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It's the depths of winter, 1941.
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Pablo Picasso is living and working
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on the top floor of an old house in Left Bank Paris.
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The Third Reich owns Europe.
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Every so often,
Picasso gets visits from the Gestapo.
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They mutter about degenerate art
and drop dark hints he's hiding Jewish friends.
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Then they trash the studio a bit.
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One day, there's a visit
that passes into the Picasso legend.
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The unwelcome visitor snoops around a bit.
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Then he notices there are postcards lying around
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of Picasso's most famous work.
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His epic depiction of what happened
when German bombs
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fell on a small Basque town
in the Spanish Civil War.
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Guernica.
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''Did you do this?'' he says.
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''Oh, no,'' says Picasso. ''You did.
Go on, take one. Souvenir.''
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Great comeback, good story,
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but what can art really do in the face of atrocity?
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Shouldn't art just stick to what it does best,
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the delivery of pleasure, and forget about
being a paintbrush warrior?
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Or is it, when the bombs are dropping,
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that we find out what art is really for?
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Paris in the 1920s.
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Pablo Picasso was
the sovereign of modern painting.
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He was living in a fancy apartment
near the Champs Elysees
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with his Russian ballerina wife, Olga,
and their little boy.
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He showed his paintings in a classy gallery,
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and all of art was his kingdom.
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Drunk on self-confidence and cleverness,
he could take it wherever he fancied.
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One day, in January, 1927,
he noticed something he definitely fancied.
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Blonde, vaguely Nordic, statuesque, 16.
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She's called Marie Th�rese Walter,
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and Picasso sees her one afternoon outside
Galeries Lafayette, a department store.
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He loses no time, goes up to her and says,
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''Mademoiselle, you have a most interesting face"
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''and I should like to paint it."
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''I am Picasso.''
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Marie Ther�se would become his lover
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and a compulsive obsession in his art.
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In 1932,
he poses Marie Ther�se in a languid reverie.
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Gently masturbating,
she's literally got sex on her mind.
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Pictures like this do what they show,
stroking us into a playful trance.
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The colour and wit of the thing,
a drowsy, sensual entertainment.
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It's the provocative work of a cocky, self-obsessed,
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self-indulgent genius.
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And it's all a long way from Guernica.
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Picasso had arrived in Paris
at the turn of the century,
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a small, pugnacious
and frighteningly gifted Andalusian.
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In the city of the avant-garde,
wherever you looked
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all the rules of poetry, music, painting,
were being junked.
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Young Picasso living like a bohemian
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with his oil-slick hair, huge black eyes
and big rabbit's nose.
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He knew he had to be part of the giddy liberty.
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And he knew what he didn't want,
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the hoary old pantomimes of the mighty.
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Modern art was modern
because it had turned its back
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on those grandstanding histories,
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painted for aristocrats and kings.
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Here's power on a horse,
the omnipotence of the ruler
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displayed by nonchalant control.
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Just one hand on the reins.
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The message was,
if the sovereign can handle the great horse,
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he can certainly manage affairs of state,
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critical matters of war and peace.
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It was the most enduring image of pure power.
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And here's what Picasso does.
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Instead of a prince in the saddle,
a naked boy leading a bare-backed horse
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through an eerily empty primordial landscape.
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There's no hero to identify here,
no story, no subject,
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just the modern
coming straight out of the archaic,
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as if there had never been anything in-between.
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History down for the count, then.
Next stop for obliteration, beauty,
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the classical ideal of art itself
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made visible in the luscious form
of the female nude.
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And this is Picasso's ferocious attack
on that sacred cow in 1907.
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This is how all those centuries of gazing at nudes
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and muttering demurely about graceful form end,
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a brothel line-up.
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They strip, you check them out.
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Everything ever associated
with nude women in European art,
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beauty, obliging sensuality, tenderness,
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all brutally sheared away.
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And then, around 1910,
having seen off beauty and history,
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Picasso goes for the hat trick.
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Something even more mind-blowing,
something that, for most people
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over the centuries,
had been the entire point of art.
