Pablo Picasso - Masters of the Modern Era- MIKOS ARTS- A Documentary for educational purposes only.

thing about arts and in this series I'm going to explore the life and work of four Titans of the 20th century unruhe Matisse Pablo Picasso Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol they all change their world but have they changed arts this week Picasso it goes something like this Picasso has a visitor and the visitor says what is art Picasso thinks about it then he points to his 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 either King his showed a self-confidence that 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 recognizable often compared to a child's with eyes in the wrong places and noses sticking out in strange directions but still manages to sell quite well this one called Dora Maar with a cat went for 95 million dollars Picasso chose to paint like this despite the fact that 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 the Casa they asked his friend and biographer John Richardson so first I come to New York to meet him feeling pretty thrilled at the prospect of meeting someone who genuinely new I guess own him really well spent a lot of time with him and so he's not just a kind of authority on the art but you really understood what made Picasso tick as the man as well just did he can boogie what you did what's the dialing John how long have you lived in this apartment because I've lived here about 12 years and I was lucky I found this 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 bullfight in our and leading the throng and there is a polo Picasso son because so is yet to be wiped clean and you and then was me here but look how many people though this is like a scene at The Godfather or some day who I don't know why we were we were the forefront of this crowd but this was just going just going through the streets towards the arena and then we used to do this all through the summer there's Picasso in his pants is this quite common you'd turn up at the studio and there he would be really open well he often worked in just a pair of shorts and you have this little can in the summer was hard you love going to the beach you want the beach a lot you must have lots of works here's a Picasso for example what's this piece that's a portrait of Jacques lean his wife um what's the date of it 60 that's 1960s day up and did he just he was obviously very generous was he he just give you um things it was very generous by nature this whole place is a treasure trove and I can see here I mean this is a tiny picture of this is Picasso as a tiny boy there's this Picasso aged I suppose 7 you can see there's prominent eyes already that's yeah and the orthology we all know it 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 right I mean Sala was a father was a very bad artist and I would imagine a very good art teacher because I mean he because he learnt everything from his father rather like people who have a child who's going to be a child star I mean he had to draw and draw and draw and draw and draw and and because he became obsessed with drawing drawing was the heart of his work and if you couldn't draw it it was no point he hated the word virtuosity but I mean his incredible ability to 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 practicing 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 surname Picasso also contains the word pica and this would have appealed to young Pablo because a pika door is a horsemen in bullfighting who lances the bull macao so once said that if he hadn't been a painter we would have been one of these guys at Picador the word Picador comes from the Spanish Pickers which means to irritate or provoke I could say that's exactly what Picasso did all his life obviously not in the bullring but in his relationships with others definitely most important in his art young Pablo revered the Picador so much one was the subject of his first oil painting made when he was around 8 at the age of only 12 because I could already draw like this at 16 it won a place at Madrid's prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid Picasso studied the greats like this by the old Spanish master Velazquez and he made a respectable copy so even as a teenager because I pretty much got the hang of classical painting but he was deeply unhappy at art school and within a year he'd left moving to Barcelona where his father was now a professor of art here he began mixing with arty bohemian types and met Carlos Casa gameis a fellow artist who became Picasso's best friend in 1900 around his 19th birthday Picasso and Casa gameís left Spain and moved to the epicenter of world art Paris this is 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 down absent with anarchists and vagabonds Picasso and Casa gamers joined the city's horde of impoverished Bohemians gorging on every vice available Picasso's paintings like this one reflected their pastimes but Casa Camus was a troubled soul in love with a girl called Germain who didn't love him and drinking heavily one night in line to no.1 Casa gamers decided that he had enough of Paris so he invited Germain and a bunch of friends to a farewell dinner in this very cafe I'm guessing has changed after they drunk several bottles of wine Kassar game is stood up and he gave a link here and slurry speech in French and then suddenly he pulled a pistol from one pocket and aimed it Germain and fired luckily she sense what was coming dumped down and the bullet just grazed her neck but then to the horror of all of his friends and all of the customers casa game has swiveled the revolve around to his own temple and pulled the trigger and 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 Casa gameis would appear regularly in Picasso's works 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 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 color blue in modern times while 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 you know it's probably the first thing he ever learned how to play I should think Miles Davis kind of blew the most popular jazz album of all time just before he made this record on another record that he made with his great friend collaborator the composer and arranger Gil Evans Gil had written the piece for him called blues for Pablo you know we can be pretty certain that the Pablo in question was was Pablo Picasso and in that sense you know 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 enclaves of para s-- it was here in this building that in 1904 picasso started renting a studio for about 15 francs a month was known as the battle avoir or laundry barge on account of all of the washing that was always hanging out to dry