Picasso: Love, Sex and Art

IN FRENCH:

At the time of his death in April, 1973, aged 91,

Pablo Picasso had become

one of the 20th century's most influential and prolific artists.

Picasso has been painted as many men -

as a genius, a womaniser, an egomaniac.

Brought up in the Spanish town of Malaga, his first paintings,

as a nine-year-old, were of bullfighting scenes.

Later, he would represent himself as the mythological Minotaur,

half man, half bull.

The bull craved women, who would feed his life and his art.

Their encounters produced

the 20th century's most extraordinary portraits,

as Picasso reconstructed the female form

to the point of total abstraction.

Many of these women would find themselves damaged forever.

For the first time, the people who knew him best tell the story

of those women, to give a new insight

into the artist and his work.

The first time I met Picasso, I was struck by the enormous power

that seemed to emanate from this very small man.

What struck me, particularly, was this Spanish concept,

from the south of Spain, "mirada fuerte" - the strong gaze.

People in Andalusia feel that they can have a woman with their eyes.

It's like an extra human...

..like a limb.

And Picasso seemed to have that.

One felt that the eyes were enormously powerful.

More than any other 20th-century artist,

Picasso's art was drawn from his relationships.

He always avoided publicly linking his women with his art,

but through his paintings, etchings and sculptures,

every life he touched becomes visible.

He was an artist with an astonishing diversity of styles,

often inspired by the women he was with.

When the women in Picasso's life changes, everything else changes.

The poet changes.

The circle of friends change, the house changes.

Everything changes with the mistress. And I watched this happen.

And that was totally fascinating.

IN FRENCH:

Picasso always defined clear periods, like patterns, in his work.

It was as if this was his way of mapping out his life

and his creativity.

Many of Picasso's works are depictions of the women he loved.

Some of the titles are clear.

Portrait of Olga In An Armchair, portrait of Dora Maar.

Jacqueline With Crossed Hands.

But some are more mysterious.

Study For Women's Head. The Dream.

Woman With Yellow Necklace.

IN FRENCH:

In each period, in fact, with each different woman,

he had a, sort of, leitmotif, like in Wagner.

You can hear it in his work,

the leitmotif that introduces each character.

In Picasso, you can see it.

So, my own leitmotif was always the blue and green.

If you asked Picasso questions about his work,

he would very often dismiss them and he wasn't interested.

But with me, we'd go through a catalogue or something

and he'd start telling me who, in fact, these portraits were of.

I mean, that is not Dora.

That's partly Dora, but there's a little bit of Francoise there

and then, some of these paintings, there are four women in one thing.

There is Dora, there is Nusch Eluard.

There's Roland Penrose's wife, the photographer, and Ines,

the maid at the local hotel.

And they were all there.

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881.

At first, it was thought he was stillborn.

He would always tell the story of how, when he was born,

he seemed to hesitate, motionless,

before at last making his entrance into the world with a great cry.

Don Jose Ruiz, his father, was a drawing teacher

and a not-very-successful painter.

Young Pablo could draw before he could talk.

The first word he spoke was "lapiz" - pencil.

His father taught him to draw pigeons, but before long,

he was fascinated by the bullfight.

Quite a spectacle for a child,

seeing a great arena for the first time.

Don Jose was not just astonished by his son, he was completely dazzled.

So, he decided to give his young prodigy a proper training.

He took him to the Prado in Madrid.

It was Pablo's first encounter with the Spanish masters,

and it opened his eyes.

Goya.

Velazquez.

He discovered the whole tradition of Spanish epic and realist painting.

Don Jose hoped to turn Picasso into a great classical painter,

but Pablo's dream was to paint life as it really is,

with all its suffering and its doubts.

His personal quest had begun

and Pablo started turning out self-portraits

that were a long way from the academic style

he wanted to leave behind.

In ebullient, avant-garde Barcelona, Gaudi was changing

the face of architecture, while students

veered from Nietzschean philosophy to Catalan nationalism.

Pablo whiled away his time at the Four Cats cabaret,

with the poet Jaime Sabartes, the painter Casagemas

and Manuel Pallares, who would all become lifelong friends.

He first tasted the pleasures of the flesh

in the brothels of the Carrer D'Avinyo.

He drowned himself in the arms of prostitutes,

waking in him a love of paid-for fantasies.

The 18-year-old boy would, all his life,

have a fascination with physical love.

