567 --> 00:41:27,163 In the early versions of the painting, there are images of hope and defiance. 412 00:41:27,967 --> 00:41:33,246 But as Picasso gets deeper into Guernica, those slight gestures of optimism 413 00:41:33,327 --> 00:41:37,115 collapse into the bleaker, overwhelming tragedy. 414 00:41:44,007 --> 00:41:48,922 A clenched socialist fist of resistance rising from the pile of bodies 415 00:41:49,007 --> 00:41:51,999 appears in several early sketches, 416 00:41:52,087 --> 00:41:56,717 but this thought fades and disappears from the final painting. 417 00:42:01,327 --> 00:42:06,447 In earlier versions, the shrieking horse with the fatal gash in its side 418 00:42:06,527 --> 00:42:09,405 had a little winged horse, Pegasus, 419 00:42:09,487 --> 00:42:12,957 the mythical symbol of the birth of art and poetry, 420 00:42:13,047 --> 00:42:16,357 born out of the wound, as if to say, 421 00:42:16,447 --> 00:42:19,325 something good may come from blood. 422 00:42:22,367 --> 00:42:27,839 But it ends with a deep, black, lozenge-shaped hole in the horse, 423 00:42:28,527 --> 00:42:32,406 right at the optical dead-centre of the painting. 424 00:42:35,767 --> 00:42:40,204 The fallen warrior originally was grander, stronger, 425 00:42:40,287 --> 00:42:43,438 his head helmeted like a classical hero. 426 00:42:47,527 --> 00:42:53,204 But Picasso has turned the warrior on his back, mouth open, gaping, 427 00:42:53,287 --> 00:42:55,755 slack-jawed, helpless. 428 00:42:56,727 --> 00:42:58,957 If he's a good partisan, 429 00:42:59,047 --> 00:43:04,485 Picasso ought to be delivering something upbeat amidst the carnage, 430 00:43:04,567 --> 00:43:07,559 but he hasn't the stomach for callow optimism. 431 00:43:12,167 --> 00:43:17,036 So the signs of redemption now are puny, though telling. 432 00:43:17,127 --> 00:43:18,640 A single daisy. 433 00:43:19,687 --> 00:43:25,603 And on the fallen warrior's hand, startlingly, an unmistakable puncture mark. 434 00:43:28,847 --> 00:43:31,998 The stigmata of the martyred Christ. 435 00:43:34,607 --> 00:43:40,159 What brought this into Picasso's head? Wasn't he supposed to be the worldly modernist? 436 00:43:40,247 --> 00:43:44,160 Wasn't it General Franco who was supposed to be the Christian soldier? 437 00:43:44,247 --> 00:43:45,839 Well, that was the point, of course. 438 00:43:45,927 --> 00:43:50,443 The idea was to turn the tables on all those holy rollers. 439 00:43:50,527 --> 00:43:54,964 What was in Picasso's head now was one more indelible image 440 00:43:55,047 --> 00:43:57,242 of the agony of his nation. 441 00:43:57,327 --> 00:43:59,716 And one which every Spaniard would have known, 442 00:43:59,807 --> 00:44:02,765 Goya's 3rd of May, 1808. 443 00:44:06,007 --> 00:44:11,798 This, too, was the response of an artist seething at cruelty and massacre. 444 00:44:14,007 --> 00:44:16,919 In this case, the execution in Madrid 445 00:44:17,007 --> 00:44:21,717 of the rebels who had risen against Napoleon's invading army. 446 00:44:23,887 --> 00:44:27,038 But it's coloured by an ancient Christian hope, 447 00:44:27,127 --> 00:44:30,085 especially deeply rooted in Spain, 448 00:44:30,167 --> 00:44:31,998 that of salvation. 449 00:44:33,727 --> 00:44:37,083 The defiant rebel is dying a saviour's death, 450 00:44:37,167 --> 00:44:40,603 arms flung wide like the crucified Christ. 451 00:44:43,087 --> 00:44:46,966 The stigmata appearing on his opened palm. 452 00:44:49,607 --> 00:44:54,158 There's something else that ties Goya's execution to Picasso's slaughter, 453 00:44:54,247 --> 00:44:58,286 something that turns the conventions of art on their head, 454 00:44:58,367 --> 00:45:02,360 and that's the alternation of light from good to evil. 455 00:45:03,287 --> 00:45:07,883 In everything ever written about art, everything ever done in painting, 456 00:45:07,967 --> 00:45:12,518 light is the bringer of beauty, of sublime dignity. 