Simon Schama's Power of Art: Picasso

SYNOPSIS

Simon sketches how Pablo Picasso, the Andalusian (south Spanish) hedonistic king of Paris' bohemian painting scene, who for decades deliberately created pioneering modern works, far from the classical traditions of realistic resemblance (in favor of cubism) and themes serving grandeur or devotion, nor aiming at beauty, while remarkably oblivious of contemporary political context, came to paint Guernica, his giant 1937 evocation of the horror of war in the German Luftwafe (airforce) total destruction of the Basque village of that name. Since Picasso was thematically inspired by his compatriot Goya's nightmarish war images, he visited Spain again in 1934, picking up the motives bull, horse and light-bearer, all to stay with him, and since general Franco started in 1936 a civil war, in which the right-wing Catholic country-based reactionaries, massively aided by Hitler's Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy which sent 40,000 troops, bitterly fought modernist urban Marxists' elected republican government, at all cost, the personal height of horror being the bombing of Spain's main museum, the Prado palace in Madrid, after which Picasso accepted its largely honorary directorship, while his turbulent love-life intensified his anxiety.