Eroticism now appeared in his work and would never leave it.

Exasperated with his father's constant disapproval

at his bohemian lifestyle, Pablo decided to leave for Paris,

wellspring of the Art Nouveau that was taking Europe by storm.

Along with Casagemas and Pallares,

Pablo explored the nightlife of the Belle Epoque.

They went to the Moulin Rouge in Montmartre,

to the Chat Noir and the Moulin de la Galette.

On these nights on the town,

the three friends took artists' models from Montmartre with them -

sensual, independent young women, who would happily pose naked

for all the painters in their studios.

Laure Florentin was one of them.

In Montmartre, she was known as Germaine.

Picasso's friend, Casagemas, fell passionately,

and violently, in love with her.

None of his friends knew, though, that Casagemas

suffered from congenital impotence

and could not satisfy his young beauty's desires.

Since she wanted more than the platonic love that was

all he could give her, Germaine dropped him.

Casagemas, spouting tears and threats, started drinking heavily.

In a moment of despair, he decided to shoot his mistress, crying,

"So much for you!"

Germaine escaped with her life, but only just.

Casagemas turned the gun on himself,

muttering, "So much for me."

This time, he didn't miss.

The death of such a dear friend was a heavy blow.

In that year of 1901,

pain found its irrevocable way into Picasso's brushstrokes.

These paintings shed light on a key moment in the life

and work of the young painter.

Laid out in his coffin, all the colour had drained out of Casagemas.

And soon, only blue would remain.

Blue for the fragility of existence,

blue for cold, blue for death.

From now on, Pablo would paint what he saw, but above all,

what he felt...

..poverty, solitude, deprivation.

After two years of misery and blue,

Pablo managed to shake off the death of his friend

in a masterpiece entitled Life.

The impotent Casagemas and Germaine,

unable to have children, confront the spectre of maternity.

But it's still with a heavy heart, felt in his work,

that, at 22 years old, the young painter moved into an insalubrious,

damp and dirty building.

His friend, the poet Max Jacob, named it the Bateau-Lavoir,

the laundry boat.

There, Max read Baudelaire and Verlaine to Pablo,

who was, at last, happy with this life of a painter among poets,

with Max, and now with Guillaume Apollinaire,

whom he met in a sleazy bar near the Gare Saint-Lazare.

The two poets had been the only ones

to stand up for Pablo's gloomy and grim paintings,

but now they would witness a sudden metamorphosis of their friend.

This portrait, on a scrap of cardboard,

found in Picasso's house after his death,

is the record of a brief and passionate affair that,

to the end of his days, Pablo would never talk of.

Her name was Madeleine and, thanks to her,

Picasso now saw la vie en rose.

Pablo had discovered the Medrano Circus, in the foothills

of Montmartre, where he spent hours chatting with the clowns.

Sharing a few moments of the life of these travelling folk

quickly impacted on Picasso's painting,

in this series on performers, acrobats and their family life.

Dreaming of fatherhood with la belle Madeleine, he painted himself

as a harlequin but all too soon, Madeleine was eclipsed by another.

She walked into his life one summer evening,

as a thunderstorm shook the Bateau-Lavoir.

Amelie Lang was a model on the run from her violent husband

and was enjoying many affairs in the studios of Montmartre.

They called her Fernande.

IN FRENCH:

Pablo, ever the possessive ladies' man, managed to

ensnare the delightful Fernande in his web

and trapped her in his studio.

It was an opium-infused prison of love and painting.

Under the drug's influence,

they lost themselves in their own fantasy world.

Summer, 1906.

Two friends, Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, were trying to

carry a heavy trunk full of tubes of paint and blank canvases.

Pablo had decided to go away with Fernande on the money

from art dealer Ambroise Vollard,

who had bought all the paintings from his pink period.

Fernande, no doubt,

would have preferred a more pleasant destination,

but Pablo had chosen the dry and lonely landscape of Gosol,

in the Catalan mountains.

IN FRENCH:

If Picasso felt the need to see out his Spanish roots, it was because

he was besieged by doubts about how much his paintings actually meant.

He had been bowled over by the Ingres retrospective

at the Grand Palais.

There, for the first time,

a picture that had been considered too scandalous was shown.

Picasso was dazzled by The Turkish Bath.

He was not the only one to fall under its spell.