Picasso was always obsessively clean but by all accounts the living conditions in here was utterly filthy and squalid there was just one toilet 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 the first time he fell deeply in love was here that he made breakthrough after breakthrough as an artist Picasso's new love was called Fernand and she inspired transformation in his paintings shifting away from morose blues to serene Pink's in what's known as his Rose period like the blue period this new style wasn't particularly revolutionary but the Rose paintings had become some of Picasso's most popular and valuable works like this beautiful haunting image of a young boy holding a pipe his hair garland 'add when it was auctioned in 2004 it became the most expensive painting ever at 104 million dollars Picasso and his gang of poets and writers would come down the road from the Battle of while most nights to this working-class tavern called the lapin agile or jumping rabbit as well as his new love for fern and 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 and because I had a natural sympathy for them and he started to paint them and figures like the Harlequin would appear again and again particularly his Rose period paintings but for the rest of his life the mysterious delicate Rose period paintings proved popular with collectors then just 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 major tom's ever Restless Picasso would shift again his subjects changing from circus performers to news this painting is called boy leading a horse and Picasso finished it in 1906 it's incredibly grand monumental quite timeless somehow he's created quite an ancient sense of myth we don't really know what this landscape is where this boy's 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 ley de Moselle d'Avignon it's of prostitutes in a brothel donar the whimsical figures in haunting landscapes these women are ugly and angular rising from jagged fragments of shattered glass it's 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 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 artifacts as his inheritance then it was Iberian heads just like these if you have a look at they're really heavy bulging eyelids and massive oversized ears you realize that these offered Picasso an alternative and quite exciting new way to represent the world of fresh 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 before head protruding the eyes chiseled 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 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 1800s 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 that he knew only too well to do this he abandoned 600 years of artistic alignment inspired by the African masks he shot himself in his studio for months finally emerging with this this painting is the out-and-out breakthrough 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 then all of a sudden you see this and 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've wandered into the brothel and here are these five prostitutes of all of them have got that Gorgon Stare they're like monsters look at them with their eyes and in a way it's like you've 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'd be sort of quite helpfully just probably their eyes shut and you could happily feast on her form but here is something like Oh actually hang on I've been caught looking and staring it's got this frenzied almost diabolical energy there's something wrong about this and that rawness is what lends it that visceral edge and there is something dark and demonic flicking around in this room it was painted in 1907 it was shocking them people thought that the guy was completely crazy to create something like this and it's still incredibly shocking now in the early 1900's Picasso is 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 arts of what they piece 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 in terms of subject matter is pretty conventional you're looking at a woman playing a mandolin but the way that 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 pictures 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 and the point is that Picasso is 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'd 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 supposed to be a few fingers and there are the strings of the instrument but the point here is that Casso is 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 really fashionable in the 20s and came to typify the opulent 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 have 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 Brewer from the Victoria and Albert Museum is going to show me how fashion designers also latched on to the craze for cubism I get the sense Chris that fashion you know you imagine the Victorian doll bit stuffy then suddenly the beginning of 20th century just takes a huge leap forward it does yeah you knew 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 at 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 I think this is a great example because it looks just like the background of one of those early cubist paintings very muted colors and the sort of the way that the forms are there is as if they've sort of dissolved into the paint surface and then someone's seen one of those I thought that would make a beautiful print on a dress Picasso's they're 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 I think Picasso would have played on that and I think contemporary fashion designers would have been incredibly interested in now his work was commenting on 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 the British buildings like this one in North London are also the big Picasso you might say it's the great-great-grandson of cubism but you can recognize the way the sort of forms collide with each other and the sort of fragments coming together and that sort of superimposing a form it's very much from cubism you'd recognize it from a painting from Picasso you know back in in 1910 it's almost like this is an attack on a traditional way of making a building well I think it certainly is I mean that's a normal North London Victorian Street and this building is completely alien it's really a piece of sculpture it's an art form rather than really than a building it's much 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 artful then yet another provocative leap Picasso started creating poles sculptures out of everyday objects and scraps of metal like this absinthe glass incorporating a real spoon traditional artists had carved or molded 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 Picasso to thank for the hordes of