Original subtitles

Modern art. It sells for a fortune in exclusive galleries, but what's it ever done for us?

Has it influenced the clothes that we wear?

Or the buildings that we live in? The cars that we drive?

The books we read to our children?

Even the way that we think.

I'm Alastair Sooke, and I earn a living writing about art.

And in this series I'm going to explore the life and work of four titans of the 20th century.

Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol.

They all changed their world.

But have they changed ours?

This week, Picasso.

It goes something like this.

Picasso has a visitor, and the visitor says, "What is art?"

Picasso thinks about it and points to a sculpture of a bicycle saddle

and a pair of handlebars which he combined to make a bull's head, and he shrugs, "What is art?

"What is not?" he replies.

"Yo El Rey" Picasso wrote on an early self-portrait.

It means "I, The King".

It showed a self-confidence he'd never lose, in art or with women.

Understandable really when, in your own lifetime, you're the richest and most famous artist who's ever lived.

So famous, in fact, his name's now part of our language.

If something goes awry, it's gone a bit Picasso.

His work is instantly recognisable.

Often compared to a child's, with eyes in the wrong place and noses sticking out in strange directions.

But it still manages to sell quite well.

This one, called Dora Maar With a Cat, went for $95 million.

Picasso chose to paint like this, despite the fact he could paint like THIS by the time he was 16.

Instead he spent his life restlessly innovating,

ripping apart conventional art and shocking the world.

So why did he do it? And does it matter to us, today, that he went "all Picasso"?

If anyone wants to know anything about Picasso, they ask his friend and biographer John Richardson,

so first I've come to New York to meet him.

I'm feeling pretty thrilled at the prospect of meeting someone

who genuinely knew Picasso and knew him really well.

He spent a lot of time with him, so he's not just a kind of authority on the art,

but he really understood what made Picasso tick as a man as well.

John, how long have you lived in this apartment? I've lived here about 12 years,

and I was lucky I found this loft space.

John Richardson became a close friend of Picasso in the 1950s,

and his apartment contains an extraordinary collection of memorabilia.

Here we are, going to a bullfight and leading the throng.

There is Paolo, Picasso's son,

his yet-to-be wife Jacqueline, and then there is me here.

Look how many people are there. This is like a scene out of the Godfather or something.

I don't know why we were the forefront of this crowd,

but this was this just going through the streets towards the arena

and we used to do this all through the summer.

There's Picasso in his pants. Is this common? You'd turn up at the studio, and he'd be reclining?

Well, he often worked in just a pair of shorts.

The summer was hot and he loved going to the beach. He went to the beach a lot.

You must have lots of works. Here's a Picasso, for example. What's this piece?

That is a portrait of Jacqueline, his wife.

What's the date of it?

That's 1960. He was obviously very generous, was he?

He would just give you things? He was very generous by nature.

This whole place is a treasure trove,

and I can see here that this is a tiny picture of Picasso as a tiny boy.

This is Picasso aged, I suppose, seven.

You can see those prominent eyes already. And the authority.

'Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga on the Mediterranean coast

'of Spain in 1881.

'He was able to draw before he could speak and, supposedly,

'the first word he spoke was the Spanish for "pencil".

'His father Don Jose, an art teacher, was astounded by his son's natural talent.'

His father was an artist. His father was a very bad artist.

And, I would imagine, a very good art teacher, because Picasso learnt everything from his father.

Rather like people who have a child who is going to be a child star,

he had to draw and draw and draw and draw,

and Picasso became absolutely obsessed with drawing.

Drawing was the heart of his work, and if you couldn't draw it, there was no point.

He hated the word virtuosity,

but his incredible ability to draw in any style he wanted.

Pablo Picasso actually began life as Pablo Ruiz,

because Ruiz was his father's surname.

But even on this early sketch,

Pablo was practising signing his mother's maiden name Picasso.

Later in his life, Picasso said, "Can you imagine me being called Ruiz?"

Because Ruiz is a very common Spanish name.

The surname Picasso also contains the word "pica",

and this would have appealed to young Pablo...

..because a picador is a horseman in bullfighting who lances the bull.

Picasso once said that if he hadn't been a painter, he would have been one of these guys, a picador.

The word picador comes from the Spanish "picar", which means to irritate or provoke,

and you could say that that is exactly what Picasso did all his life,

obviously not a bull ring, but in his relationships with others, definitely,

and importantly, in his art.

Young Pablo revered the picador so much, one was the subject

of his first oil painting, made when he was around eight.

At the age of only 12, Picasso could already draw like this.

At 16, he'd won a place at Madrid's prestigious academy of fine art.

In Madrid, Picasso studied the greats.

Like this, by the old Spanish master Velazquez.

And he made a perfectly respectable copy.

