Whether one can separate art from the artist is a debate that will run for ever, but with Pablo Picasso there is little point in having it. The man himself said his work told you everything about him – and the work is mercurial, confrontational, twisted and violent. Picasso: The Beauty and the Beast, a three-part documentary marking 50 years since his death, confirms that the tumult on the canvas mirrored the painter’s temperament.
The tale begins with Picasso’s arrival in Barcelona at 14. He formed a fraternity of wannabe artists who were interested in painting, women and painting women. Sketching nudes was fun, but interactions with unmarried women were forbidden on religious grounds, so Picasso acquainted himself with the refuge that would inform his work for decades to come: the brothel. We hear the story of him being asked, later in life, how old he was when he lost his virginity. He responded by holding his arm out at chest height, as if to say: I was yea high.
After a glance at thrusting early work, such as 1903’s Two Figures and a Cat (a cat idly spectating cunnilingus) and the self-explanatory Brothel Scene, from 1900, we take in Picasso’s portraits of his father, a failed artist whom the young man renders as deathly, incomplete, unable to meet the viewer’s gaze. The self-portraits of the time, by contrast, are bold and piercing.
On we go to Paris, at the dawn of the century Picasso would do much to shape. The suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas brought on the Blue Period, to be followed by the cheerier Rose Period, inspired by the woman who is the star of episode one, Fernande Olivier. She wrote about and, in later life, was recorded talking about Picasso at length; her suffering sums up what gives the programme the “beast” part of its title.
After observing that Picasso was a work in progress – “I’m horrified by his lack of personal cleanliness” – Olivier enjoyed a blissful early romance with him, fuelled by absinthe and opium. Soon, however, Picasso started locking her in their home whenever he went out, to stop any other man seeing her unsupervised. Her work as a model had to stop.
The programme’s meatiest section concerns Picasso’s plundering of African art to assist him in creating his 1907 left-turn, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, its female faces directly influenced by an exhibition at the Musée d’Ethnographie. The painting heralded the invention of cubism and the modernity of the work seems to endlessly renew itself; now, it feels current again as the subject of a debate about cultural appropriation.
The artist Julian Schnabel deems this criticism “absurd”. Mind you, he also says: “There’s diagonals in that painting … he’s constructing a configuration that has a body. The body is the painting. The paint is the skin.” Whether his opinion is one you want to borrow is open to question.
A more cogent contribution comes from the V&A East director, Gus Casely-Hayford, who thinks the painting’s off-kilter perspectives ought to spark thoughts of how we view gender and race. But a deep discussion of the opening episode’s key work, particularly what it reveals about Picasso’s view of women, never quite materialises as several interviewees have their say. This programme might have been better with someone like Casely-Hayford authoring it: a named presenter gives an art-history documentary a point of view around which to pivot. Without one, it can feel like watching a textbook.
Not much is added here by his descendants, either, although the number of them interviewed is impressive. Documentary-makers reach for family members to lend their films an intimate authenticity, but children – and especially grandchildren – often don’t have any insight into an artist or writer. That is the case with early Picasso, even in a rendering of a life as gossipy as this one.
Talking of which, Olivier eventually got tired of Picasso’s philandering and got her own back in what one likes to think was the customary manner for betrayed bohemians in prewar Paris: she had an affair with a futurist.
Part one ends with this breakup, the outbreak of the first world war and the death of Picasso’s father. Then the great man marries and has a son with the ballerina Olga Khokhlova, bins cubism and starts enjoying a dandyish bourgeois lifestyle. But, uh-oh, his paintings of Khokhlova make her look cold and anxious, and we are told he “loved being a father – at the beginning”. More masterpieces, and more pain for those who were there to see them created, are still to come.
• Picasso: The Beauty and the Beast aired on BBC Two and is on BBC iPlayer now.
