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In the autumn of 1907,
a young Spanish artist showed his Parisian friends a new painting.
So horrified were they that he rolled it up and hid it away for a decade.
Indeed, it wouldn't be properly shown until 1937.
And yet it's a painting that changed the course of art history.
The artist was Pablo Picasso.
Picasso was, like so many artists at the beginning of the century
an interesting mixture of many influences.
There was a Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, who said
that a man's homeland is his childhood.
Picasso's childhood is Málaga
and his core is Málaga.
This never left him.
He never forgot the light of the Mediterranean.
He remembered the bulls that he visited with his parents and his uncles
here in Málaga.
Flamenco was part of him.
Picasso is Málagueño but he is also from Barcelona,
from La Coruña,
and he is also, eventually,
an artist that is formed in Paris
but his homeland, his childhood, is Málaga.
The Málaga in which Picasso was born
was a Málaga of class struggle,
a Málaga divided between the upper bourgeoisie
and the working class.
It's a year in which Málaga's industry is still strong
but is falling behind
in comparison with other industrial areas.
Especially the north of Spain and Barcelona.
But Picasso's city was also the home
of the Golden Age of Málagueña painting.
In the city there are great painters
sculptors, engravers
but all local.
Picasso, from childhood, absorbed that environment.
One of the most important aspects of
Picasso's very nature
was the capacity he had for attention
fixation and, above all, retention.
Although Picasso studied in depth
the most important traditions of art
German, Italian, French
there was something in his work that takes us directly to the south
to this hybrid south, a south in which different cultures
have historically lived together.
The Jew, the Arab, the Christian.
I believe this is key to understanding the work of Picasso
because it has the elements
the forms, these cultural elements
that, distinct from their place of origin, comprised the south of Spain.
Here, in Málaga,
Picasso enjoyed bullfights
he admired doves and pigeons.
This brought him closer to Andalucía.
To his roots.
To his origins.
This is the house where Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born
on October 25th, 1881.
This house had been inhabited before the wedding of Picasso's father
by the father and his two sisters
but after the wedding of José Ruiz Blasco
with María Picasso López
the couple came to live here.
And this is where Picasso was born.
The family had a great influence on Picasso.
The character of Doña María
the profession of Don José
were key influences in his life and in his work.
Picasso grew up in a small bourgeois family in Málaga
where thanks to his father's profession and his father's friends
he came into direct contact with painting
with drawing, with colour.
Here he makes his first drawings, his first paintings.
The childhood of Pablo Picasso was an exciting one
because it was linked to art
since his father was an art teacher.
On the other hand his childhood was full of visual stimuli.
Málaga was a small city.
He lived where there was a lot of life on the streets
and that probably affected his way of understanding the world.
Málaga and the presence of his father
were the key points of his influences.
I would say that when his father was asking him to draw a pigeon
or to go to a corrida with him,
he was building his son with very strong Spanish roots.
We cannot neglect the fact
that Don José is very important for Pablo as an inspiration.
He realised that Pablo was more than talented
and that this needed to be supported.
In 1891, a few days before his tenth birthday,
Pablo arrived in a very different part of Spain,
La Coruña on the northern Atlantic coast.
Pablo's father, José, had secured a teaching role.
And it was here that he really taught his young son how to paint with oils.
"In La Coruña, my father did not go out
unless it was to go to the art school.
On his return, he painted.
But nothing more.
The rest of the time, he looked out the window at the falling rain
and then, in the end, he abandoned painting for good.
Instead he gave me his colours and his brushes
and he never painted again.
It frightened my parents that their child
dared exhibit his work.
Some friends chose a place,
an umbrella shop at Calle Real number 54,
more a junk shop selling everything from headscarves to suits.
In spite of my cheap prices the sales were poor.
I wouldn't have sold a thing
were it not for the generosity of my father's friends..."
Picasso arrived in La Coruña on October 14th, 1891 from Málaga.
He made the trip by boat with his whole family.
They would stay in La Coruña for three and a half years.
It was a very important period for the young Picasso
because it was where he started his academic training
and where he also began
to make his first pictures with a completely free spirit.
That first year Picasso was enrolled at secondary school
and the school of fine arts
which was in the same building as the secondary school.
Picasso had as his teacher his own father
José Ruiz Blasco, who had taken that position
and Picasso combined these studies between 1892 and 1894
but then in 1894 his father
decided that his son end his normal studies
to stop studying mathematics and grammar
and to devote himself solely to the study of art.
At the beginning of 1895
Pablo starts to study the natural figure
and it was Picasso's father who paid the models
to pose for Picasso and his classmates.
It was here that Picasso made considerable advances
because over two or three months he made many portraits.
These portraits were important not just from an artistic point of view
but from a psychological one
because Picasso exhibited these works
in the shop windows of the Calle Mayor
which was common for artists at that time.
Picasso received some very complimentary reviews.
Some even compared him to Giotto and Raphael.
These paintings, rather than being considered works of genius
should be seen as the works
of a 13-year-old boy already showing promise.
