Hitler vs Picasso

Françoise Gilot's candid memoir remains the most revealing portrait of Picasso written, and gives fascinating insight into the intense and creative life shared by two modern artists.

Presented by a friend of Picasso in his later years, John Richardson, Picasso: The Full Story is an accessible and comprehensive look at the life of the most important artist of the 20th Century, examining the influences and the secrets behind many of the masterpieces he created. Televised previously on Channel 4 as Picasso: Magic, Sex and Death, the programme is divided into three parts.

Part 1: Magic
Magic (77 mins) traces Picasso’s early influences back to his birth in Malaga in 1881 and early childhood in Barcelona, attempting to relate his artistic power with the influence of Southern Spanish Andalusian gypsy lore, comparing the “search for the sacred fire” in his painting with voodoo and shamanism, where women are seen as sacrificial offerings made for his art. This is intriguing and Richardson makes a good case, examining numerous works and tying this into the well-known influence of the powerful symbolism of tribal and prehistoric art on Picasso’s later work. There is undoubted power in Picasso’s work and it is worth examining what the secret of that force is, but calling it ‘magic’ feels somewhat sensationalist and is far from convincing. What the first part manages to do successfully however is draw a clear line between Picasso’s life and the various early periods of his artwork, making a good connection between the duality of sex and death in Picasso’s work up to 1916; the death of his friend Cassagenes in Paris in 1900 as the inspiration for his Blue Period; his affair with model “La Belle Fernande”, their visits to Gosol and the beginning of his Rose Period; and the development of cubism with Braque. Particular attention is given to his ground-breaking work on “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, examining the influences of tribal art, early Iberian art and El Greco on this key work.

Guernica (1937) was created during Picasso's Surrealist period and captures the horror of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. By the end of World War II, Picasso had become an internationally known artist and celebrity.