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Bye-bye, resemblance.
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If a two-dimensional duplicate of the world
is what you want,
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then photography is going
to do that job much more efficiently.
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This is Picasso's art dealer, Ambroise Vollard.
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This is how Picasso saw him,
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a different vision of the way things really are.
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Cubism.
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Deep inside his Slinky-toy cascades of form
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seen juddering through moments in time,
was, he insisted,
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something compact, solid and firm.
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By blowing up the look of things,
Picasso was saying,
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I'm getting beyond surface appearances,
to the core.
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It wasn't for those
who wanted something easy on the eye.
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00:10:01,407 --> 00:10:05,195
But then Picasso wasn't interested
in pleasuring the public.
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00:10:05,287 --> 00:10:08,802
He positively revelled in the cult of difficulty.
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''Too hard?''
you can almost hear him sneering. ''Tough.''
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00:10:17,047 --> 00:10:18,765
In the 1920s,
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there's something else
he doesn't lose much sleep over,
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the state of the world.
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00:10:30,887 --> 00:10:35,358
He's doing fine, thank you,
but Europe is in deep trouble,
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fascism beginning to strong-arm
its way into power.
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00:10:42,887 --> 00:10:47,119
But of the chaos and hatred, riot and revolution,
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there's not a hint in Picasso's work.
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For some artists,
it was no problem, obligation even,
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to combine radical politics and radical painting,
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to have modern art
criticise hypocrisy and injustice.
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00:11:10,607 --> 00:11:12,962
George Grosz, the German artist,
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was busy having a go
at the military dinosaurs and Nazi sympathisers
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who were busy
subverting Germany's fragile democracy.
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Creatively, of course, Grosz is no Picasso.
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But he never pretends that art can stay
immune from ideology,
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high above the fray.
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00:11:37,007 --> 00:11:39,726
He knows there's a war to be fought,
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and his brushes are armed to take the offensive.
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00:11:48,607 --> 00:11:51,679
The only wars Picasso had ever fought
had been against
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the conventions of art.
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Oh, yes, he'd mostly been on the side of freedom,
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but that had always been creative,
not political, freedom.
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No wonder one of his best friends called Picasso,
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''The least political person I've ever known.''
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00:12:13,927 --> 00:12:17,317
What's happening in Picasso's studio
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is about as far from the barricades as you can get.
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00:12:26,487 --> 00:12:29,081
It's all very self-obsessed.
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00:12:29,167 --> 00:12:33,240
Politics and social conflict
doesn't interest him at all in the 1920s.
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Instead, he's brooding on his calling.
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So, lots of complicated, super-subtle images
of the artist in the studio.
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Lots of reflections of and in mirrors.
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Lots of models pulled this way and that.
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Body parts artfully rearranged.
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,
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were in constant conflict.
139
00:13:28,487 --> 00:13:31,718
And when he was feeling
imprisoned by the relationship,
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his artistic distortions are grotesque.
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00:13:38,287 --> 00:13:40,676
Meet praying mantis woman,
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with her frighteningly toothed all-purpose orifice.
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Not all of his images of women
were brutal and predatory.
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00:13:54,327 --> 00:13:56,602
When he starts painting Marie Th�rese,
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Picasso's jagged lines suddenly become
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as curvy and voluptuous as his lover's body.
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00:14:07,567 --> 00:14:10,035
We are deep in Picasso's world,
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where his principal inspirations are his art,
his women and himself.
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00:14:18,407 --> 00:14:22,764
Picasso often said, ''This is how
modern art is supposed to be,
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00:14:22,847 --> 00:14:26,556
''free of sentimental attachments
to place and memory. ''
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00:14:30,767 --> 00:14:34,965
But even Pablo Picasso can't escape history.
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In his homeland, Spain,
the old certainties were collapsing.
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The country had voted
to throw out the royal family.
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A new golden age
of social justice and political liberty
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was supposed to dawn.