My grandfather realised that the artistic scene was in Barcelona.
Of course, he was very young: 13, 14 years old.
And there is a part of luck in his life
because when his father was appointed in La Coruña,
was offered to make a switch with someone in Barcelona,
it was just luck
because Pablo was going to be part of the artistic scene of Spain
and from Barcelona everything was possible.
When one looks at Picasso's work
one always sees the desire to rebel
of not wanting to do what others told him to do as an artist.
This is evident from the beginning
when, as a child he did things that adults usually do
and later, as an adult
he did things that children do.
We are talking about an artist
who can be described as a great rebel
against the artistic academy
against conventions
against stereotypes
against the authority of others.
Very shortly after arriving in Barcelona
Picasso was enrolled in the Llotja art school.
The training was very old-fashioned.
The young students did not like it
because the academy was basically repetition and copying.
Picasso was very reluctant
to follow this training.
But there is the great paradox
that the academic training that Picasso received
in La Coruña, in Barcelona and later in Madrid
was decisive for his training as an artist.
Picasso is an artist who throughout his life
will want to break the rules
and transgress from all the teaching
he had received in his training.
Despite this he is an artist who has
a very solid, very sound base.
A base that allowed him later to develop
in a more profound way as an artist.
The Picasso who arrived in Barcelona
at just 13 years of age
was no more than a student of fine arts.
He was not yet the genius he was to become.
Nor did he pass through Barcelona
as a great artist recognised by all the world.
The Picasso that was in Barcelona was an artist still evolving.
Very eclectic in the sense that he fed on
different influences that came from outside
but he had not yet defined his own style.
But in the meantime, he was being influenced
from all directions.
I think that the Barcelona period was important for two reasons.
The first, something more academic.
On the other side you have the people of Barcelona
and those exotic subjects like prostitutes or local people.
I think that Pablo in Barcelona discovered how wide was the scope
to see through the people.
Of course, Barcelona was offering a lot of inspiration.
The theme of this painting is a theme
that was really in vogue
in the late 19th century.
The subject of medicine, of scientific advances
and in particular hospital medicine.
The young Picasso chose a fashionable subject
that he knew would be successful in a national exhibition.
The format was also important for a national contest.
The entrants
looked for themes that were in vogue
but also they had to be large-scale
which featured one or several characters.
The more complex, the more the artist could demonstrate
their abilities and training.
For example he included hands
which always proved difficult for an artist.
In 1896 and 1897 Picasso was making many studies of hands
in the sketchbooks that he carried in his pockets.
He was becoming trained in all subjects
not only in depicting clothes or making compositions
but also showing the hands and features of the subjects.
It could be said that this was the pinnacle
of his academic training
where he was still following a path closely supervised by his father.
His father was the one who had organised his professional career until now.
At this moment Picasso is tired
like any young man of his age
he wanted to do things in a different way
and these national competitions, these subjects
no longer interested him.
But it had been his father overseeing his career
and who surely posed here as the doctor.
This painting must have been a challenge because
we do not know the exact dimensions of the studio where he painted it
but clearly it was a small space.
It was a challenge for an artist
who was physically short
who was young
and not very experienced
to paint a work of this great size
in a space that did not allow him a great perspective.
And some of the drawing faults that are evident in this work
could come from the lack of perspective
not being far enough away from the work.
He received criticism
some quite harsh, a bit sarcastic.
In particular he was criticised for the hand of the patient.
But without a doubt
Picasso, at the age he was then
was well-received.
They saw his potential.
His father and uncle saw his potential too
and paid for him to go to Madrid,
to study at the prestigious San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
The academic environment and living alone in the city
did not appeal
but what did catch Picasso's attention was the Prado Museum
and the glories of Spanish art that lay within.
Velázquez, Goya, even El Greco and more.
But by the summer of the following year
he was back in Barcelona and as likely to be in a bar as a gallery.
When Picasso begins to move
in the alternative world
in the bars and cafés of Barcelona
he initially relates to a generation of artists
young artists who have not yet acquired
an important status in the artistic world.
Picasso is a young artist
who is still trying to navigate the artistic world.
There were different tables
and it's obvious that at this stage
he is placed among the less relevant artists.
But little by little
he will form bonds with the great figures of Catalan art
who are the artists that, to begin with,
do not have contact with Picasso.
He as a teenager gets very much involved with a group of artists
around the café of Els Quatre Gats
who were politically involved
because they were sympathisers of anarchism
and Catalan nationalism.
He must have been stricken
by this very lively community of young artists.
In February 1900, Pablo Picasso made a breakthrough.
In the back dining room of the café Els Quatre Gats,
he held his first exhibition.
The dozens of portraits hung in lines around the room
caught the attention and admiration
of the leading Catalan and modernist artists of the day.
When he starts to frequent Quatre Gats
Picasso met Ramon Casas and Santiago Rusiñol.
They were not only going to influence his art
but they would also raise the question of what is an artist?
Casas and Rusiñol had gone to Paris very young.
They had lived the bohemian life.
They had taken morphine.