Henri Matisse, the flag-bearer of the Fauvist movement,

had, that spring, presented The Joy Of Life, inspired

by The Turkish Bath, and its colours had aroused Picasso's indignation.

The picture troubled him.

No doubt, for the first time in his life,

he felt rivalry with another painter.

His reply to Ingres, and especially to Matisse,

influenced by the austere surroundings of Gosol,

was to turn to primitivism.

Go back to the very roots of art.

Learn to be clumsy again, and get down to basics.

His faces would soon become masks.

Back in Paris, Pablo continued his research.

He used himself as his own model,

as these self-portraits found in his house show.

Picasso had decided to paint what he felt, rather than what he saw.

He was searching for a kind of painting that had never been

seen before and shut himself up at his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir.

It is thanks to the sketchbooks and studies that he left behind

that we now know that this process,

that would lead to one of the most celebrated

paintings in the history of art,

lasted for no less than nine months and required more than 800 studies.

Pablo had decided on its risque subject from the very start.

It was to be a brothel scene.

The violence of society, the darkness of sexuality.

The initial influence was primitive Spanish art -

Iberian statues that Pablo had come across in the Louvre.

Then there was not African masks, as had always been believed,

but the photographs

brought back by Edmond Fortier from black Africa.

The faces, twisted and scarified, has finally become primitive masks.

Ingres, Matisse -

Picasso had definitively deconstructed

both The Turkish Bath and The Joy Of Life.

Pablo called the painting The Brothel At Avinyo, in reference

to his adventures in that street back in Barcelona.

Later, to the great chagrin of the artist, it would be renamed

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

It represented a complete break with all the conventions

of Western art since the Renaissance.

Nobody seemed to understand his Avinyo bordello.

So, Picasso carried on researching those forms

that would eventually lead him to Cubism.

It was an adventure that started with photography.

He had discovered photography when he first came to Paris.

He quickly started playing with tricks of perspective,

as in this image, the first one we have by Picasso, the photographer.

Appearing among his canvases on the left of the photo amused him.

He photographed himself in his Bateau-Lavoir studio

in the middle of his beloved collection of African statuettes.

There, one evening, high on hashish and in a state of despair,

he cried out that he might as well kill himself,

now that photography existed.

What was the point of painting, if reality could be captured by a lens?

In order to surpass photography,

he needed to drag painting beyond what was real.

When he went to Horta de Ebro with Fernande

in the summer of 1909, Pablo captured the landscapes.

On the canvas, the reservoir he had photographed

became deformed and the houses above it elongated.

"That's where it all started.

"That's where I realised how far I could go," he would later say.

To give volume to figures.

To take geometrical forms as far as possible.

To deconstruct forms and take them beyond reality.

Pablo also tried his hand at Cubist sculpture,

breaking up, as he called it, the head of Fernande

into a multitude of planes.

He had travelled a long way from the sensuality of Gosol

and the Bateau-Lavoir.

But by 1911, Pablo, the eternal ladies' man,

had no time for Fernande any more.

He had fallen for the frail and elegant Eva Gouel.

He named all his paintings after Eva.

Cubism was now leading towards abstraction.

Based on a popular song of the time, "Oh, ma jolie,

"mon coeur te dit bonjour", Pablo depicted Eva,

his secret lover, with the words Ma Jolie - My Pretty One.

Fernande was so jealous of Pablo's new liaison

that he and Eva were soon forced to flee Paris.

They sought refuge near Avignon with Georges Braque and his wife.

Georges was the only one to have understood

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Moreover, he was Pablo's ally in the shared folly of Cubism.

When Braque showed his paintings at the Autumn Salon of 1908,

Matisse said, "Look! Braque has sent us some paintings

"full of little cubes!"

Soon, though, cubes would be all the rage.

EXPLOSION

The First World War halted the development of Cubism,

as fellow artists from the movement were called to the front.

Picasso, though, avoided conscription,

because of his Spanish nationality.

Then, in 1914, Eva contracted tuberculosis.

The woman he loved was now in danger.

It was no longer enough to represent her as just words on a canvas.

Now, Picasso painted himself with Eva in an evocation

of the painter and his model -

a pairing that would become the pictorial obsession of a lifetime.

Eva died in 1915 and Pablo would forever keep this canvas

hidden away in his studios.

By now, the war was bogged down in the trenches.

But in Montparnasse, little by little,

life was getting back to normal.

Soldiers on a few days' leave from the front

enjoyed the cafe terraces.