So, even as teenager, Picasso had pretty much got the hang of classical painting.

But he was deeply unhappy at art school and within a year he left,

moving to Barcelona where his father was now a professor of art.

Here he began mixing with arty bohemian types, and met Carlos Casagemas,

a fellow artist who became Picasso's best friend.

In 1900, around his 19th birthday, Picasso and Casagemas left Spain

and moved to the epicentre of world art - Paris.

This was where any ambitious young artist needed to be.

Paris was also the European capital of sin,

home to hundreds of brothels, the Moulin Rouge and sordid bars

where artists and poets downed absinthe with anarchists and vagabonds.

Picasso and Casagemas joined the city's horde

of impoverished bohemians, gorging on every vice available.

Picasso's paintings, like this one, reflected their pastimes.

But Casagemas was a troubled soul,

in love with a girl called Germaine who didn't love him, and drinking heavily.

One night in 1901, Casagemas has decided he had had enough of Paris,

so he invited Germaine and a bunch of friends to a farewell dinner in this very cafe,

which I'm guessing has changed just a little bit.

After they had drunk several bottles of wine, Casagemas stood up,

and he gave an incoherent, slurry speech in French, and then suddenly,

he pulled a pistol from one pocket and aimed it at Germaine and fired.

Luckily, she sensed what was coming, ducked down, and the bullet grazed her neck.

But then, to the horror of all of his friends and customers,

Casagemas swivelled the revolver round to his own temple and pulled the trigger.

He was dead within an hour.

The death of his greatest friend devastated Picasso, and his sorrow permeated his art.

For the next few years, Casagemas would appear regularly in Picasso's works,

and, most significantly of all, he began to paint almost exclusively in blue.

He depicted outcasts, isolation and despair,

as if that was all that he could see.

But his misery led to his first distinct style,

now known as his Blue Period.

Although still relatively classical,

he was painting from the heart, using blue to express profound emotion,

rather than just accurately copying reality.

The sorrowful power of these paintings would capture imaginations far beyond the world of art,

but did Picasso play a part in defining blue as the colour of sadness?

While blues music actually came first, Picasso did influence jazz legend Miles Davis,

who released an album called Blue Period in 1951.

Author Richard Williams has written about the influence of the colour blue in modern times.

Well, I think the Blue Period paintings were very important

in establishing the meaning of blue for the 20th century

in art and culture.

Miles, as a jazz musician, would have grown up playing the blues.

It was the first thing he learned how to play.

Miles Davis, Kind of Blue - the most popular jazz album of all time.

Just before he made this record, on another record he made with his great friend and collaborator,

the composer and arranger Gil Evans, Gil Evans had written a piece for him called Blues For Pablo.

We can be pretty sure that the Pablo in question was Pablo Picasso, and in that sense, this was his blue period.

And you can play that piece and look at Picasso's Blue Period paintings at the same time

and they really do echo each other.

So blue really was the colour of the 20th century.

Picasso's blues lasted three years.

They came to an end when he found a new home and love in Montmartre, the bohemian enclave of Paris.

It was here in this building that in 1904

Picasso started renting a studio for about 15 francs a month.

It was known as the Bateau-Lavoir, or laundry barge, on account of all the washing

that was always hanging out to dry.

Picasso was always obsessively clean, but by all accounts the living conditions in here

were utterly filthy and squalid.

There was just one toilet to serve the entire block,

which was this stinking hole down in the basement, and next to it was the only tap for about 30 studios.

But the thing is, Picasso loved this place.

It was here that he forged close friendships that were going to last decades,

and for the first time he fell deeply in love.

Here, he made a breakthrough after breakthrough as an artist.

Picasso's new love was called Fernande,

and she inspired a transformation in his paintings,

shifting away from morose blues to serene pinks,

in what is known as his Rose Period.

Like the Blue Period, this new style wasn't particularly revolutionarily,

but the rose paintings have become some of Picasso's most popular and valuable works...

..like this beautiful, haunting image of a young boy,

holding a pipe, his hair garlanded.

When it was auctioned in 2004,

it became the most expensive painting ever at $104 million.

THEY SING IN FRENCH

Picasso and his gang of poets and writers would come down the road

from the Bateau-Lavoir most nights to this working-class tavern, called the Lapin Agile, or Jumping Rabbit,

as well as his new love for Fernande, Picasso had found new subjects to paint.

Like him, the circus performers living on the outskirts of Paris were marginal figures,

mainly a group of foreigners who were itinerant.

Picasso had a natural sympathy for them and he started to paint them.

Figures like the Harlequin would appear again and again,

particularly in his Rose Period paintings, but for the rest of his life.

The mysterious, delicate Rose Period paintings proved popular with collectors then,

as they are today,

and their commercial success ended Picasso's life of poverty.