156
00:15:15,847 --> 00:15:18,805
But the eight years of the Spanish Republic
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would be a prolonged torment
for its defenders and enemies alike.
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00:15:28,807 --> 00:15:35,485
Violence regularly erupted between factions
on the political right and left,
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00:15:35,567 --> 00:15:38,479
between the past and the present.
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00:15:44,327 --> 00:15:48,206
In his Parisian exile, the modernist virtuoso
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finds himself haunted by a past master,
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the darkest genius of Spanish painting,
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Francisco Goya.
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Goya was the first to make art
look squarely into the nightmare of cruelty
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that was modern warfare.
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00:16:14,727 --> 00:16:18,322
His disasters of war turn the ideal forms of art,
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the beauty of a human body, into a sick joke.
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So much butcher's chops.
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00:16:31,247 --> 00:16:34,637
Goya's obsessions infected Picasso.
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00:16:36,167 --> 00:16:39,921
The old master's bullfights,
with their rituals of slaughter,
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pulling him inexorably back to Spain.
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00:17:01,087 --> 00:17:06,286
In 1934, Picasso crossed the Pyrenees
for a tour of his homeland.
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00:17:06,367 --> 00:17:09,484
For part of the trip,
he was joined by Marie Th�rese.
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Inevitably, here in Madrid,
they went to a bullfight.
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00:17:19,687 --> 00:17:23,521
The poet Federico Lorca described Spain
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as the only country
where death is a national spectacle.
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00:17:33,247 --> 00:17:34,965
In the mid-1930s,
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the spectacle was threatening
to spill from the bullring.
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Spain was about to be torn apart.
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It was already hopelessly divided.
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There was a modern Spain,
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urban, secular, industrial.
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00:18:01,687 --> 00:18:06,636
A Spain of thriving socialist movements
and agitating anarchists.
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00:18:12,167 --> 00:18:14,920
But there was another, more ancient Spain.
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A country of immense landed estates
and a poverty-stricken peasantry.
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A Spain suffocated by the heavy presence
of the Catholic Church.
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Picasso called this The Black Spain.
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The problem was that both Spains
claimed to be the true nation.
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Neither was prepared to accept
the verdict of elections.
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00:18:48,687 --> 00:18:52,680
Had they thought of themselves
as just rival political parties,
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well, then hostile but peaceful coexistence
would have been possible.
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But they didn't.
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00:19:01,007 --> 00:19:05,717
Each side, left and right,
old and new, believed the other
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not just to be the opposition
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but the enemy of reborn Spain itself.
196
00:19:12,447 --> 00:19:16,520
Each side demanded the other's annihilation.
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Some Spanish artists
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had more than an inkling of what was coming.
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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
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Right-wing intellectuals
made overtures to Picasso,
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hoping he might join Dali in their camp.
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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
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00:20:38,247 --> 00:20:42,604
and found he'd fallen
into the abyss of native hatreds.
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00:20:58,567 --> 00:21:04,358
A Spanish fever begins to take hold
of Picasso's deepest creative imagination.
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Into the prints and drawings
come all the old ancient antagonists,
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who, once summoned, never really go away.
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The bull,
212
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the horse
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and the bearer of light.
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It's not pretty, it is scary.
215
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We're in the bullring.
216
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Entrails spill from gored horses,
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sometimes toreadors die,
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sometimes bulls.
219
00:21:53,087 --> 00:21:57,478
But we're also in a more ancient world
of the Minotaur,
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00:21:57,567 --> 00:22:00,684
and the labyrinth of Picasso's mind.
221
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In 1935, with Spain on the brink of catastrophe,
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Picasso suddenly stops playing around
223
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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
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which somehow has the weight,
226
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solemnity and monumental power of an altarpiece,
227
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a mural or reworking of an ancient frieze.
228
00:22:33,247 --> 00:22:36,159
He calls it The Minotauromachy.
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It has all the quality of a dream or memory,
230
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sexual and scriptural.
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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
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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
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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 Ther�se 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 Th�rese,
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 Th�rese 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.
52150
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