Pablo returned to his portrait and started sketching his old friends -

Guillaume Apollinaire, badly wounded, who has had brain surgery.

Max Jacob, the faithful friend.

And above all, a newcomer who appeared in Pablo's life.

A defector from the Paris in-crowd.

He was 25 and his name was Jean Cocteau.

TRANSLATION:

Montparnasse was a village.

You sat staring at the Rotonde, just like that any old local.

I remember well the time I asked Picasso to do Parade With me.

It was if I had dragged Renaud backstage at a music hall.

Well, everyone looked down their noses at us.

And I made this proposition to him right there

on the street in front of the Rotonde.

I tell you, it was like being in a village.

Cocteau dreamt of creating a new artistic movement,

bringing together Picasso with the composer Eric Satie

and Diaghilev's Russian ballet for a new show called Parade.

Picasso threw himself passionately into this new world of the theatre.

When, in February 1917, he arrived in Rome,

where the Russian ballet was in residence, Pablo discovered

the life of a ballet company, with its 60 ballerinas.

Diaghilev may have had 60 stars,

but it was just one of them who dazzled Picasso.

She was one of the youngest in the troupe.

The purity of her beauty entranced him.

Her name was Olga Khokhlova.

He followed her on her tour of Italy

until the troupe returned to Paris for the opening of Parade.

As the audience took their seats in Paris's Chatelet theatre

that May evening in 1917,

the first thing they saw was the huge stage curtain,

painted by Picasso.

Its air of classical romanticism

stood in sharp contrast to the resolutely Cubist scenery.

In a fantasy inspired by the circus and conceived by Picasso,

these monolithic figures in their Cubist costumes were the managers.

Guillaume Apollinaire was there to applaud his friends.

He coined a new word for Picasso and for Parade - surrealism.

A new spirit.

But the audience reacted angrily.

TRANSLATION:

We had one chap say to another,

"If I had known it was this stupid, I would have brought the children."

In those days, women still wore hat pins

and they wanted to stick them in our eyes - me and Picasso and Satie.

But they were impressed with Apollinaire and his heroic bandages.

He was a real hero. He saved us.

Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso were inseparable.

Perhaps inevitably, each would be a witness at the other's wedding.

Guillaume got married that spring.

Then, in July 1918, Picasso married the beautiful Olga Khokhlova.

Picasso's witnesses were the poets who had sheared his life

since he first came to Paris - Max Jacob,

Jean Cocteau and Guillaume Apollinaire.

Guillaume's gift to Pablo was a poem.

"Dear Pablo, the war goes on.

"Our marriages are children of the war and will live long.

"Our God now wants to help us, his children wise, courageous.

"So may he bless our weddings, our poems and paintings

"and one day, like the stars above,

"along with these dear ones we love,

"dear Pablo, may he let us be

"singing for all eternity."

On the 11th of November, 1918,

the whole country finally celebrated victory.

But although delighted by Germany's surrender,

Pablo received terrible news.

Guillaume Apollinaire had died in agony of the Spanish flu.

Olga and Pablo Picasso started life as newlyweds

in a new-found prosperity.

The gallery owner Paul Rosenberg had, every year,

started buying Picasso's canvasses

for hundreds of thousands of francs

which he sold in France, but especially in America.

It was Rosenberg who found, right next door to his gallery,

the smart apartment that was perfect for Picasso's new life -

the glamorous life of a now-famous artist.

Olga gave Picasso access to her friends,

Eric Satie, Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky.

TRANSLATION:

This was a woman who, through her work and what she did

and through the people she knew, was already in a, sort of, cultural

avant-garde and I think that, too, attracted Picasso, being close

to people who saw that beginning of the 20th century through modern eyes.

Olga aspired to a life of high society and saw in Picasso

an established figure with whom she could settle down.

Picasso amused himself with some traditional portraiture -

Rosenberg's wife or Olga in the style of Ingres.

Olga was now the happily-married wife,

surrounded by all Pablo's paintings, all his different

styles and periods but overlapped and blended into each other,

only to suddenly split away and head for new horizons.

Olga was the first to undergo the transformation that Picasso

now imposed on his subjects.

Bodies got heavier, the hands and feet seemed to swell.

He invented a race of giants, not of this world.

Pablo the giant was now completely swollen with pride.

At 40 years old, he at last became a father.

Olga bore him a baby son, Paul, born in February 1921.