The eerie, dreamlike quality of the paintings has shaped many imaginary landscapes since.

# Ashes to ashes

# Funk to funky

# We know Major Tom's a junkie... #

Ever restless, Picasso would shift again,

his subjects changing from circus performers to nudes.

This painting is called Boy Leading A Horse,

and Picasso finished it in 1906.

It's incredibly grand, monumental, quite timeless -

somehow he has created quite an ancient sense of myth.

We don't really know what this landscape is, where this boy is going

and why hasn't he got any reins to lead the horse?

And it's still, in a way, quite traditional,

but, somehow, just within a year, Picasso went from this to THIS.

This painting is known as Les Demoiselles D'Avignon.

It's of prostitutes in a brothel.

Gone are the whimsical figures in haunting landscapes, these women are ugly and angular,

rising from jagged fragments of shattered glass.

It has been described as the rupture moment,

between the art of the past and the art of the future.

So what brought about this cataclysmic transformation?

In searching for his own artistic voice,

Picasso dug deeper and deeper into his Spanish past -

he became fascinated by the crude severity of ancient Spanish sculptures,

just like these.

In 1906, he visited The Louvre where some of these carved heads

had gone on display after being found in southern Spain.

Now Picasso, of course, was born in Malaga in southern Spain,

so if he could lay claim to any ancient artefacts as his inheritance,

then it was Iberian heads just like these.

If you have a look at their really heavy, bulging eyelids

and massive oversized ears,

you realise that these offered Picasso an alternative and quite exciting new way

to represent the world afresh,

in contrast to the age-old academic tradition of simply imitating nature.

Iberian heads like these gave Picasso the chance to experiment.

The result was this portrait of the writer and art collector Gertrude Stein.

The face a smooth mask, the forehead protruding, the eyes chiselled -

radical by the standards of the day, but Picasso was just getting going.

It wasn't just ancient Spanish heads that inspired Picasso.

One day, probably in the summer of 1907,

he was blown away by a collection of African masks, a bit like this one,

that he saw in a museum in Paris.

These tribal objects crackled with a raw, primitive power

that instantly bewitched him.

They were nothing short of a revelation.

In the 19th century, conventional art like this,

when even of a brothel,

was precise, polite and rather restrained.

But Picasso wanted to convey the lurid, carnal harshness of the brothels he knew only too well.

To do this, he abandoned 600 years of artistic refinement.

Inspired by the African masks,

he shut himself in his studio for months, finally emerging with this.

This painting is the out-and-out breakthrough of Picasso's life.

This is the foundation stone on which his whole reputation rests.

And you might be thinking, why? I mean, this is...

Picasso had proven that he could paint in this beautifully realistic manner before,

and then all of a sudden, you see this.

I think part of the reason it's so powerful is because Picasso really believed that painting,

that art, should never be polite.

All of a sudden, it's like you have wandered into the brothel,

and here are these five prostitutes and all of them have got that Gorgon stare.

They're like monsters. Look at their eyes! You have suddenly been caught out.

Previously, in Western art, it would be fine to have a look

at a painting of a beautiful woman lying there

and she would be quite helpfully, just probably there with her eyes shut

and you could happily feast on her form.

But here, it's something like, "Oh, actually, hang on, I've been caught looking and staring."

It's got this frenzied, almost diabolical energy.

There's something raw about this, and that rawness is what lends it that visceral edge.

There is something dark and demonic flickering around in this room.

It was painted in 1907.

It was shocking then. People thought that the guy was completely crazy

to create something like this, and it's still incredibly shocking now.

In the early 1900s, Picasso was living through an unprecedented technological revolution.

In this miraculous modern world of electric lights, airplanes, photography and movies,

paintings that simply created an illusion of reality seemed obsolete.

Picasso believed that art now had to do something much more.

He wanted it to communicate everything we know and feel about an object,

not just show us how it looks from one vantage point at one moment in time.

He started collaborating with another radical painter, Georges Braque,

comparing themselves to the aviation pioneers, the Wright brothers.

They took a sledgehammer to conventional, pictorial art,

and what they pieced together from the fragments is called Cubism,

said to be the most momentous innovation in art

since the development of perspective.

Picasso painted this in 1910, and in terms of subject matter, it's pretty conventional.

You are looking at a woman playing a mandolin. The WAY he's painted her is anything but.

This is such a radical departure from what he was doing even two years before,

and it represents all the hallmarks of his new Cubist style, so the picture's really flattened.

Perspective doesn't seem to exist.

And look at the way that he's fracturing and fragmenting the forms

so the whole thing looks like a pane of shattered glass.

Here, for example, you see the woman's shoulder,

but you sort of see over into her back at the same time.

The point is that Picasso's trying to create these multiple viewpoints all at once.

Over the next few years, Braque and Picasso pushed their deconstruction of reality further and further.