They were very different in character to his father
who was very conventional.
So Picasso, at this moment started thinking about Paris.
It was in Barcelona that he changed
after listening to his older companions
tell him about all of the wonders of Paris.
We have this wonderful portrait from the year 1900
which is when Picasso was occupying the studio
in Calle Riera de Sant Joan
with his friend Casagemas.
In this work we can see that Picasso
had already completely changed his style
from what he had been doing before.
His sister Lola had been one of his first models.
This work is very odd
because we see that Lola appears without a face
but it is an optical effect.
If we open a window and the sun shines through
into a dimly lit room our features are not visible.
Since Picasso is essentially a realist painter
he was depicting it as he saw it.
The most important thing about this work
is that it is one of the few pictures of Picasso's Barcelona studios.
Picasso had many studios in Barcelona
and we see representations from the windows
and from the terraces of these studio exteriors.
The urban landscapes, the roofs of Barcelona
are always depicted from the windows of these studios.
But this is one of the few
that represents the interior of Picasso's studio
and we see on the floor
a set of squashed paint tubes
that indicates that this was his studio.
In 1900 when he painted this portrait he was 18 years old.
So he was a teenager who was opening up to the world.
This search for colour.
This search for freedom.
This search for the explosion of life.
Picasso forged his artistic identity in Barcelona
and met a lot of artists
poets, critics
and read many magazines.
His eye is formed in Barcelona,
in a Barcelona that is already very open to Europe
and very open towards Paris.
Picasso first went to Paris in the autumn of 1900
because one of his paintings
had been accepted at the Universal Exhibition of that year,
which was the largest ever organised.
It was, of course, a huge opportunity for him
to finally experience the big city everybody was talking about.
"Pablo and I go to café-concerts or the theatre.
They think they're doing Spanish dances...
Olé, olé, caramba, caramba
which left us in doubt about our origins.
The Boulevard de Clichy is full of crazy places.
Everything is fanfare, tinsel and papier-mâché stuffed with sawdust.
Tell our friends to come to Paris.
Because there's room for everybody and money for anyone who works.
Rob, kill, assassinate, do anything to come."
Carles Casagemas.
In 1900, he made his first trip to France, to Paris.
He will make many trips between 1900 and 1904
before settling permanently in Paris in 1904.
Montmartre was a kind of Spanish colony.
There were many Spanish artists in Paris.
Picasso indeed thought of himself as a Spanish exile in Paris
so there is a double culture that resides in Picasso.
He will always remain Spanish.
At the same time he consumed not only Parisian art
but the entire production of the avant-garde
taking place in the French capital.
Pablo was born in a very comfortable life.
With his family, he was a little king at home.
When he came to Paris he had to face a different life.
He had to struggle to have food,
to live in a very cold place in the winter,
very hot in the summer.
I think that this shows his determination.
We see that Pablo was ready to experience all the difficulties.
And he did. It was not a problem for him.
This is the first time he leaves Spain.
It's a real adventure.
He's with other artists
but he is effectively now free.
This is Picasso's overwhelming feeling in the early years.
The freedom with his time.
To be curious about whatever he likes
outside the shackles of the Academy of Fine Arts.
Now he can focus on everyday subjects
the street, the cabaret, beggars.
When he arrives in Paris he can't speak French
so he hangs out with his Spanish compatriots.
And in this period he starts to sign his notebooks with "Yo, Picasso"
"I, Picasso".
It's already a statement.
He is abandoning his father's name abandoning the name of 'Ruiz'
and taking the name of his mother
which is less Spanish, being Italian in origin.
He now has this new identity as 'Picasso'
someone ready to conquer the Parisian art scene.
"We've already launched into work.
Tomorrow we'll light the heater and we'll have to work furiously.
Whenever there is daylight
we are in the studio painting and drawing.
We all got together at Petit Poucet
and we all got drunk.
Utrillo wrote nursery rhymes,
Peio sang bawdy songs in Latin,
Picasso made sketches of people, and I wrote verses."
Carles Casagemas.
"Picasso had a top hat which was magnificent;
for although he always had a taste for cheap clothes,
which he bought in workmen's stores,
this was the last touch of refinement:
he is very fastidious and matches his underpants to his socks
with as much love as he makes a painting.
Everyone recognised that he had a fire, a real brilliance, a painter's eye.
I spent the day looking at piles and piles of Picasso's paintings!
He was making one or two each day or night,
and selling them for 150 francs on the Rue Laffitte."
Max Jacob, poet and critic.
You have to consider that Paris was an exciting place
not only because of the Universal Exhibition
and the architecture of Paris.
The Eiffel Tower, it was a dream.
It was also important because it was attracting a crowd
coming from all over the world.
What happened in Paris was that these references were multiplied.
From a visual point of view
Picasso was strongly impacted.
He was impacted by posters on the streets
by the galleries he could visit
many more than in Barcelona.
Here he could see the works of the artists he admired
directly on gallery walls.