TRANSLATION:

Picasso said it himself. His work is his diary, his biography.

Olga was his model.

My father, too, as soon as he was born, was immediately used as a model

and part of his creation.

The beauty of those works, especially the ones that feature my father,

shows all that sweetness, that love, that life.

From now on, the women he loved were not the only ones that

inspired Picasso. The child, too, became a model.

Through him, the painter recharged and renewed himself.

The family life Pablo had built around himself might have been

fulfilling for the man, but it could not satisfy the artist for long.

Picasso was naturally drawn to the effervescent Paris

of the Roaring Twenties

Now, he pushed to its extreme the deformation of the body

begun in those giants,

as if he wanted to be part of the young poet

Andre Breton's Surrealist movement.

The Dance, painted in 1925, was, in its skewed composition,

a revolutionary piece.

One that would completely overturn Picasso's whole body of work.

It's a danse macabre

that brought all the phantoms of the past back to life.

The dancer, driven mad by the furious rhythms, was Germaine.

Like the Grim Reaper, she spread death among the men -

like his friend Casagemas, who had tried to love her.

For Picasso, love was always fatal.

Sexuality was always violence.

Even a kiss became a thing of terror

in this painting from the same period.

The Kiss, or the journey of the painter -

anguished, obsessed and tormented to the very depths of his being.

One day in January 1927, Pablo, whose marriage to Olga

was by now on the rocks, was walking around the Opera district.

Suddenly, out of the blue, he noticed a young girl.

He had found the perfect model he'd always been looking for.

TRANSLATION: When my father first set eyes on my mother,

she was a splendid 17-year-old.

Blonde, blue eyes, fresh skinned,

and she was going in to the Galeries Lafayette department store -

the famous one.

And he noticed her from outside,

because there was this, sort of, bin where she spent ages

looking for collars and cuffs.

So, my father was waiting for her, waiting and waiting,

and she never came out.

She didn't know that there was this gentleman outside ogling her.

He was the one who always went on about it.

"I was exploding," he said.

Her name was Marie-Therese Walter and she was only 17.

She would soon captivate the man,

and completely turn around the artist.

Obviously, he couldn't let anyone find out

that he had an underage girl posing for him in his studio,

so young Marie-Therese,

with whom Pablo was now enjoying a torrid affair,

only appeared in his paintings in a disguised, coded form.

Here are her initials, MT, as the frets of these guitars,

and here she is disguised as the woman playing ball,

stretched out across his paintings from the beach at Dinard,

where Pablo, Olga and little Paul enjoyed family holidays -

with Marie-Therese hidden away at a nearby guesthouse.

These paintings are an amazing testimony to the dilemma

of a man torn between Olga and Marie-Therese.

The Kiss now represents the bitter face-off

between the dark-haired Olga and the blonde Marie-Therese.

Marie-Therese, the object of obsession of a 47-year-old man

who couldn't tear himself away from the face, the smile of his mistress.

He took photos of her, dozens of them.

And, just for fun, he turned them into a, sort of, flipbook.

So, now he had at his fingertips a moving image of the woman he loved.

When Marie-Therese at last came of age,

it was a liberating moment for Pablo.

Now, he could fill his canvases with her body, her curves, her nakedness.

These are masterpieces that will figure among his most famous works.

To keep his work secret from Olga

and create the sculptures inspired by his new muse,

Pablo bought himself a chateau, near Gisors, in Boisgeloup.

At first, the purity of Marie-Therese's face

became classical sculpture.

But then it was remodelled...

deformed...

refined.

In a seemingly unstoppable frenzy,

Picasso started turning out engravings

in thrall to the almost-obsessive repetition the medium allows.

Sexuality soon tipped over into bestiality, as,

inspired by Marie-Therese, he seized on a new theme -

the Minotaur,

the half-man, half-bull monster of mythology,

to whom the Athenians yielded up their young virgins.

Pablo, the Minotaur, raping the young beauty.

All the drama of his most famous engraving, Minotauromachy,

centres on Marie-Therese.

She is the female bullfighter

carried off by the disembowelled horse.

She is also the carefree young woman who watches Pablo from her window

as he loses all control.

But, above all, she was the only one capable of taming the monster

and saving him from himself.

Despite the ever-increasing tension between them,

Olga and Picasso still kept trying to hold on to their family life.