457 00:45:15,927 --> 00:45:17,963 Not here. 458 00:45:18,047 --> 00:45:22,040 Here it's the instrument of slaughter. 459 00:45:22,127 --> 00:45:26,086 The sallow gleam in which the machine men go about their dirty business 460 00:45:26,167 --> 00:45:30,160 in the dead of night. Just obeying orders. 461 00:45:32,687 --> 00:45:35,121 Now, look at Guernica. 462 00:45:35,927 --> 00:45:39,966 You feel the heave and swell of that pyramid of writhing bodies, 463 00:45:40,047 --> 00:45:42,959 thrusting up through the painting, don't you? 464 00:45:43,047 --> 00:45:45,436 But what do they strain towards? 465 00:45:47,807 --> 00:45:49,206 An evil eye. 466 00:45:50,047 --> 00:45:51,924 And within that evil eye, 467 00:45:52,007 --> 00:45:56,637 the merciless glare of a single electric light bulb. 468 00:46:00,847 --> 00:46:05,363 It's the incandescence of the exterminating angel, 469 00:46:05,447 --> 00:46:09,599 the searchlight of the death squad and the targeting bomber. 470 00:46:10,647 --> 00:46:13,764 The bare bulb of the torturer's cell. 471 00:46:19,207 --> 00:46:22,756 Against it is the candlelight, held straight out 472 00:46:22,847 --> 00:46:25,645 by a heroically beautiful arm. 473 00:46:26,887 --> 00:46:31,039 An epic battle, then, of the good and the wicked lights. 474 00:46:32,047 --> 00:46:36,359 Art versus evil. 475 00:46:44,607 --> 00:46:46,837 It's almost done. 476 00:46:46,927 --> 00:46:49,566 But there's one more necessary touch. 477 00:46:55,527 --> 00:46:58,599 He and Dora cover the body of the dying horse 478 00:46:59,447 --> 00:47:03,281 with a field of sharp little downward strokes, 479 00:47:04,367 --> 00:47:08,599 that make the body dissolve into a sea of newsprint 480 00:47:08,687 --> 00:47:11,247 or the light of a newsreel projector. 481 00:47:12,607 --> 00:47:15,360 The marks are unreadable. 482 00:47:15,447 --> 00:47:18,245 They're the visual equivalent of static. 483 00:47:19,567 --> 00:47:22,525 Towering above them is the force of art, 484 00:47:22,647 --> 00:47:25,764 breaking through the drone of news. 485 00:47:31,847 --> 00:47:36,045 When he's finished painting, he knows he's done the impossible. 486 00:47:36,607 --> 00:47:40,486 Created something that reaches deep into modern nightmares, 487 00:47:40,567 --> 00:47:44,526 hectic, terrifying, burning, screaming. 488 00:47:45,367 --> 00:47:47,085 There's no way out. 489 00:47:55,687 --> 00:47:57,723 It's defiantly modern, 490 00:47:57,807 --> 00:48:01,880 but it also pulls us back into the tragedy of the ages. 491 00:48:02,727 --> 00:48:07,118 A Cubist commotion, yet also a classical monument, 492 00:48:07,207 --> 00:48:11,405 with it's wailing women flanking the massive pyramid of death. 493 00:48:12,447 --> 00:48:14,483 It's just paint and canvas, 494 00:48:14,887 --> 00:48:17,959 but it has the authority of stone. 495 00:48:18,767 --> 00:48:22,476 It's unbombable, it's indestructible. 496 00:48:26,647 --> 00:48:29,878 For this picture achieves a miracle. 497 00:48:29,967 --> 00:48:34,677 Despite all the images of violence and disaster with which we're bombarded, 498 00:48:34,767 --> 00:48:36,917 it makes us feel it. 499 00:48:37,007 --> 00:48:39,043 It gets under our skin. 500 00:48:43,487 --> 00:48:48,277 This, for me, is what all great art has to do, 501 00:48:48,367 --> 00:48:51,200 crash into our lazy routines. 502 00:48:55,047 --> 00:48:57,607 The routine that Guernica tears into 503 00:48:57,687 --> 00:49:01,521 is a sickness of our, as well as Picasso's, time. 504 00:49:01,607 --> 00:49:06,476 The habit of taking violent evil in our stride. 505 00:49:06,567 --> 00:49:08,797 The yawn at the massacre. 506 00:49:08,887 --> 00:49:12,038 Seen it before, go away. 507 00:49:12,127 --> 00:49:14,402 Don't spoil the fun of art. 508 00:49:19,127 --> 00:49:22,563 But Guernica isn't with us for fun. 509 00:49:22,647 --> 00:49:25,684 It's there to rip away the scar tissue. 