For example
the greatest influence on him in Paris in 1900
was Toulouse-Lautrec
because he could go to Moulin Rouge or Moulin de la Galette.
These were spaces that previously he knew
only through publications
or through the testimonies of other artists.
Therefore the Picasso who went to Paris
was an artist who changes completely.
"If you were to see us you wouldn't recognise us
because we've finally become such hard workers.
All this about women must seem to take all our strength, but no!
Not only do we spend our lives 'fondling',
but I've almost finished a painting
and, to be frank, I think I've just about sold it.
Because of this, we are saying goodbye to the bachelor life.
As of today we are going to bed at ten and we're not going out anymore."
Pablo Picasso.
The nightlife was much more exciting than Barcelona.
Reviews, music halls, cabarets, Pigalle, Moulin Rouge.
You can see it in the artworks.
Pablo moved from the individual human figures of poor people,
of prostitutes,
to a crowd of rich people enjoying themselves, spending money
with beautiful women, beautiful dresses.
This is Paris in the 1900s.
I can understand that Pablo would have walked to Paris to see that.
And there were rumours that in Paris, in Montmartre,
collectors and art dealers were attracted by new artists
and new forms of creation.
"Picasso is very young, 19 years old,
and at his age, I doubt if there are many who have done what he has.
He has very great qualities but also great defects."
Pere Coll, journalist & critic.
"I can imagine the reaction of the illustrious bourgeois
upon seeing my exhibition but that ought to be as important to us as applause,
that is to say, as you already know:
if the wise man doesn't approve, bad;
if the simpleton applauds, worse.
So I'm content."
Pablo Picasso.
"This very young Spanish painter,
who has only recently come among us,
is a passionate lover of modern life.
We think of him as a lively, inquisitive person,
a keen observer of street scenes and human adventures.
After a brief glance at his work
we are bound to imagine him covering the canvas in furious haste,
impatient that he cannot wield the large, colour-laden brushes faster.
Here we have a new harmonist of bright tonalities,
with dazzling tones of red, yellow, green and blue.
We realise at once
that Pablo Ruiz Picasso wants to see and express everything."
Gustave Coquiot, critic.
At the Picasso Museum in Barcelona
we can clearly see Picasso's evolution.
We can also see the leap that he made in Paris in 1900.
Picasso made his first trip with his friend Casagemas
and later Pallarés and Casas in September 1900
and they stayed four months.
Here Picasso would discover, first-hand
impressionist and post-impressionist painting.
This greatly influenced his art.
Then Picasso went back to Spain for a few months
before returning in May 1901
for his first exhibition in the French capital.
The exhibition was organised by Pere Mañach
a young Catalan art dealer who Picasso met in Paris in 1900
and who had organised this exhibition at the Vollard Gallery
along with another Spaniard, Francisco Iturrino.
When Picasso arrived in Paris
he brought artworks with him
quite colourful but largely Spanish themes
but he needed to make much more work.
He had to produce about 60 paintings
in just 15 days.
Picasso had no money to buy canvases
because canvas is expensive and it takes time to dry.
So he used cardboard
as it was very cheap and dried fast.
So in the Vollard exhibition
many of his masterpieces were painted on cardboard
such as this one called Margot, Waiting.
This is a very important work because we see how Picasso
had already absorbed all the artistic styles
that had been developed a few years before in Paris.
For example we see that he mimics Toulouse-Lautrec's subject matter
and Van Gogh's brushstrokes.
That thick, short brushstroke of Van Gogh.
He also used the colours of the other impressionists.
We see this set of influences
that Picasso absorbed to then make his own art.
He is someone who is constantly absorbing
who is very curious
and integrates what he sees directly into his own work.
He works non-stop
despite his financial difficulties.
We know he sells for very little
a few drawings to an innkeeper in Montmartre
so that he has enough money to be able to continue.
We have to imagine Picasso arriving in Paris
rather poor, as a 19-year-old
and installing himself in a friend's studio
with his friend Carles Casagemas
and it was an intense experience.
Because you had to rely on a network just for survival.
This is perhaps what makes the experience of these young modern artists
so special because they created very strong bonds.
When they came to Paris
there was a big excitement visiting a new place with new girls,
with a world of entertainment in fact.
But Casagemas had a natural problem of impotence
so his attraction to women was limited.
Of course, Pablo didn't have the same problem.
They meet this girl, Germaine.
Casagemas is in love with her and Pablo is getting her.
And, of course, Casagemas was devastated.
When we think about the drama of the death of Casagemas,
you have to understand the circumstances.
It was in a café, Germaine was seated with friends
and suddenly Casagemas came to her.
He had a revolver
and told her, "This is for you,"
and he shot at her.
But he missed her.
He didn't realise because she fainted and fell on the floor.
Then he said, "This is for me,"
and he killed himself.
When you imagine that Pablo wasn't there,
it's extremely painful to imagine,
but he had to face the death of his friend
and to think that he was maybe the reason of his death.
So the Blue Period was fuelled with this tragic moment.
I think that for Pablo it was a struggle
to try to survive the death of his friend.