This is another painting of a woman with a guitar,

but I would forgive you, if you thought, "I really can't see that at all."

You can just about make out here there's an elbow,

and I think those are a few fingers and there are the strings of the instrument,

but the point here is that Picasso has ditched representation altogether.

The process of fracturing and fragmenting form has been taken to its completion, really,

and the woman has dissolved into the surface altogether.

She's hidden. He said that he wasn't really creating a reality that you could hold in your hands,

it was more like capturing the essence of a perfume,

something that was in front of you, behind you, to the side, all at once.

The almost complete distortion of the thing being painted was radically, provocatively new.

With Cubism, Picasso threw open the doors to abstract art,

and in the future, many artists wouldn't even bother with a subject at all.

Cubism was a hit with many powerful dealers and collectors, making Picasso increasingly wealthy.

The sharp angles and hard lines felt mathematical, technological,

scientific, just like the modern world.

And the look would gradually saturate the 1920s and '30s, reaching into the remotest corners.

Proof can be found in this isolated hotel on its own island off the Devon coast.

Cubism would have an enormous impact, not just on art, but on culture more widely.

Just look around this room.

It's a beautiful example of Art Deco design, a decorative style that became fashionable in the '20s

and came to typify the opulence, glamour and excitement of life during the jazz age.

Suddenly, everything became stripped-down, streamlined icons of modernity.

The funny thing is that many of the hallmarks of Art Deco

wouldn't really exist if it wasn't for Cubism.

You could even call Art Deco "Cubism for the masses" -

Picasso's radical ideas remoulded and repackaged for the mainstream.

Victorian interior design had been inspired by the natural world,

while Art Deco used the geometric, abstract shapes of Picasso's Cubism.

So it could be said that Cubism led to these iconic buildings of the '20s and '30s.

It also influenced the clothes that were worn.

'Chris Breward from the Victoria and Albert Museum is going to show me how fashion designers

'also latched onto the craze for Cubism.'

I get the sense, Chris, that fashion, you know, you imagine the Victorians, all a bit stuffy,

then suddenly, at the beginning of the 20th century,

it just takes this huge leap forward. It does, yeah.

You move from a kind of era of corsets, bustles,

the hourglass figure to something that's completely modern.

Something like this... from the mid-1920s.

What's interesting here is we see a geometrical print that's very much showing us

how Cubism was starting to have an influence on popular style of the time.

And if you look across the whole range, you can almost see quotations from Cubist paintings -

they've got out into popular dressing.

Here's an example. It's like the background of an early Cubist painting, muted colours,

and the sort of...the way that the forms are there,

it's as if they've sort of dissolved into the paint surface

and then someone's thought, "That would make a beautiful print on a dress!"

Picasso's there in the mix, so he's there in Paris,

he's moving in the circles of Chanel,

and art and fashion have always had this vibrant relationship,

and Picasso would have played on that

and contemporary fashion designers would have been incredibly interested in

how his work was commenting on modern life, which is what fashion does, essentially.

The influence of Picasso's Cubism can still be felt today,

nowhere more strikingly than here, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

When it was built in 1997, it was hugely controversial,

not least because it was designed by an American, Frank Gehry.

But he was inspired by this, the Accordionist, painted by a Spaniard, Pablo Picasso.

And it's not just modern Spanish architecture that's been contorted by Cubism.

Architect Russell Brown thinks British buildings, like this one in North London,

are also a bit Picasso.

You might say it's the great-great-grandson of Cubism,

but you can recognise the way the sort of forms collide with each other,

and the sort of fragments coming together,

and that sort of super-imposing of forms is very much from Cubism.

You'd recognise it from a painting from Picasso, you know, back in 1910.

It's like this is an attack on a traditional way of making a building. I think it certainly is.

This is a normal north London Victorian street, and this building is completely alien.

It's really a piece of sculpture. It's an art form, really, rather than a building.

It takes much more from art practice than it does from architectural tradition.

In 1912, Picasso and Braque made yet another outrageous innovation.

They started sticking materials like cloth or newspaper

or rope onto their paintings.

Amazingly, they were the first to use collage as an art form.

Then, yet another provocative leap.

Picasso started creating whole sculptures out of everyday objects and scraps of metal,

like this absinthe glass incorporating a real spoon.

Traditional artists had carved or moulded their sculptures

from materials like bronze, wood or marble.

Just assembling a sculpture from odds and ends, like this guitar

made from sheets of metal, was breathtakingly original.

So, we've Picasso to thank for the hordes of contemporary artists who've since adopted this technique.

Such as Anthony Caro.

Sir Anthony, hi. Alastair.... Hello!

Hi! He's one of Britain's most acclaimed sculptors,

who, along with Norman Foster, designed London's Millennium Bridge.