510 00:49:25,767 --> 00:49:29,123 To make us bleed, to rob us of our sleep. 511 00:49:30,727 --> 00:49:35,562 So, what can art do when the bombs start dropping? 512 00:49:35,647 --> 00:49:40,277 It can instruct us on the obligations of being human. 513 00:49:44,487 --> 00:49:48,685 In all the ways that really counted, Picasso had won, 514 00:49:48,767 --> 00:49:51,839 art had won, humanity had won. 515 00:49:59,007 --> 00:50:04,206 So, does Guernica storm the Paris World Fair and the world of art? 516 00:50:05,767 --> 00:50:07,758 Well, no, not really. 517 00:50:09,127 --> 00:50:12,563 The response is devastatingly polite. 518 00:50:13,607 --> 00:50:17,236 Critics are more bemused than blown away. 519 00:50:17,327 --> 00:50:21,115 Left-wing visitors to the Fair from Spain and beyond 520 00:50:21,207 --> 00:50:26,076 looked in vain for muscular proletarians in heroic attitudes. 521 00:50:26,887 --> 00:50:31,119 Or even the grim-faced bad guys in malevolent poses. 522 00:50:34,407 --> 00:50:40,039 One critic described the painting as nothing more than a private brainstorm, 523 00:50:40,727 --> 00:50:43,195 which, of course, it partly was. 524 00:50:49,487 --> 00:50:54,083 Whilst Guernica is bathed in rather lukewarm praise, 525 00:50:54,167 --> 00:50:59,525 Picasso is off to the Cote d'Azur with Dora and his posse of friends. 526 00:51:02,247 --> 00:51:07,685 But there is now more to Picasso than the bohemian beach-bum act. 527 00:51:07,767 --> 00:51:10,804 He is an artist transformed. 528 00:51:10,887 --> 00:51:15,324 An artist who believes his art has a political purpose 529 00:51:15,767 --> 00:51:17,758 and a political message. 530 00:51:18,727 --> 00:51:21,719 In Guernica, and all my art, 531 00:51:21,807 --> 00:51:24,765 I express my revulsion of the military caste 532 00:51:24,847 --> 00:51:28,362 who have sunk Spain into an ocean of pain. 533 00:51:35,927 --> 00:51:38,282 Two years after Guernica, 534 00:51:38,367 --> 00:51:41,518 Franco was victorious in Spain 535 00:51:41,607 --> 00:51:44,963 and fascism was eviscerating Europe. 536 00:51:47,327 --> 00:51:51,878 Guernica was not just a painting, it was a prophecy. 537 00:52:14,607 --> 00:52:19,158 In 1944, after four years of gruelling war, 538 00:52:19,247 --> 00:52:22,523 Paris was liberated from Nazi occupation, 539 00:52:22,607 --> 00:52:25,963 and Picasso was free to meet an adoring public. 540 00:52:29,527 --> 00:52:32,041 And how they flocked to the studio, 541 00:52:32,127 --> 00:52:35,483 hungry for stories about Guernica's creation. 542 00:52:40,407 --> 00:52:43,877 He obliges the fans and groupies lingering on those years, 543 00:52:43,967 --> 00:52:48,085 like an old field marshal reliving his finest campaign. 544 00:52:49,767 --> 00:52:53,316 Well, this was his finest campaign. 545 00:52:56,367 --> 00:53:01,600 Picasso once described the creative process as a kind of complete emptying. 546 00:53:02,287 --> 00:53:06,803 He'd put so much of everything he had to offer in the world into Guernica, 547 00:53:06,927 --> 00:53:10,636 during those few, feverish months of 1937. 548 00:53:10,767 --> 00:53:14,555 But afterwards, there was not much left in the creative tank. 549 00:53:15,247 --> 00:53:18,080 He had 30 years of work ahead. 550 00:53:18,167 --> 00:53:22,524 The longest, saddest anti-climax in the history of art. 551 00:53:31,687 --> 00:53:35,123 Pablo Picasso becomes Comrade Picasso, 552 00:53:35,207 --> 00:53:37,243 the Cote d'Azur communist, 553 00:53:37,327 --> 00:53:41,479 knocking off hack work for the party of peace and goodwill. 554 00:53:42,687 --> 00:53:48,239 And what's worse than being a poster boy for Stalin? Well,just being a poster boy. 555 00:53:49,367 --> 00:53:53,758 Settling into celebrity, the Riviera tan ever-deepening, 556 00:53:53,847 --> 00:53:59,717 Picasso leaps from the pages of Marxist critiques to the fashion glossies. 