contemporary artists who've since adopted this technique such as Anthony Caro sans me hi Alistair he's one of Britain's most acclaimed sculptors who along with Norman Foster designed London's Millennium Bridge like Picasso sculptures carros 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 oil the quantum Sam song 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 bowl out from the street and you transform them by combining them into something new okay yes that is collage which was started by Picasso Braque of course that's his legacy has he been a very big influence on you as a stocker 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 ahead Peters comfortable doctor Picasso I'll show you a photograph I love all these bits and pieces you seem to assemble into your sculpture there's a magpie of a magpie yes there's 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 that this becomes this the baguettes yeah and they're sort of there yes and right in this fruit bowl you can see the round form the beginning tool that's it Picasso famously was very happy to raid our history it often recycle motifs from lots of different artists I know that Matisse called him a bandit for example no 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 remembered also cuz 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 Brock 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 [ __ ] clover 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 the Parisian high society spending their summers on the Mediterranean coast of France before Becky so French Riviera had been a winter rather than a summer resort but back in the 20s when he used to stay here with all of his stylish friends during the hottest months of the year picasso 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 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 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 and lark the result was the three dancers the painting of unprecedented violence drawn from the deepest crevices of Picasso's mind harsh colors 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 started off as a much calmer depiction of the Three Graces but it ended up as something really wild he was completely living high life he was married to Olga the ballerina and they led this very very gilded existence then suddenly he created this but I think this picture is upon turn away from that and towards something more difficult more scary and a bit madder his friend Ramon Pia shot died while he was painting the picture he said that it should really be called the death of pee shot and he said that this shadow here represented the shade of pee thought if you take this sensual 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 is it has an eye there come on its side yeah and then the other eyebrow up at the top and then in a very small prim little mouth very pretty but I think there's a second face right and if we turn our heads like that okay then the little mouth becomes another eye and the other eye remain tonight but that what was previously the eye on its side becomes a grinning mouth like a crude cartoon exactly I conclude gap-toothed grin so do you think it's safe to say that the marriage is on the rocks by this point well Picasso's painting that this period has often been related to problems he's having with his marriage of course the big event really happened in 1927 when Picasso met his mysterious mountain etfs the teenager beautiful teenage Meritor there's after that then his marriage with Olga was really in trouble Picasso's affair with Marie Torres began when he was in his mid 40s 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 recognize Murray Terez but Picasso is not trying to show us her beauty he distorted features and selected colors that reveal how he felt about his subject trying to capture their emotions their personality their essence former eater airs gentle innocent sexy for a later lover Dora Maar disturbing unhinged anguished the full emotive power of Picasso's technique would be realized in 1936 that was the year his beloved home country of Spain was ripped apart by a brutal civil war one of the wars worst atrocities took a horror of modern warfare to a new extreme in April 1937 a squadron of German aircrafts who was supporting the Spanish fascists flattened the communist oppositional town of Guernica with five thousand bombs massacring more than 1600 civilians it was the first time that Europe had suffered such ruthless calculated terrible Picasso's response was to create the most important painting of his life in something 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 meters 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 bulb has actually dropped from the end 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 woman 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's almost like in her grief her entire identity is dissolving before our eyes look at her nostrils in her eyes that seem 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 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 symbolize 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 like well there's this five millimeter cavity which is beneath the eye of a soldier down 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 : 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's 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 celebrated gathered 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 honoree Matisse Picasso decided to immortalize the bird in this lithograph his party friend immediately spotted the prints 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 come gather our people where are you wrong then admit that Picasso later refined his dove creating a simple striking image hit bar today the dove has become the global symbol of peace thanks largely to Picasso and you better start swimming or your sink like a stone but a time when Picasso wasn't campaigning for international communism and World Peace he returned to his life as a multi-millionaire superstar artist he spent much of his time on the French Riviera one of 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 and he worked in many different mediums - 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 three and a half thousand 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 the blank scrap of paper was worth far more in Picasso's hands than hard currency by the mid 50s his work had won him enormous fame but Picasso the man become an icon - it came to embody a certain kind of lifestyle glamorous exotic and drenched in sunlight with a girl while cigarette in one hand and a twinkle in his eye Picasso had become the very incarnation of shik gee what