In these precious and rare family images, it was Pablo himself

who set up a camera in the garden in Boisgeloup to film Olga and Paul.

It was a moment of happiness for a family that would soon split apart.

Olga was losing the man she loved.

When he learned that Marie-Therese was now with child,

Pablo hastened the divorce proceedings.

Olga simply couldn't imagine not being Madame Picasso.

Nevertheless, Pablo got the separation he wanted.

Olga got the chateau in Boisgeloup to live in.

And because divorce was still illegal for a Spaniard,

she was able to remain Madame Olga Picasso till the day she died.

So, Pablo would never be able

to properly acknowledge his future children.

The first to arrive was little Maria de la Concepcion,

born the 5th of September 1935.

TRANSLATION: I arrived.

What's more, I was half dead, because they'd

so anaesthetised my mother that I came out a bit...floppy.

What to call this thing?

Is it a girl?

So, naturally, the only thing they could think of,

and both of them came up with it,

was Maria de la Concepcion -

the little sister my father lost when he was 11 or 12,

and still grieved for.

Now 54, Pablo installed Marie-Therese and Maya in a house,

Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, lent to him by the gallery owner Ambroise Vollard.

Pablo now had Marie-Therese in a golden cage.

Like the loving and dutiful companion that she was,

she accepted her fate,

giving herself forever to the man who had awoken her

from innocence to experience.

He wrote passionate letters to her.

"I love you tonight more than yesterday, less than tomorrow,

"I love you, Marie-Therese. I love you, I love you, I love you."

But the Minotaur was insatiable,

and he was already devouring yet another woman.

His new victim was Dora Maar.

She was 30.

Dora was a photographer,

half French, half Yugoslavian, brought up in Argentina.

She spoke Spanish and she thought like a Surrealist.

She impressed Pablo with her passion for politics

and her knowledge of, and love for, art.

She was introduced to him by the poet Paul Eluard.

Apollinaire was no more, Max Jacob had withdrawn to a monastery -

Eluard was now the poet for Picasso.

Pablo's social and artistic circle revolved around Surrealism.

along with Eluard, the young photographer Man Ray and Dora,

he was gripped by a craze for politics.

He found it intolerable that democracy was in such peril,

with Italy falling to Mussolini

and the German Republic under the heel of Hitler.

Transcendence must now come from poetry.

And in those trouble times, Picasso would try his hand at it himself.

When his Surrealist friend Andre Breton published Picasso's poems,

he would note that he "has the impression of being in the presence

"of an intimate journal."

"Let the rats feast where they will,

"But let them not eat the pigeons in their nest,

"Nor let them set flags and little lanterns in the wounds

"and then, in the morning, all is tears."

"Give, snatch away wrongs and kill I cross over

"set fire to and burn caress and lick embrace

"and look, I sound on every flight the bells until they bleed."

-Viva la republica!

-ALL: Viva!

ALL SING

Pablo celebrated with Paul Eluard

the Popular Front's victory in Spain,

and then that of Leon Blum and his French Popular Front in May, 1936.

But General Franco wouldn't accept the Left's victory

and he started a civil war.

Picasso voiced his confusion in illustrated verse,

Sueno Y Mentira De Franco - The Dream And Lie Of Franco.

The Spanish Republic, in complete disarray,

asked its most illustrious painter to come up with a huge canvas

that would adorn the Spanish pavilion

at the next universal exhibition.

Under the eaves of a large mansion in the Rue des Grands Augustins,

Dora Maar had found just the studio Picasso was looking for.

BOMB WHISTLES

On the 28th of April, 1937, Italian and German planes

that supported Franco and his nationalists

bombarded and destroyed the Basque town of Guernica.

When, on the 30th of April, Pablo saw the photos

of Europe's first-ever aerial massacre,

he knew exactly what he had to paint.

The canvas must be enormous.

It would, in fact, be almost 25 feet long and over nine feet high.

The head of a woman, with her dead child in her arms

is howling at the sky. Tears, where her eyes should be.

In the background, a horse, struck down by death from the sky,

struggles to its feet in agony, to scream out injustice.

And Picasso explained it all in an explicit text.

"The Spanish Civil War is a battle of reactionary forces

"against the people, against liberty.

"In the panel that I shall call Guernica,

"I clearly express my horror at the military caste that has plunged

"Spain into an ocean of pain and death."

Unveiled in July at the Paris Exposition,

Guernica was taken on a fundraising tour for the Republican cause

to Stockholm, Manchester and London, before crossing the Atlantic.