557 00:54:05,687 --> 00:54:10,238 In contrast, Guernica accumulates symbolic power. 558 00:54:11,647 --> 00:54:15,322 The painting takes up residence in New York City 559 00:54:15,407 --> 00:54:19,002 where, for three decades, it burns with moral heat 560 00:54:19,087 --> 00:54:21,920 on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art. 561 00:54:24,807 --> 00:54:30,040 Its creator had done something no one who'd known him could ever have predicted. 562 00:54:30,127 --> 00:54:34,837 He'd rescued modern art from the curse of its own cleverness, 563 00:54:34,927 --> 00:54:37,202 from the curse of novelty. 564 00:54:41,567 --> 00:54:44,525 Guernica's always been bigger than art. 565 00:54:44,607 --> 00:54:47,883 Uncontainable by mere museum walls. 566 00:54:47,967 --> 00:54:50,242 It's one of those very rare creations 567 00:54:50,327 --> 00:54:53,683 that gets into the bloodstream of the common culture. 568 00:54:55,807 --> 00:55:00,358 It's become the shared heritage of an appalled humanity, 569 00:55:00,447 --> 00:55:04,281 and a mirror of the suffering of civilians in every conflict. 570 00:55:38,887 --> 00:55:44,200 In 1981, with Franco dead and democracy at last alive, 571 00:55:45,007 --> 00:55:47,840 Guernica found its way home to Spain. 572 00:55:51,487 --> 00:55:55,480 Picasso never saw its return, having died eight years before, 573 00:55:55,567 --> 00:56:01,164 but he relished the prospect that his painting would outlast Franco. 574 00:56:06,447 --> 00:56:10,360 Here's the old thing, comfortably settled in Madrid. 575 00:56:10,447 --> 00:56:14,599 And just when you think, ''Well, it's a magnificent relic, 576 00:56:14,687 --> 00:56:16,678 ''what can it possibly have to say to us 577 00:56:16,767 --> 00:56:20,965 ''in our video-saturated, digitally-enhanced age?'' 578 00:56:21,047 --> 00:56:26,599 something comes along to awaken from those old black-and-white characters 579 00:56:26,687 --> 00:56:30,282 the tempestuous force of their original creation. 580 00:56:35,167 --> 00:56:37,635 In February 2003, 581 00:56:37,727 --> 00:56:40,639 the American delegation to the United Nations 582 00:56:40,727 --> 00:56:43,116 decided to make its pessimistic case 583 00:56:43,207 --> 00:56:46,802 for the likelihood of armed intervention in Iraq. 584 00:56:49,927 --> 00:56:56,162 Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council was to be followed by a press conference. 585 00:56:57,007 --> 00:56:59,077 And then, at the last minute, 586 00:56:59,167 --> 00:57:02,842 someone noticed something inconvenient about the location. 587 00:57:05,487 --> 00:57:10,197 There was a tapestry reproduction of Guernica hanging on the wall. 588 00:57:12,407 --> 00:57:15,205 ''Oh, dear. Screaming women, 589 00:57:15,287 --> 00:57:19,519 burning houses, dead babies, jagged lines. '' 590 00:57:22,047 --> 00:57:25,642 ''Cover it up, ''said the TVpeople. ''It's too distracting. '' 591 00:57:25,727 --> 00:57:30,403 So Guernica was shrouded by a big blue drape. 592 00:57:35,927 --> 00:57:37,838 The news handlers could have said, 593 00:57:37,927 --> 00:57:42,955 ''Hold on a minute, we could show the painting. After all, this is what tyrants do, 594 00:57:43,047 --> 00:57:47,086 ''death, suffering, misery. '' But they didn't. 595 00:57:49,687 --> 00:57:51,245 However you massaged it, 596 00:57:51,327 --> 00:57:55,036 there was something about the way that damned picture would look on the news 597 00:57:55,127 --> 00:57:57,436 that would upset people. 598 00:57:57,527 --> 00:57:59,677 Much better to cover it up. 599 00:58:04,727 --> 00:58:09,517 It was, I suppose, the ultimate backhand compliment to the power of art. 600 00:58:10,327 --> 00:58:14,161 You're the mightiest country in the world, you can throw your armies around, 601 00:58:14,247 --> 00:58:16,283 you can get rid of dictators. 602 00:58:16,367 --> 00:58:19,279 But, hey, don't tangle with a masterpiece.