The one he came to Paris with and the one who never came back.
"It was while thinking that Casagemas was dead
that began me painting in blue.
I'm showing what I'm doing to the artists here
but they think there is too much soul and no form.
It's very funny.
You know how to talk to people like that;
but they write very bad books and they paint idiotic pictures.
That's life."
Pablo Picasso.
The reason why Picasso
creates the Blue Period at this time
is that he is searching for his artistic identity.
He's looking for what he has to say as an artist
and this very monochrome treatment of the Blue Period
is one of the first manifestations of Picasso's artistic identity.
What was known as the Blue Period
began in Paris at the end of 1901
but actually took place in Barcelona over the following years
with scenes from the centre of Barcelona
where many of the people we see
in Picasso's paintings appear.
It is a city that created
like all large industrial cities
large pockets of marginalisation.
There is an emergence
of extraordinary social contrasts.
These contrasts gave Picasso extraordinary input
from a creative point of view
which are evident at different moments
in Picasso's creativity
but especially in this Blue Period.
There are portraits of real people
friends of the artist who are perfectly identifiable.
And there are other works
portraying female characters of low social class
poor
many of which are recreations
of possible real characters.
Therefore we are not talking about people that exist
but about concepts.
Picasso was not as interested
in portraying a poor woman
as portraying the concept of poverty.
Therefore, during this Blue Period
there is a real strength to his characters
but they are more symbolic.
These are very symbolist pieces.
Picasso is special in that he reinterprets his sources
in a very personal way.
La Vie of 1903 is the masterpiece of Picasso's Blue Period
that was painted in Barcelona
but very much thinking back to the experience of Paris
with his friend, Carles Casagemas.
It's an allegory of both life and love
and in many ways of an artist, like Picasso, coming-of-age.
It is very important to emphasise that during the Blue Period
there was a great contrast between two types of work.
The major works were devoted
to the great Picasso themes of that period
maternity, the poor, the vagabonds
but, in parallel his smaller works
contained a lot of erotic content
especially around 1903
drawing inspiration from the bars and taverns
and in particular the brothels
which Picasso frequented
as was very common among young men.
In a way his sexual initiation occurred in those places.
An example of Picasso's erotic work
is this painting of a completely naked woman.
It is one of the few full-length nudes
that Picasso painted during this period.
We see a woman who surely
does not correspond to any real model
with long hair
in a posture of proposition
offering her sex, her body.
It is a work that reflects perfectly the symbolist canons
that were prevalent in the Blue Period of Picasso.
In 1904, Picasso moved into a ramshackle building
that, on multiple floors, housed numerous artists and writers.
This was known as the Bateau Lavoir
as it reminded some of the laundry boats that were docked on the River Seine.
This was to be Picasso's home for five years
and it was also where he would have his first significant relationship.
Picasso's attitude to women was misogynist
but we should also remember that all these women
were not forced into relationships with him.
We should understand his not very healthy relationships
he had with his wives and companions
as part of a broader culture in which women were often mistreated.
Picasso met Fernande Olivier, who was a married artist's model,
soon after he moved into the Bateau Lavoir in the spring of 1904.
And she would be the muse of some key moments
in the young Picasso's artistic development.
Her real name was Amélie Lang.
They entered into a kind of relationship
which was both artistic and personal.
I think that Fernande was a classical muse, in a way,
but also, she was open to any kind of creativity.
And this was very important.
You can identify a period
because for each period there is a woman.
Fernande Olivier was the official first one.
You can say, "This is the Fernande period in his life and in his creation."
It is very interesting
how much there is a link between Pablo and a subject.
Fernande wrote a book in 1933 about the life of Picasso
in those early years of the 20th century.
According to what she wrote,
it was a very happy life
even though they had a lot of material difficulties.
She was remembering about those moments of posing for him,
but also for the moment of the relationship
which was based on a lot of fun,
but also about Pablo's character.
She said that he was very jealous, locking her up
and being after her in a very jealous way.
"The Spanish painter is often in front of the door
to the building with his noisy gang of Spanish artists.
I find them annoying but they make the square more colourful.
Yesterday the sky was black
and when it broke we had to rush for shelter.
The Spanish painter had a little kitten in his arms which he held out to me.
I couldn't resist his magnetism and went with him to his studio.
It was full of large unfinished canvases.
He must work so hard but what a mess!
Dear God, his paintings are astonishing.
I find something morbid in them,
which is quite disturbing, but I also feel drawn to them.
The Spanish painter Picasso adores me with real sincerity,
which I find touching.
He is sweet, intelligent, very dedicated to his art,
and he drops everything for me.
His eyes plead with me.
If I fall asleep, he's beside the bed when I wake up,
his eyes anxiously on me.
He doesn't look after himself
and I'm horrified by the lack of personal cleanliness.
He writes me desperate letters in a French
that is highly imaginative and quite barbaric.
He doesn't like theatre, he found it boring,
and he didn't trust his judgement over classical music.
What he did like was the guitar, guitarists,
Spanish dancing and gypsy dancers.