Picasso would not live to see the change in government

for which the Spanish people had been waiting.

It was not until 1981 that Guernica was finally hung

in Madrid's Prado museum.

As the Second World War engulfed Europe,

and Paris was occupied, Picasso chose to stay.

Dora would be his muse in those dark years,

as the couple closeted themselves in the attic studio.

It is her body stretched, tortured, suffering.

L'aubade is Picasso's best-known wartime work.

The image of a woman serenaded in her imprisonment,

reflecting the agony of occupation and terror.

As Paris was liberated,

Picasso celebrated with Marie-Therese and Maya

on their balcony.

But he also now sought personal freedom

and both Marie-Therese and Dora would soon be eclipsed

by a new mistress.

Her name was Francoise Gilot,

and, with her, Picasso aimed to start again from the beginning.

He left Paris and moved south with Francoise,

to break with her previous relationships.

He soon realised that there was something different

about this sexually-confident young woman.

TRANSLATION: I was like the seventh wife of Bluebeard,

by which I mean, Bluebeard already had a bad reputation.

Everybody knew it and he didn't even bother to hide it.

And don't forget, he was 40 years older than me

and he had an authority about him that I didn't have, at all.

Throughout this long relationship - ten or 11 years -

I remained just as much of a mystery to him as on the first day.

Picasso's depiction of Francoise was of a flower in green and blue -

La Femme Fleur.

With her began one of the happiest periods of his life.

The young art student inspired the celebratory painting,

La Joie De Vivre -

Francoise dancing naked in a Mediterranean setting.

Soon, the couple moved into a house called La Galloise,

and their first child, Claud, was born in 1947.

TRANSLATION: We were a charming little family

in a simple little house.

Everyone always seemed busy, all around me.

And I was busy watching them, and watching everything they were doing.

The first time I really got to know Picasso was in '51

and we went to La Galloise,

which seemed such a crummy little...

dwelling for the greatest artist in the world.

It was, sort of, so ordinary.

And, of course, that, in a way, I think, for Picasso, was its quality.

I mean, he'd become a member of the Communist Party

and he wanted to live like a, you know, working man -

no frills, no chichi, and no luxe of any kind.

We spent a little bit of time at the Galloise,

but then we went to the factory, the old factory,

rusting factory he'd taken over,

which is where he made his sculpture and did most of his painting.

TRANSLATION: My father had found this place he called Le Fournace.

You could get there on foot - it wasn't really very far.

He had his sculpture studio there, and his painting studio.

And his ceramics workshop was at Madoura's place.

He spent a lot of time at both of them.

Pablo Picasso, perpetual innovator,

now turned to a new medium - ceramics.

But he continued to use his favourite subject - the female body.

A sister for Claud arrived in 1949.

Her name was inspired by one of Picasso's most recognisable works -

the Dove Of Peace which he offered

to the International Congress for Peace in 1949.

The launch of Picasso's dove, or "paloma" in Spanish,

as a global peace symbol coincided with the birth of his daughter.

TRANSLATION: Paloma was born at that very moment, you know?

So, it's not surprising she was named after a dove.

Paloma joined Picasso's expanding family,

and his journal of paintings.

He could finally have all of his children close to him.

Paul, now 28, would stay closest to his father,

and regularly joined him at the bullfight.

Unable to be in his beloved Spain, Picasso would watch

the Corrida d'Arles and Nimes in the South of France with Francoise.

One of the tragedies in Picasso's life was that, after 1934,

he could never return to Spain.

And he loved Spain, he longed to go back to Spain,

but there was no way he could do it.

One way he managed to keep, as it were,

in touch with Spain, was through the bullfights.

I think Picasso's involvement in bullfighting

and the cult of the bull is enormously important on his art.

SPANISH GUITAR

At home, the independent Francoise was more than a match

for the ageing bull,

and an increasingly-frustrated Picasso responded

with this image of a knight in armour with his pages.

What I didn't know at the time,

which Francoise Gilot told me much later,

is that the main figure in armour,

the spikiest of all these armoured figures, was her.

Because Picasso said, you know,

"You're so spiky, you won't give way to me over anything,

"your spikes stick out,

"and there you are, in armour."

TRANSLATION: Apparently, he then said to my son,

"Yes, you're the son of the woman who says no."