Like Picasso's sculptures, Caro's are assembled from scraps of metal.

Very large scraps of metal.

You can see all sorts of things here you've assembled. Girders?. Yes.

What is that? Is that a big drill or an...a coil?

It's a coil of some sort.

Just looking around, it seems like you take lots of everyday objects

that could be big spanners or those sort of springs, or maybe a big bollard from the street,

and you transform them by combining them into something new.

Yes, that is collage which was started by Picasso and Braque of course. That's his legacy.

Has he been a very big influence on you as a sculptor? Oh yes, yes.

And everybody for the last 50 years, 60, 70, 80 years. Yes. Incredible.

He changed sculpture completely.

I get the impression that, in a funny way, Picasso's

paintings, more than his sculptures, have actually influenced your work.

I think that's true.

I have made a sculpture called After Picasso. I'll show you a photograph.

I love all these bits and pieces you seem to assemble into your sculptures.

Yes, a magpie. I'm a magpie.

Yes, there's a sculpture,

a table sculpture. And it's actually called After Picasso.

Were you thinking about a particular painting? Oh, yes, absolutely.

Here it is. And I thought, well, let's see what happens if I try to make it into a sculpture.

I get some of the same things like the table,

leaf table, which is in all of them, and then this becomes this...

The baguette is there. Yes.

And they're sort of there, yes, right.

And even this fruit bowl, you can see the round form there.

That's it. Picasso famously was very happy to raid art history.

He'd often recycle motifs from lots of different artists.

I know that Matisse called him a bandit, for example.

Oh, he was a bandit all right. Yes.

But there was... There's no guilt in doing this in art.

It's all part of the growth.

We're all trying to nudge art forward, keep it alive.

And do you think that's what Picasso was doing, what he'll be best remembered for,

that he moved art history forward in great leaps and bounds?

I don't think he'll be remembered just for that.

He'll be remembered also cos he...painted and sculpted masterpiece after masterpiece.

We can't speak highly enough of him.

You seem quite moved, even thinking about him.

Yeah. Yeah.

He was something.

The outbreak of the First World War interrupted Picasso's Cubist experiments.

His collaborator, Braque, was called up, along with many of his bohemian friends.

But being a Spaniard, Picasso was not.

During the war he fell in love with Olga Khokhlova, a beautiful ballet dancer.

The respectable daughter of a wealthy Russian general, she

was very different to the multitude of women Picasso had known before.

They married in 1918.

His Cubist paintings had made Picasso rich.

Olga was socially ambitious, and together they became fixtures of Parisian high society,

spending their summers on the Mediterranean coast of France.

Before Picasso, the French Riviera had been a winter rather than a summer resort, but back in the '20s

when he used to stay here with his stylish friends during

the hottest months of the year, Picasso had sparked a trend,

and suddenly, escaping to southern France for a break in the sun was the fashionable thing to do.

They lived the dream.

Sun, sea,

picnics and parties.

Picasso's settled, conservative, high life with Olga was reflected in his paintings.

They generally became more gentle, more realistic, more conventional.

But after several years of marriage, Picasso started to feel

increasingly constrained by his authoritarian wife.

The life of disciplined respectability that Olga demanded

began to drive Picasso to distraction.

His pent-up frustration finally burst out in his art.

In the spring of 1925, Picasso and his wife,

Olga, visited Monte Carlo, where her ballet company were rehearsing.

Picasso had made a series of really beautiful but quite

classical-feeling drawings of some of the dancers, but then the news

of the death of a really old friend

prompted the return of his restless, anarchic spirit.

The result was The Three Dancers, a painting of unprecedented

violence, drawn from the deepest crevices of Picasso's mind.

Harsh colours, deformed bodies, nightmarish, grotesque.

It couldn't be further removed from the well-behaved classical paintings he'd been producing recently.

I'm going to see this startling picture with Picasso expert Charlie Miller.

It started off as a much calmer depiction of the three Graces,

but it ended up as something really wild.

He was completely living the high life.

He was married to Olga, the ballerina, and they led this very, very gilded existence.

And then suddenly, he created this.

I think this picture is a kind of turn away from that.

Um...and towards something more difficult, more scary and a bit madder.

His friend, Ramon Pichot,

died while he was painting the picture.

He said it should really be called The Death Of Pichot

and he said that this shadow here represented the shade of Pichot.

If you take this central dancer, it's been suggested that maybe the

kind of crucifixion that's happening here might be being done to his wife.

I mean, it's not a very loving image of your wife, is it? She's got more than one face?

I'd say so. See if you can see them.

I think the first face that we see when looking at this as an eye there, kind of on it side,

and then the other eye, brow up at the top,

and then a very small, um, prim little mouth.

Yeah, very prim.

Um... But I think there's a second face. Right.