Everything that reminded him of his own country."
Fernande Olivier.
He could be very outgoing
very funny, very kind
and then he could switch character
and become more closed, more introspective.
We find a personality that could oscillate
between these two very different characters.
In fact, this was true throughout his life.
But at the same time he was also very professional
and when he was working
he did not allow himself to be interrupted
even during his youth.
Picasso liked to work in the evening
and late at night
sleep in the morning
and continue all afternoon and evening until four or five in the morning
to work without anyone bothering him.
He kept this modus operandi throughout his life.
"You already know how lonely I am,
always in the middle of a commotion and in the midst of a crowd,
which irritates me,
but I'm forced to deal with them because of interest and necessity.
One has to eat.
But if it were only that!
When you have to arrange things with other people
and when you want to do something,
it's terrible to be obliged to waste so much time,
sometimes scrounging for the last peseta
to pay for the studio or restaurant.
And believe me all those struggles and all this trouble isn't worth it.
It's wasted time."
Pablo Picasso.
If one looks at the Seated Nude of 1905
that is a nude female portrait of a seated woman
we are clearly at the junction between the Blue and Pink Periods.
We can clearly see the creative transition
that Picasso is engaged in that year.
We see a very melancholic portrait.
In the elongation of the limbs
and in the monochrome background
we are for the best part in the Blue Period.
And with the working in of the ochres
then the re-introduction of colour
we are already heading towards the Pink Period.
When we refer to the Pink Period
it's a little misleading as there is very little pink.
Indeed there is another cycle that is much wider
which is that of the acrobats
and lasts from the end of 1904 until 1906.
I think that the transition
between the Blue Period and the Pink Period
is based on two reasons.
First, Pablo was attracted by the world of circus.
He was visiting the Medrano Circus
and he was seeing a lot of artists
like acrobats, clowns, harlequins and a lot of colours.
So, of course, it was a large source of inspiration.
The second reason was because of art dealers and collectors;
Gertrude Stein, of course, and Ambroise Vollard.
They were interested in the new Picasso, so after the poor life,
it was the beginning of a new, comfortable life for Pablo and Fernande.
Especially because Ambroise Vollard
bought something like 20 paintings
so all this was driving him to a Pink Period.
A period of happiness.
It is important to say that there was, let's say, a daily life reason
and an artistic reason.
The key painting of the Pink Period
is Family of Saltimbanques of 1905,
that represents Picasso's love for the circus,
which he used to attend in Paris,
as well as his intimate life of that period,
by incorporating references to his lover Fernande Olivier
as well as his great friend the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
Finally,
Family of Saltimbanques is very important
because we see Picasso portraying himself as Harlequin,
an apt alter ego for Picasso
because he is a figure of transformation
and someone who, out of rags,
managed to create a beautiful costume for himself.
There is always something
that connects one phase to the next.
There are strong connections in all his work.
He was someone who worked tirelessly
and who considered that what he had to say was in the artworks.
Picasso was always pondering the same questions.
What is painting?
What am I doing as a painter?
He questions the role of the model.
Political engagement.
One's place in the world.
He is an artist that reflects
what is happening at the time.
And I think it's the mark of great artists
that they produce works that are both very rich and very open.
Then in the subject matter
he struggles and seeks
to extract substance.
He searches for the essence of things.
In doing so he forces the viewer to be active too
forcing them to question themselves
to decipher and also to put a part of themselves in what they see.
But he also draws on an extensive knowledge of artistic language
and the inter-connection of all the disciplines.
Don't forget that Picasso is certainly a great painter
but he is also a major sculptor.
We see the pictorial tradition
the artistic tradition reflected in many of these works.
Picasso is constantly inspired by
the old masters he saw in Madrid, at the Prado
but now in Paris, at the Louvre and the Luxembourg Gallery
in all the galleries of the Rue Laffitte
he's now seeing the work of his contemporaries.
He is someone who has an eye that captures absolutely everything.
To me my grandfather, when in Paris,
was not looking at the past.
Even if he saw Renoir or Manet,
this was part of history.
So it wasn't very important to speak about the past,
but to exchange with artists about the future.
He was in the process to make sure that he was purely original.
In the summer of 1906
Picasso went to Spain to see his family
and then continued his journey
with Fernande Olivier, his girlfriend
to Gósol.
Gósol is a very small village in the Catalan Pyrenees
that is really lost in the middle of nowhere.
You had to get there by mule.
It was truly an expedition.
It is a village stuck in the past.
It had no electricity, no running water.
It's in the middle of splendid nature
and at the same time very isolated.
It's a landscape of very ochre colours
very dry, very arid
a bit wild.
We are in the process of a homecoming
which is what Picasso is looking for at that moment.
He had seen the Ingres retrospective
at the Salon d'Automne of 1905
and he reworked these themes
of hair brushing, the harem, the classics.
We can feel a Picasso searching for
the most effective subjects and places for his work.
We now see a simplification of his work
a simplification of forms
a geometrisation of forms.
His faces gradually become rigid and turn into full ovals.