But, in fact, I didn't say no much,

because that never went down well with Picasso.

Francoise tolerated, as much as she could,

the visits of Picasso's former wives and mistresses.

Olga even moved in nearby,

proclaiming to the end her status as Madame Picasso.

The ex-wives weren't stuffed in the closet - they were right there.

They were always there, for heaven's sake.

So, already, there was that to put up with.

And then, in '51, he found himself a girlfriend - I don't know where.

It was already quite enough for me,

and then, if there was going to be others, as well,

apart from me, well, in that case, I wanted to take care of myself

and go off with the children.

And his reply to that was completely inappropriate.

He said, "You don't leave a man like me."

I just said, "All right, then. Just wait and see. You'll see."

She was not damaged by the break-up of the relationship.

I mean, the other women... I mean, Dora went slightly insane,

Olga, the wife, I mean, had a terrible time.

Francoise was the only one of Picasso's women

to survive the experience.

Picasso was hurt,

because this was the first time that anybody had left HIM.

In the past, I mean, he'd left THEM.

The woman who was to be his last companion was Jacqueline Roque.

She worked at the local ceramics gallery,

and had recently separated from her husband.

The couple acquired a grand house in Cannes called La Californie.

Also Picasso's studio, it quickly became overwhelmed by art.

I was lucky to be around at the time of change,

from Francoise to Jacqueline.

I felt immediately that what Picasso wanted

from the woman who would almost certainly be

the last mistress of his life,

was someone who was prepared to sacrifice herself

on the altar of his art.

And Jacqueline made it very clear to Picasso,

Jacqueline would do anything.

And Picasso realised that.

Picasso could only remarry once Olga had died.

By then, he was almost 80 years old.

Jacqueline became the second Madame Picasso.

In the last years of his life,

Picasso retreated with Jacqueline into their final home,

Notre-Dame-de-Vie, only occasionally receiving friends,

and no longer seeing his children.

Jacqueline saw herself as protecting Picasso

from those who would distract him from has art.

In his 80s, he worked tirelessly

on versions of some of his best known paintings.

Le Matador.

Le Baiser - The Kiss.

L'aubade - The Serenade.

TRANSLATION: My father was running out of time.

The older you get, if you love something

and are passionate about it, the more you chase after time.

But above all, you know, just imagine what it means

to create something every day, day after day after day.

And just look at the dexterity of the engravings.

Right at the end of his life, he was doing absolutely extraordinary ones.

Picasso continued to create furiously.

His subjects were the female figures

that had obsessed him his entire life.

The canvases piled up in every room.

Pablo Picasso was now 91 -

still as youthful of spirit and curious as ever.

But he knew his life was coming to an end.

TRANSLATION: The last work session we had

was at the beginning of July 1972,

and it lasted three hours.

That worried me, because I thought it might tire him.

But he had some reproductions of stuff he'd done in 1912, 1913.

He was absolutely delighted to see them, at any rate.

It was a terrific session.

And then, when he'd finished, he took me by the arm and led me

to a little workshop where he'd laid out his portrait on a chaise longue,

like a person.

The one with the bulging eyes, you know?

And I understood straight away

that he must have had an attack, or something,

and he'd done his self-portrait faced with death.

And our goodbye, really...

Well, he just saw me out and just left me there.

In his last days, confined to his bed,

he continued to draw, with the devoted Jacqueline by his side.

TRANSLATION: The ritual was always the same.

He'd get up at 8:30 or 9:00,

then he had to get on the phone and call his secretary,

who'd come and bring his mail. They'd talk.

And that morning, he called just before he died,

around seven or eight o'clock.

He was already very ill, very tired,

and he said to bring him some pencils.

He started to draw,

and then died, just like that, in his bed, drawing.

So, it was a good end.

The Minotaur was gone, but it would continue to affect

the destinies of the women in his life.

Picasso's force of personality,

his extraordinarily prolific output, his single-mindedness,

but most of all, his insatiable passion,

were his legacy to them.

It was a legacy that would have tragic consequences.

Marie-Therese ended her life in October 1977,

four years after Picasso's death,

unable to carry on, now that the love of her life was gone.

In 1986, Jacqueline Roque organised a Picasso exhibition in Madrid.

Nobody knew that it was planned as a last homage to her husband.

On the evening of the inauguration, at home in Notre-Dame-de-Vie,

she lay back in bed and pressed the trigger of a revolver.