MODERN MASTERS: Picasso transcript

[Music] modern arts it sells for 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 alist souk 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 hre matis Pablo Picasso Salvador Dary 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 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 L Ray Picasso wrote on an early self-portrait it means I the king he showed a self-confidence that he'd never lose in art or with [Music] 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 is now part of our language if something goes arai 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 it still manages to sell quite well this one called doramar with a cat went for $95 million 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 [Music] Picasso if anyone wants to know anything about Picasso they ask 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 knew Pico and knew him really well spent a lot of time with him and so he's not just a kind of authority on the Arts but he really understood what made Picasso tick as the man as well John how long have you lived in this apartment CU it's 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 a b fight in Al and leading the throng and there is AP poo Picasso's son Picasso his yet to be wife jacleen and you and then there's me here but look how many people there are this is like a scene out the Godfather or something I don't know why we were we were the Forefront of this crowd but um this was just going 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 quite common you'd turn up at the studio and there he would be he often well he often worked in in just a pair of shorts and you know this the can in the summer was hot he loved going to the beach he went to the beach a lot he must have lots of Works here's a Picasso for example what's this piece uh that's a portrait of jacleen it's um uh what's the date of it 60 that's 1960 it says 60 Y and did would he just he was obviously very generous was he he'd just give you um things he 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 this is Picasso aged I suppose seven you can see those prominent eyes already that's there and the authority you know 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 father was father was a very bad artist and uh I would imagine a very good art teacher because I mean he Picasso learned everything from his father rather like people who have a a child who's going to be a child's star I mean he had to draw and draw and draw and draw and draw and Picasso became absolutely obsessed with drawing drawing was the the heart of of of his work and if you couldn't draw it was was no point he hated the word virtuosity but I mean his incredible ability to to draw um in any style he [Music] wanted Pablo Picasso actually began life as Pablo Ruiz because Ruiz was his father's surname but even on this early sketch paabo was practicing signing his mother's maiden name [Music] 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 Pika and this would have appealed to Young Pablo because a picador is a horseman in bull fighting who lances the [Applause] bull Picasso once said that if he hadn't been a painter he would have been one of these guys at picador the word picador comes from the Spanish picar which means to irritate or provoke you could say that's exactly what Picasso did all his life obviously not in the bull ring 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 eight [Music] [Applause] at the age of only 12 Picasso could already draw like this and 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 Filas is and he made a perfectly respectable copy so even as a teenager Picasso had 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 cagus a fellow artist who became Picasso's best friend in 1900 around his 19th birthday Picasso and cagus left Spain and moved to the epicenter 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 brothel the Mulan Rouge and sworded bars where artists and Poets down abath with anarchists and vagabonds Picasso and cagus joined the city's horde of impoverished Bohemians gorging on every Vice available Picasso's paintings like this one reflected their past [Music] times but cagus was a troubled soul in love with a girl called Jermain who didn't love him and drinking heavily One Night in 1901 casus decided that he'd had enough of Paris so he invited Jermaine 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 drunk several bottles of wine C Gamers stood up and he gave an incoherent slurry speech in French and then suddenly he pulled a p pistol from one pocket and aimed at at Germaine and fired luckily she sensed 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 camer swiveled the revolver around to his own Temple and pulled the trigger and he was dead within an [Music] hour the death of his greatest friend devastated Picasso and his sorrow permeated his art for the next few years cagus would appear regularly in Picasso's works and most significantly of all he began to paint almost exclusively in [Music] 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 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 color of sadness while Blue's 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 well I think the blue period paintings were very important in establishing the meaning of blue for the 20th century uh 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 should think Miles Davis Kind of Blue 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 uh Gil had written a piece for him called blues for Pablo uh 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 uh so blue really was the color of the 20th [Music] century Picasso's Blues lasted 3 [Music] years they came to an end when he found a new home and love in Mont Mart the Bohemian Enclave of Paris it was here in this building that in 1904 Picasso started renting a studio for about 15 Franks a month it was known as the bass lavoir 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 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 for the first time he fell deeply in love it was here that he made breakthrough after breakthrough as an [Music] artist Picasso's new love was called Fernand and she inspired a transformation in his paintings shifting away from morose Blues to Serene pinks in what's known as his Rose period like the blue period this new style wasn't particularly revolutionary but the rose paintings have become some of Picasso's most popular and valuable [Music] 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 $1 104 [Music] million Picasso and his gang of poets and writers would come down the road from the batau lavoir most nights to this workingclass Tav called the lapan AIL or jumping rabbit and as well as his new love for Fernand 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 Picasso had a natural sympathy for them and he started to paint them and figures like the harleyquin would appear again and again particularly in his Rose period paintings but for the rest of his life [Music] 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 [Music] ever Restless Picasso would shift again his subjects changing from circus performers to [Music] nudes 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 RS to lead the horse and it's still in a way quite traditional but somehow just within a year Picasso went from this to [Music] this this painting is known as Le demoiselle davor it's of prostitutes in a brothel daone are 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 [Applause] transformation in searching for his own artistic voice pic dug deeper and deeper into his Spanish past and he became fascinated by the crude severity of ancient Spanish sculptures just like these in 1906 he visited the Lou where some of these carved heads had gone on display after being found in southern Spain now Picasso of course was born in malago