a vivre right into his 70s Picasso continued working his way through a succession of beautiful young women while still managing to maintain an or inspiring Alpers of art and unsurprisingly women were often his inspiration one of his most celebrated models of the mid-1950s was a 19-year old called Silva dahveed 55 years later SIL Vette lives in Devon I've come to meet her hello hi so much hello nice to meet you okay alistair heart at least that lovely so this is where this is 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 yeah how did that work I married an English man and then we move down here tell me about the first time that you met Picasso I lived in Vella yes in the South of France and Picasso at the studio was it Picasso saw you and just thought my gosh you have to come a model for me yes it's surprising but they are it was a a chance encounter obsessed by his new model over several months Picasso produced more than 40 pictures of SIL vet you were quite young at the time yeah was 19 how old was he when you first met well you know he was about 73 my age now he took me to visiting the studio and there was a little room with a bed and a window and he jumped on the bed so he's very agile at 73 and I think he wanted me to jump like him onto the bed onto the bed my children you know do but I wasn't going to do that I thought wow I'll stay at the door and see what happens that it 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 nan was in the nude that's a no see he was so famous then yes and what happened to you did you get lots of attention of course all the newspaper came running they took photos of me and I came out in Pattie magic which I have one can I say 54 in my show me so my memory suitcase if you like you have a memory suitcase yeah love to say let's go see them I've had it all my life this leather case Wow I can't think of a more appropriate suitcase for memories okay it's really all I don't know what to show you first really so much yes long here well is this wrong very mad photograph of 1954 I can see why Picasso is so drawn to paint you it's partly because your hair was so you wore it so sort of disheveled it just kind of tumbles down this beautiful blonde ahead disheveled no us fascinated by my hair people must have seen pictures like this in a magazine and sort of thought you know you were the Scarlett Johansson of the day or something I can't believe is me I don't know why soon after SIL vet appeared in Perry match an almost unknown young starlet called Brigitte Bardot transformed herself from a neat brunette into a wildly disheveled blonde it's believed that Bardot's look in her breakout film and God created woman Lee was inspired by Picasso Sylvia now famous Bardot visited Picasso in 1956 she was sporting a rather familiar ponytail so she became a beautiful blonde and actually you know autobiography she said I wanted to be painted by Picasso but he painted silver 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 top soon became the epitome at artistic that Amiens chic appropriated by anyone including Andy Warhol and Jean Paul Gautier wanting a touch of the Picasso aura I'm meeting Scott Shuman the hugely influential blogger and photographer whose website records the latest trends in street fashion whether or not I can get an image dance 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 and really they must be quite inspirational for someone like you because it looks so sort of iconic in them right yeah I mean he's total his total stud you know I mean like he's one of the first artists to be a visual brand and like it came from the clothes I think it came from the posture and it came from his the charisma there was an unspoken charisma it was the way that he stood he's looking straight at the cameras that gaze that everyone talks about yeah so fierce not just the gaze it's the way he holds a cigarette and his other arm here because it's the way that he's standing it's the way that he's wearing it you know he's in no way a self-conscious he's in no way shy in this photograph he's looking right at you and he's got this almost kind of bull like stance you know to go back to this kind of bull find her kind of thing he had a look that made you think that he he knew something you didn't he saw things in a way that you maybe didn't yeah I mean I think he looks quite Stern I just wonder whether he'd rather we were talking about his paintings oh come on I mean he was total womanizer right I mean he had all the most beautiful girls he he was a showman and I mean think about all artists their showman Andy Warhol obviously comes off rack a so he totally ripped off Picasso in terms of his look and war exactly the same stripy Breton fisherman'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 well who do I look to I look to Picasso right he could break the rules not only an 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 chains logo and then there's Citroen who were looking to add a smattering of arty chic to they're 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 I mean this is a family car and because I was not exactly known as a family man in any way 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 his 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 have been passed to others who cross the Atlantic were busily splattering paints and printing soot calves but none of this would have been possible if Picasso hadn't invented modern art in the first place when ricasso died he left behind him in a state for more than 43,000 works which is easily the largest recorded output of any artist ever someone once said that Picasso is genius illuminated the 20th century like a comet well it's still blazing away today because I 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 the boys watch the girls while the girls watch the boys or watch the girls go by and modern masters continues next Sunday at 10:00 as all new Graham Norton here on BBC HD tomorrow at 10:35 the next night it's a song for Europe in beautiful people know that over and of course romances bar Oh you

Channel: MIKOS

Views: 612,619

Rating: 4.7894735 out of 5

Keywords: History, Documentary, Television Show, Culture, Season 2, Painting, Drawing, Pablo Picasso (Painter), Artist, Drawings, Paint (Visual Art Medium), Sculpture, Museum, Paintings, Artwork, Abstract, Painters, Work of Art, Pablo, Picasso, Bravo, Famous, famous artists, Documentary Film (TV Genre), girls, women, fashion, Genius, Architecture, Architectural, #FollowArt, Surrealistic M.L. Pappas, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Dali, Matisse, Fashion

Id: ANqi-LuH5j8

Length: 59min 4sec (3544 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 06 2012