And if we turn our heads like that...

OK. ..then the little mouth becomes another eye,

and the other eye remains an eye, but what was previously the eye on its side becomes a grinning mouth.

Like a crude cartoon. Exactly.

Like a crude gap-toothed grin.

So do you think it's safe to say that the marriage was on the rocks by this point?

Well, Picasso's painting at this period has often been related to

problems he's having with his marriage.

Of course, the big event happened in 1927 when Picasso met his mistress,

Marie-Therese, the teenager, beautiful teenager Marie-Therese.

After that, then, um, his marriage with Olga was really in trouble.

Picasso's affair with Marie-Therese began when he was in his mid-forties and she was around 17.

The relationship lasted ten years, and his portraits of her have all

the classic elements that most people associate with 'a Picasso.'

You can just about recognise Marie-Therese, but Picasso's not trying to show us her beauty.

He distorted features and selected colours that reveal how he felt about his subject,

trying to capture their emotions, their personality, their essence.

For Marie-Therese, gentle, innocent, sexy.

For a later lover, Dora Maar, disturbing, unhinged, anguished.

The full emotive power of Picasso's technique would be realised in 1936.

That was the year his beloved home country of Spain was ripped apart by a brutal civil war.

One of the war's worst atrocities took the horror of modern warfare to a new extreme.

In April 1937, a squadron of German aircraft,

who were supporting the Spanish fascists, flattened the communist opposition held town of Guernica

with 5,000 bombs, massacring more than 1,600 civilians.

It was the first time that Europe had suffered such ruthless, calculated terror bombing.

Picasso's response was to create the most important painting of his life,

and some think, the most important painting of the 20th century.

Guernica.

Whenever people talk about this painting, they always start by telling that story of the incredibly

black day in April 1937 when the Basque town of Guernica was bombed to smithereens.

And we know that that was the starting point for Picasso.

As soon as he heard the news, he was inspired to this frenzy of energy and creativity

and, in less than six weeks, he managed to cover this enormous canvas, measuring 30 square metres.

But I think that the reason this is so resonant and has spoken to people

for so many decades is because it's not specifically about Guernica.

Picasso isn't just commemorating that one catastrophe,

he's encapsulating a whole century of suffering.

And the way that Picasso does that is by creating this massive mess of mangled, dismembered limbs, as if

the bomb has actually dropped from the air and just gone off, just as we come in.

Look, for example, up at that light bulb with its jagged flare

which feels like an explosion going off as we're looking.

And here to the left is such a pitiful, heart-rending picture

of a women carrying the corpse of her dead child.

And I find the most affecting detail of this is the way that Picasso has painted her face,

because it is almost like, in her grief, her entire identity is dissolving before our eyes.

Look at her nostrils and her eyes that seemed to be dripping right off her head.

And this soft, soft feel of her flesh leads up to that terrifying image of her mouth

with that piercing tongue which just means that you can almost hear that

incredibly shrill sound of a mother's total, total,

in-the-moment grief for her dead child.

This is a reminder of the barbaric depths to which we can reach.

And looking at it is horribly, horribly shocking.

Guernica was first shown in the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair.

This was a regular international exhibition of industry, culture and art.

But Picasso's pacifist outcry went almost unnoticed,

because the event was overshadowed by the antagonistic posturing of Nazi Germany on one side

and the Soviet Union on the other.

But Guernica's timing was critical to its later success.

As the world teetered on the edge of the Second World War, the painting was sent on

a global tour in support of the fight against fascism in Spain.

And when the world did descend into war, the painting came to symbolise

the unprecedented carnage and horror that was inflicted on the innocent.

The painting was moved more than 50 times before it was eventually returned here to Madrid.

What's so amazing about seeing Guernica up close is that you get

a real sense of how incredibly battered this painting really is,

because, over the years,

Guernica travelled the world umpteen times and, on each occasion that it was rolled up and shunted

from one museum to another, the surface of the painting sustained just a tiny bit more damage.

And today, you can make out all sorts of tiny tears and fractures and hairline cracks.

There's this 5mm cavity which is beneath the eye of a soldier down at the bottom of the painting.

But, if you ask me, there's something quite pleasing

about the fact that this devastating masterpiece about the effects of war has its own battle scars.

Today Guernica is still a powerful symbol.

When there's an anti-war protest, you're likely to see images

of Guernica among the banners and placards.

And then there's the incident in 2003 at the United Nations

when Colin Powell presented the case for war against Iraq.

Someone noticed that the press conference afterwards

was due to be held in front of a tapestry replica of Guernica.

The decision was taken to cover it up with a blue drape.

Picasso spent most of the Second World War cooped up in

his Paris studio in this building, while the Germans occupied the city.

Many of his friends fought in the Communist resistance and, after

the liberation of Paris, Picasso joined the French Communist Party.