in southern Spain so if he could lay claim to any ancient artifacts as his inheritance then it was Iberian heads just like these and if you have a look at their really heavy bulging eyelids and Mass 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 the forehead 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 brothel that he knew only too well to do this he abandoned 600 years of our artistic refinement inspired by the African masks he shut himself in his studio for months finally emerging with [Applause] [Music] 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 what 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 and I think part of the reason it's so powerful is because Picasso really believed that painting the art should never be polite all of a sudden it's like you've wandered into the brothel and here are these five prostitutes and all of them have got that Gorgan 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 there with her eyes shut and you could happily Feast on her form but here it's sudden 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 and there is something dark and demonic flicking 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 George BR comparing themselves to the aviation Pioneers the right Brothers they took a sledgehammer to Conventional pictorial art and 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 cubis style so the picture is 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 pain 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 barock and Picasso push 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 Picasso is ditched representation alt together 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 sides 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 [Music] all cubism was a hit with many powerful dealers and collectors making Picasso increasingly wealthy the sharp and Les 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 tipify 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 remolded 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 20 and 30s it also influenced the clothes that were worn Chris breard 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 Victorian all a bit stuffy then suddenly at the beginning of the 20th century just takes this huge leap forward uh it does yeah you move from a kind of era of corsets bustles uh the hourglass figure to something that's completely modern something like this uh 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 cubis paintings they've got out into popular dressing well I think this is a great example because it looks just like the background of one of those early cubis paintings very muted colors 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 seen one of those and thought that would make a beautiful print on a dress Picasso is there in 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 how 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 gugenheim museum in bilbow Spain when it was built in 1997 it was hugely controversial not least because it was designed by an American Frank giri but he was inspired by this the accordion painted by a Spaniard Pablo Picasso and it's not just modern Spanish architecture that's been contorted by cubism architect Russell brown thinks that 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 recognize the way the sort of forms collide with each other and the sort of fragments coming together um and that sort of superimposing of forms is very much from cubism you'd recognize it from a painting from Picasso you know back 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 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 rather than really than a building it's much takes much more from art practice than it does from architectural uh [Music] tradition in 1912 Picasso and Brock 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 absen 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 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 Sir Anthony hi aler 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 caros are assembled from scraps of metal very large scraps of metal you can see all sorts of things here you've assembled girders yes 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 Ballard from the street and you transform them by combining them into something new that yes that is collage which was started by Picasso and Brock of course that's his legacy has he been a very big influence on you as a sculpter 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 haven't been as comfortable AR Picasso I'll show you a photograph I love all these bits and pieces you seem to assemble into your sculptures there's a magpie I'm a magpie yes there's there's a sculpture um 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 baguette is there and and they're sort of there yes that's right even fruit bowl you can see the round form there beginning to that's it Picasso famously was very happy to raid art history it often recycle motifs from lots of different artists I know that matis 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 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 cocklover 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 [Music] 1918 his cubis 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 [Music] France before beo the 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 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 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 [Music] Spirit the result was the three dancers a painting of unprecedented violence drawn from the deepest crevices of Picasso's mind harsh colors deformed bodies nightmarish [Music] grotesque it couldn't be further removed from the well- behaved classical paintings he'd been producing [Music] 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 the high life he was married to Olga the ballerina and they LED this very very gilded existence then suddenly he creates this but 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 peot died while he was painting the picture he said that it should really be called the death of peot and he said that this Shadow here represented the shade of peot 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 uh 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 kind of on its side yeah um 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 okay then the little mouth becomes another eye and the other eye remains an eye but the what was previously the eye on its side becomes a grinning m MTH like a crude cartoon exactly like a crude Gap toothed grin so do you think it's safe to say that um 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 really happened in 1927 when Picasso met his mistress M te the teenage beautiful teenage Mar to there after that then um his marriage with a was really in trouble Picasso's affair with Marie terz began when he was in his mid-40s and she was around 17 the relationship lasted 10 years and his portraits of her have all the classic elements that most people associate with a Picasso you can just about recognize marz 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 for Marita resz gentle innocent [Music] sexy for a later lover doramar 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 [Music] 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 gica with 5,000 bonds massacring more than 1,600 civilians it was the first time that Europe had suffered such ruthless calculated Terror [Music] boming Picasso's response was to create the most important painting of his life and some think the most important painting of the 20th century [Music] gica whenever people talk about this painting they always start by telling that story of the incredibly black day in April 1937 when the bar town of gica was bombed to Smither 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 6 weeks he managed to cover this enormous canvas