We also feel this influence of sculpture.
It will revolutionise the language of form.
In Gósol Picasso abandons literary subjects.
He is no longer interested in what he represents.
He is interested in how he represents it.
He is interested in the representation of the body
but it doesn't matter if it's a circus artist
or a jester or an acrobat.
The subject disappears.
We see the emergence in his work
of a true modernity of language.
After ten weeks, he and Fernande headed back to Paris.
It is tempting to over-simplify the development of an artist's career
but there is no doubt that those ten weeks spent in Gósol
had been transformative.
For Picasso now began preparations
for one of the most significant works of his youth.
Indeed one of the most significant works of his life:
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Pablo visited the Museum of Mankind at Trocadéro in Paris.
He was a bit lost in this museum, in the dusty rooms
where there were thousands of objects from the Colonies,
especially from Africa.
It is how he discovered the masks.
"A smell of mould and neglect caught me by the throat.
But I forced myself to stay,
to examine these masks,
all these objects that people had created
with a sacred, magical purpose,
to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown.
And then I understood what painting really meant.
It's not an aesthetic process;
it's a form of magic
that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe,
a means of seizing power
by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires.
The day I understood that, I had found my path."
He was impressed because he was trying to understand
what was the process because it was frightening.
At the same time, it was like a kind of protection.
He had seen a mask at Gertrude Stein's home
and remembered that he was discussing that with Matisse.
And where the other artists were neglecting this type of civilisation,
he was considering that his present was a result of the past.
From that moment, he started to observe
what was the simplified representation of the humankind.
At the same time, he was also trying to understand how it was possible
to go through the reality of, let's say, a traditional representation of the face
with the potentiality of representing faces and profiles.
So it was a kind of exploration in this period that we call Primitivism.
Primitivism has very much to do with the encounter with non-Western art.
It includes pre-Classical sculpture, as well as so-called 'tribal' arts.
All of these examples provided artists
with a different approach to representation
from the one they had learned through academic training.
"Picasso continued to be driven by great ambition,
despite the fact that he was reluctant to exhibit
and never took part in group exhibitions at that time.
He wanted to create a new kind of art,
and although with his abilities
he could have enjoyed great success as a traditional artist,
he wanted to be an innovator."
Fernande Olivier.
"Picasso inevitably presented us
with an appearance of the world
which did not conform to the way in which we had learned to see it.
For the first time in Picasso's work
the expression of the faces is neither tragic nor passionate.
These are masks almost entirely free from humanity."
André Salmon, critic.
At this moment in Picasso's career
he is really out to do nothing less
than reinvent the history of Western painting
in his own aggressively confrontational,
stylistically disjunctive, provocative terms.
We know he put a lot of time into planning this work.
We can just see from the size of it
that it is of tremendous ambition
and I think he was intent on making people stand back
and say I've never seen a painting like this before.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon started as a narrative scene set in a brothel,
of two men, a sailor and a medical student,
surrounded by five prostitutes.
In time it became a very iconic image of five female nudes.
Choosing a canvas of such a size
is significant for an artist at this time.
What he chooses to represent is a brothel scene.
And it's a brothel scene that is very confrontational.
The composition is very interesting
since when we look at his studies
we see that Picasso originally planned
to include two male characters.
One was a sailor, a regular customer of brothels
and the other was a medical student
arriving with a skull.
So it's this omission of the two male characters
that puts the viewer in the position of voyeur.
That's very important
since we are now complicit with what is happening.
One of the characters opens a curtain
and we are caught in the scene inside the brothel
which was also something violent at that time.
This is a picture with a particular erotic charge
that certainly has to do with the putative brothel scenario.
One of the things I always notice when I look at this work
is the way that each one of those figures locks eyes with us.
It's one of the most aggressive pictures in relation to the viewer's gaze.
Traditionally we would be staring at objects in a painting;
here these powerful female figures are staring back out at us.
The title of this painting is extremely confusing
because first we speak about demoiselles
when they are prostitutes,
and we say Avignon which is a little town in the south of France.
But you have to refer to the Carrer d'Avinyó in Barcelona
which was the street of the brothels and bars.
The very origin
of the title of the work
and the iconography
are from the visits that Picasso
made to brothels in Barcelona.
In a way, it's an iconography
made in France but it takes as reference
the moments and memories of his youth
of the young Picasso entering such brothels.
The other fact is that Pablo was not giving titles to his artworks.
It would have been very difficult for Pablo
to give a title for each painting
when you think that he has made more than 8,000, for example.
But for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,
the real title should be The Prostitutes of the Carrer d'Avinyó
which is not very attractive for a painting.
In fact, the titles were given by art dealers or people after that.
Then we have the style
which has really shaken things up.
We have strong geometric influences
with liberties taken
in relation to the representation of the model.
We often talk about this 'quarter-of-brie' nose
because Picasso has turned the profile of the nose on to the face.
We see a multiplication of points of view
and it doesn't matter if the face is a front view
we can still put the nose in profile.
So we have this violence, something new.