He remained a loyal member for the rest of his life, which seemed

rather inconsistent with the millionaire celebrity lifestyle he now embarked on with gusto.

Picasso became the Communists' poster boy, regularly wheeled out to promote the cause.

Then he became their poster designer.

He created a version of 'The Dove of Peace' to be used at the 1949 World Peace Conference.

The image was chosen by a Communist comrade who spotted it in one of Picasso's portfolios.

Picasso's celebrated Dove of Peace actually started life as an illustration of a pigeon.

The model had originally been a gift from Picasso's on-again,

off-again friend and great rival, the French artist, Henri Matisse.

Picasso decided to immortalise the bird in this lithograph.

His party friend immediately spotted the print's potential as

a propaganda poster, as long as people believed that it was a dove.

And that's how Picasso's pigeon ended up as the world famous Dove of Peace.

MUSIC: Bob Dylan 'Times They Are A Changing.'

Picasso later refined his dove, creating a simple, striking image.

Today the dove has become the global symbol of peace,

thanks largely to Picasso.

When Picasso wasn't campaigning for international Communism

and world peace, he returned to his life as a multimillionaire, superstar artist.

He spent much of his time on the French Riviera, and one the places

where he worked, in Antibes, is now the Picasso Museum.

People often say that Picasso switched between

different artistic styles as often as an actor adopts different roles.

He worked in many different mediums, too.

He could turn his hand to anything, with dazzling results.

And that's exactly what happened after the Second World War when

Picasso began to explore the possibilities of working in - of all things - pottery.

He created more than 3,500 pieces of pottery.

But also produced vast numbers of sculptures.

And, of course, there were hundreds of paintings.

His fame and reputation were now so great that everything he made could be sold for a fortune.

It was said that a blank scrap of paper was worth far more in Picasso's hands than hard currency.

By the mid-Fifties, his work had won him enormous fame.

But Picasso the man had become an icon, too.

He came to embody a certain kind of lifestyle - glamorous, exotic and drenched in sunlight.

With a Gauloises cigarette in one hand and a twinkle in his eye,

Picasso had become the very incarnation of chic joie de vivre.

MUSIC: Francoise Hardy "Tous Les Garcons Et Les Filles"

Right into his 70s, Picasso continued working his way through a succession of beautiful young women,

while still managing to maintain an awe inspiring output of art.

And, unsurprisingly, women were often his inspiration.

One of his most celebrated models of the mid-50s was a 19-year-old

called Sylvette David.

55 years later, Sylvette lives in Devon, and I've come to meet her...

Hello. Hi, Sylvette, hello.

Nice to meet you. Yeah. Alastair, hi.

Alastair, lovely.

So this is where you work? This is the studio?

Yes. And it's only a year old.

So the thing that I'm finding amazing is that outside it's quite

drizzly, and we're down in Devon and one of Picasso's muses has ended up here. How did that work?

I married an English man and then we moved down here.

Tell me about the first time that you met Picasso.

I lived in Vallauris in the South of France and Picasso had a studio opposite.

Picasso saw you and just thought, "my gosh, I need her to come and model for me"? Yes.

It's surprising but there you are.

It was a chance encounter.

Obsessed by his new model over several months Picasso produced more than 40 pictures of Sylvette.

You were quite young at the time?

Yeah, I was 19. How old was he when you first met?

By January, he was about 73, my age now.

He took me to visit the studio and there was a little room

with a bed and a window and he jumped on the bed.

So he was very agile at 73.

And I think he wanted me to jump like him. Onto the bed? I bet he did!

Onto the bed, like little children, you know?

But I wasn't going to do that.

I thought, wow, I'll stay at the door and see what happens!

He came down and he understood I didn't want to play games.

I didn't want him to say, you've got to take your clothes off now and pose in the nude. So, no.

So he was so famous then?

Yes, very. And what happened to you, did you get lots of attention?

Of course, all the newspapers came running, they took photos of me.

And I came out in Paris Match, which I have one from 1954. Can I see?

In my suitcase. Yeah. Show me.

My memory suitcase, if you like.

You have a memory suitcase? Yes.

I'd love to see the memory suitcase.

Let's go and see, then. I've had it all my life, this leather case.

Wow, I can't think of a more appropriate suitcase for a memory suitcase.

It's really old. I don't know what to show you first, really.

There's so much. Yes. In here.

When is this from? Paris Match photographs of 1954.

I can see why Picasso was so drawn to paint you. Can you?

It's partly because your hair, you wore it so dishevelled

so it just kind of tumbles down, this beautiful, blonde hair.

I'm quite dishevelled. No, he was fascinated by my hair.

People must have seen pictures like this in a magazine and thought,

you were the Scarlett Johansson of the day or something.