measuring 30 square m 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 gica 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 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 and 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 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 [Music] shocking gica 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 gera's timing was critical to its later success as the world teet on the edge of the second world war the painting was sent on a global tour in support of the fight against fascism in [Music] 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 [Music] the painting was moved more than 50 times before it was eventually returned here to Madrid what's so amazing about seeing gica up close is that you get a real sense of how incredibly battered this painting really is because over the years gica traveled the world ting times and on each occasion that it was rolled up 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 mm 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 gica is still a powerful symbol when there's an anti-war protest you're likely to see images of Gera among the banners and placards and then there's the incident in 2003 at the United Nations when colon 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 gica 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 [Applause] gusto Picasso became the Communist poster boy regularly wheeled out to promote the cause and 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 hre matis and Picasso decided to immortalize the bird in this lithograph his party friend immediately spotted the prince potential as a propaganda poster as long as people believe that it was a dove and that's how Picasso's pigeon ended up as the world famous Dove of [Applause] Peace Picasso later refined his Dove creating a simple striking image today the do has become the GL 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 multi-millionaire Superstar artist he spent much of his time on the French Riviera and one of the places where he worked in onti 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 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 [Music] he created more than 3 and A2 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 that the blank scrap of paper was worth far more in Picasso's hands than hard currency by the mid-50s his work had won in 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 GW cigarette in one hand and a twinkle in his eye Picasso had become the very incarnation of shik zav viiv [Music] right into his 7s Picasso continued working his way through a succession of beautiful young women while still managing to maintain an a inspiring output of Art and unsurprisingly women were often his [Music] inspiration one of his most celebrated models of the mid1 1950s was a 19-year-old called silvette David 55 years later silvette lives in Devon and I've come to meet her hello hi hello nice to meet you yeah yeah yeah alist hi alist so this is where you were St yes and it's only uh a year old so the thing that is 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's that 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 valoris in the south of France and Picasso had a studio POS it Picasso saw you and just thought my gosh I need her to come a model for me yes it's surprising but there you are it was a a chance encounter obsessed by his new model over several months Picasso produced more than 40 pictures of silvette you were quite young at the time yeah I was 19 how old was he when you first met well do you know he was about 73 my age now he took me 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 like little 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 he came down and he understood I didn't want to play games I I didn't want him to say you got to take your clothes off now and pose in the new so 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 parim mat which I have one can can I see 1954 in my suit yeah show me 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 see then I've had it all my life this leather case wow 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 what so much yes in here when is this from per match photograph of 19 54 I can see why Picasso was so drawn to paint you it's partly cuz your hair was so you wore it so sort of disheveled so it just kind of tumbles down this beautiful blond hair quite disable no it was fascinated by my hair people must have seen pictures like this in a magazine and sort of thought you know you were the Scarlet Johansson of the day or something I can't believe it's me I don't know why soon after sylvette appeared in Parry match an almost unknown young Starlet called Bridgette BAU transformed herself from a neat brunette into a wildly disheveled blonde it's believed that bardo's look in her breakout film and God created woman was inspired by Picasso's [Music] silvette now famous BAU visited Picasso in 1956 and she was sporting a rather familiar ponytail so she became a beautiful blonde and actually in her autobiography she said uh I wanted to be painted by Picasso but he pained silvette David who looked like me like two drops of water he didn't because he had done me [Music] 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 strip top soon became the epitome of artistic Bohemian Chic appropriated by anyone including Andy Warhol and Jean Paul gotier wanting a touch of the Picasso aura [Music] I'm meeting Scott Schuman a hugely influential blogger and photographer whose website records the latest trends in Street fashion whether or not I can get an image that um 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 looks so sort of iconic in them right yeah I mean he's total he's a total stud you know I mean I think he was one of the first artists to be a visual brand and I think it came from the clothes I think it came from the posture I think it came from his the 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 and that's 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 uh self-conscious he's a 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 fighter kind of thing he he had a 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 the artist there showman Andy Warhol who obviously comes after Picasso he totally ripped off Picasso in terms of his look and wore exactly the same stripy Breton Fisherman's top because clearly already then when he was big in the 60s he was saying um 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 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 chains logo and then there's citen who were looking to add a smattering of artti chic to their slightly conventional people carrier they decided to give their new car a very special 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 Picasso is 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 citen 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 Hacked 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 shadow in provance to add to his [Music] collection he lived into his '90s working incessant as if to defy death his later work was of mixed quality the battern of shocking revolutionary art had been passed to others who across the Atlantic were busily splattering paint and printing Soup [Music] cans but none of this would have been possible if Picasso hadn't invented Modern Art in the first place when lasso 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 aresh in an entirely new [Music] light if you'd like to find out more about the art and the influence of matis Picasso Dar and Warhol then go online to bbc.co.uk slod Masters the boys want girls while the girls watch the boys who watch the girls go by and Modern Masters continues next Sunday at 10: there's all new gram Norton here on BBC HD tomorrow at 10:35 and next night it's a song for Europe in beautiful people and [Music] r