毕加索 Part 01

It's the depths of winter, 1941. . . . . . .

Pablo Picasso is living and working on the top floor of an old house in Left Bank Paris. The Third Reich owns Europe.

Every so often, Picasso gets visits from the Gestapo. They mutter about degenerate art and drop dark hints he's hiding Jewish friends.

Then they trash the studio a bit. One day, there's a visit that passes into the Picasso legend.

. . . . . . The unwelcome visitor snoops around a bit.

Then he notices there are postcards lying around of Picasso's most famous work, His epic depiction of what happened when German bombs fell on a small Basque town in the Spanish Civil War. - Guernica.

" Did you do this? " he says. " Oh, no, " says Picasso. " You did. Go on, take one. Souvenir."

Great comeback, good story, but what can art really do in the face of atrocity? . . . . . .

Shouldn't art just stick to what it does best, the delivery of pleasure, and forget about being a paintbrush warrior? Or is it, when the bombs are dropping, that we find out what art is really for?

. . . . . . Paris in the 1920s. Pablo Picasso was the sovereign of modern painting.