I can't believe it's me!

I don't know why.

Soon after Sylvette appeared in Paris Match, an almost unknown young starlet

called Brigitte Bardot transformed herself from a neat brunette into a wildly dishevelled blonde.

It's believed that Bardot's look in her break-out film

'And God Created Woman' was inspired by Picasso's Sylvette.

Now famous, Bardot visited Picasso in 1956, and she was sporting a rather familiar pony-tail.

So she became a beautiful blonde and actually in her autobiography, she said

"I wanted to be painted by Picasso but he painted Sylvette David

"who looked like me like two drops of water.

He didn't because he had done me first.

Picasso was the original celebrity artist.

A global icon, a living legend.

In the 1950s he started wearing Breton fisherman's tops,

which became his signature look.

Striped tops soon became the epitome of artistic, Bohemian chic,

appropriated by anyone, including

Andy Warhol and Jean-Paul Gaultier, wanting a touch of the Picasso aura.

I'm meeting Scott Schumann, a hugely influential blogger

and photographer whose website records the latest trends in street fashion.

Whether or not I can get an image that helps people dream, and something that's kind of inspiring.

Obviously Picasso, as well as being a phenomenal artist, he was photographed obsessively.

Those images in themselves are really... they must be quite inspirational for someone like you?

Because he looked so iconic in them, right?

Yeah, I mean, he's a total stud.

He's one of the first artists to be a visual brand.

It came from the clothes, the posture, I think it came from his charisma.

There was an unspoken charisma. It was the way that he stood. He's looking straight at the camera.

It's that gaze that everyone talks about. Yes. It's so fierce.

Not just the gaze, it's the way he holds his cigarette in his other

arm here because it's the way he's standing, the way he's wearing it.

He's in no way self-conscious, or shy in this photograph.

He's looking right at you and he's got this almost

bull-like stance, go back to this bullfighter kind of thing.

He had a look that made you think that he knew something you didn't.

He saw things in a way that you maybe didn't.

Yeah, I think he looks quite stern,

I wonder whether he'd rather we were talking about his paintings.

Oh, come on. I mean he was a total womaniser, right?

I mean he had all the most beautiful girls.

He was a showman. And think about all artists, they're showmen.

Andy Warhol obviously comes after Picasso. Right.

He totally ripped off Picasso in terms of his look

and wore exactly the same stripy Breton fishermen's top.

Because clearly, already then when he was big in the 60s, he was saying

I want to be seen as an iconic artist. Who do I look to?

I look to Picasso. Right.

He could break the rules not only in art but in fashion and in style.

And yet he did it with such charisma.

He broke those rules and looked great doing it.

The Picasso brand has never diminished, and today it's so powerful

that even his style of signature alone can give an air of glamorous creativity to a hotel chain's logo.

And then there's Citroen, who were looking to add

a smattering of arty chic to their slightly conventional people-carrier.

They decided to give their new car a very special name.

So they called it Picasso.

Now, to be honest, this isn't really all that Picasso, is it?

This is a family car and Picasso's not exactly known as a family man.

And anyway, his car was absolutely enormous.

Here's a picture.

But this was a brilliant piece of marketing.

Citroen linked their name with what was effectively by then one of the biggest brands in the world

because anything with Picasso's name on it stands to benefit from the association.

More than anyone before or since, Picasso reinvented art.

He was master of the new, swinging a wrecking ball through centuries of

tradition, destroying the hackneyed cliches of representative art.

He would try anything, no matter how outrageous, in his quest for innovation.

And the visual languages he invented continue to inspire.

Even in old age, Picasso kept living life to the full.

He enjoyed his fame, and wealth, buying a vast 14th century chateau in Provence to add to his collection.

He lived into his 90s, working incessantly, as if to defy death.

His later work was of mixed quality.

The baton of shocking, revolutionary art had been passed to others who,

across the Atlantic, were busily splattering paint and printing soup cans.

But none of this would have been possible if Picasso hadn't invented modern art in the first place.

When Picasso died, he left behind him an estate of more than 43,000 works

which is easily the largest recorded output of any artist ever.

Someone once said that Picasso's genius illuminated the 20th century like a comet.

Well, it's still blazing away today.

Picasso had a saying.

He wanted to tear reality apart and I believe that's exactly what he did.

And when he put it back together again,

he made us see the world afresh in an entirely new light.

If you'd like to find out more about the art and the influence of Matisse,

Picasso, Dali and Warhol, then go online to bbc.co.uk/modernmasters

# The boys watch the girls

# While the girls watch the boys

# And watch the girls go by

# Eye to eye

# They solemnly convene to make the scene

# Which is the name of the game

# Watch a guy or watch a dame

# On any street in town

# Up and down

# And over and across

# Romance is boss

# Guys talk, girl talk... #

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