Many will question it
be surprised by it
and even reject it.
When he showed Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to his friends
although they were poets, avant-gardists and open-minded
the reactions were terrible.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a painting that is significant
because of its incorporation
of so-called 'primitive' traditions
into a very classical format.
The change within it was very much prompted
by the reference to non-Western artistic sources.
First of all, the Iberian sculpture from Andalucía,
Cerro de los Santos,
and then the African masks
and examples from the modern primitivist tradition of Gauguin
that Picasso had recently come to consider in his work.
So Picasso superimposed faces
that were inspired not only by non-Western art,
but also references to the art of Paul Gauguin
or Egyptian sculpture
onto the bodies of women that are posing as classical Venuses.
So this coming together of Primitivism and Classicism
makes Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
a turning point in the history of Western art as a whole.
What Picasso succeeds in doing
in the 14 years up to 1907
is indeed a revolution.
He changes the way we see reality.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is the beginning of what will become cubism.
This way of representing the world
from several points of view at the same time.
This is a revolution because since the Renaissance
since the use of perspective
the world has been represented
from a single point of view
constructing different planes using depth of field
using mathematics
to present reality
as we perceive it
in the most faithful way possible.
Now we have this extra dimension to the painting
which is its need to be recomposed
in the imagination of the viewer.
In cubism the viewer needs to intellectually recompose
the complexity of a known object
which if we consider it as a three-dimensional structure
can't be reflected exactly on a flat surface.
And that's truly a revolution.
It's very interesting that, in the space of ten years,
attitudes to the whole issue of Primitivism in art
and also to Les Demoiselles
changed quite radically.
When Picasso first showed Les Demoiselles to his friends
they reacted very strongly and very negatively,
considering it a complete failure.
André Derain even said
that one day they will find Picasso hanging behind the painting.
Then by 1916, despite the war,
Les Demoiselles had a huge success in a very fashionable art gallery,
where it was displayed by the French designer Paul Poiret.
So, we can say that in these ten years
there was an inclusion of avant-garde art
that allowed for Primitivism and Les Demoiselles
to become fashionable commodities.
It's true, it was not shown publicly until July 1916,
but it was seen in Picasso's studio
which many, many people passed through.
The legend is that everybody was shocked and appalled,
but I think when you really begin to look
at the literature and the commentary
that the responses were more mixed.
I think what is, it seems to me,
very true is that this was a picture
that surprised and shocked and upset.
But that isn't necessarily a pejorative thing;
that's a great thing.
It's a cause for argument and debate and dissent.
So there's the public showing, there's the private impact,
there are the artists' studio conversations
and then in the 1920s
one of the young poets who was a foundational figure
for the surrealist artist,
André Breton, saw this picture
and ended up convincing its first buyer to purchase it, Jacques Doucet
and Breton then for a whole generation of artists in the '20s and '30s
he published the picture, he wrote about it,
he saw it as a watershed
as the picture that took art beyond painting for the first time.
And then in the '30s it comes to New York
and it is acquired by the Museum of Modern Art
and it's included in the first big exhibition MoMA did in 1939
of Picasso's work
and I imagine it's been on our walls ever since.
One thing I always like to ask people to do in front of any work of art
and I suppose this one in particular
is to look at it for 30 seconds in silence
and think about what they notice.
I think with this one,
for people who might say,
"Oh, I would rather look at a Titian or an Ingres or a Delacroix",
then the question I would pose to them
is to hold those pictures that you love in mind
and look at this one and think,
"Why would Picasso want to do something so different?
And how is it making me feel?
And what is it that is in fact different about this?
Why would a painter want to make something that seems so wilfully ugly,
or grotesque, or discomforting, or confrontational?"
And I think the more that you do that
the more that this picture begins to get back to you.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is said to be
the origin of modern art.
It is a confusing consideration
because to me it is because of its size, of course,
and the innovation of creation.
On the other side, it is probably a question of marketing
because of the creation of the Museum of Modern Art in New York
at the beginning of the '30s.
So probably it is not the first artwork of modern art,
but it is probably the one which is symbolising at its most.
This is why it is a treasure,
not only for the museum itself, but for the 20th century.
Picasso is an artist of reference.
Even today so many years after his death
he remains a reference not only for scholars but for artists.
A great artist, the first who was able to manipulate
all elements of the media within his reach
who throughout his artistic life
maintained the highest level of output.
He is one of the greatest references for 20th-century art
and his ability to communicate
made him an absolutely unparalleled artist
known worldwide today.
There are very few artists whose name or signature
is known as widely as Pablo Picasso.
There is one thing that is very important.
Picasso never tired of experimenting.
He was a man somewhat dissatisfied with his work
thus always trying to advance
and experiment in new areas.
I think he was always frustrated with himself.
That's why there's such an enormous quantity
of ceramics, engravings, drawings, oil paintings.
I personally calculate about 50,000 works.
It's a whole world, a whole universe
that he has bequeathed to us,
a way to understand the 20th century.
After all, Picasso is the summation of all that is the 20th century.