Simon Schama's Power of Art (2006–…): Season 1, Episode 7 - Picasso - full transcript

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.

He was living in a fancy apartment
near the Champs Elysees



with his Russian ballerina wife, Olga,
and their little boy.

He showed his paintings in a classy gallery,

and all of art was his kingdom.

Drunk on self-confidence and cleverness,
he could take it wherever he fancied.

One day, in January, 1927,
he noticed something he definitely fancied.

Blonde, vaguely Nordic, statuesque, 16.

She's called Marie Th?rese Walter,

and Picasso sees her one afternoon outside
Galeries Lafayette, a department store.

He loses no time, goes up to her and says,

''Mademoiselle, you have a most interesting face"

''and I should like to paint it."

''I am Picasso.''

Marie Ther?se would become his lover

and a compulsive obsession in his art.

In 1932,
he poses Marie Ther?se in a languid reverie.

Gently masturbating,
she's literally got sex on her mind.

Pictures like this do what they show,
stroking us into a playful trance.

The colour and wit of the thing,
a drowsy, sensual entertainment.

It's the provocative work of a cocky, self-obsessed,

self-indulgent genius.

And it's all a long way from Guernica.

Picasso had arrived in Paris
at the turn of the century,

a small, pugnacious
and frighteningly gifted Andalusian.

In the city of the avant-garde,
wherever you looked

all the rules of poetry, music, painting,
were being junked.

Young Picasso living like a bohemian

with his oil-slick hair, huge black eyes
and big rabbit's nose.

He knew he had to be part of the giddy liberty.

And he knew what he didn't want,

the hoary old pantomimes of the mighty.

Modern art was modern
because it had turned its back

on those grandstanding histories,

painted for aristocrats and kings.

Here's power on a horse,
the omnipotence of the ruler

displayed by nonchalant control.

Just one hand on the reins.

The message was,
if the sovereign can handle the great horse,

he can certainly manage affairs of state,

critical matters of war and peace.

It was the most enduring image of pure power.

And here's what Picasso does.

Instead of a prince in the saddle,
a naked boy leading a bare-backed horse

through an eerily empty primordial landscape.

There's no hero to identify here,
no story, no subject,

just the modern
coming straight out of the archaic,

as if there had never been anything in-between.

History down for the count, then.
Next stop for obliteration, beauty,

the classical ideal of art itself

made visible in the luscious form
of the female nude.

And this is Picasso's ferocious attack
on that sacred cow in 1907.

This is how all those centuries of gazing at nudes

and muttering demurely about graceful form end,

a brothel line-up.

They strip, you check them out.

Everything ever associated
with nude women in European art,

beauty, obliging sensuality, tenderness,

all brutally sheared away.

And then, around 1910,
having seen off beauty and history,

Picasso goes for the hat trick.

Something even more mind-blowing,
something that, for most people

over the centuries,
had been the entire point of art.

Bye-bye, resemblance.

If a two-dimensional duplicate of the world
is what you want,

then photography is going
to do that job much more efficiently.

This is Picasso's art dealer, Ambroise Vollard.

This is how Picasso saw him,

a different vision of the way things really are.

Cubism.

Deep inside his Slinky-toy cascades of form

seen juddering through moments in time,
was, he insisted,

something compact, solid and firm.

By blowing up the look of things,
Picasso was saying,

I'm getting beyond surface appearances,
to the core.

It wasn't for those
who wanted something easy on the eye.

But then Picasso wasn't interested
in pleasuring the public.

He positively revelled in the cult of difficulty.

''Too hard?''
you can almost hear him sneering. ''Tough.''

In the 1920s,

there's something else
he doesn't lose much sleep over,

the state of the world.

He's doing fine, thank you,
but Europe is in deep trouble,

fascism beginning to strong-arm
its way into power.

But of the chaos and hatred, riot and revolution,

there's not a hint in Picasso's work.

For some artists,
it was no problem, obligation even,

to combine radical politics and radical painting,

to have modern art
criticise hypocrisy and injustice.

George Grosz, the German artist,

was busy having a go
at the military dinosaurs and Nazi sympathisers

who were busy
subverting Germany's fragile democracy.

Creatively, of course, Grosz is no Picasso.

But he never pretends that art can stay
immune from ideology,

high above the fray.

He knows there's a war to be fought,

and his brushes are armed to take the offensive.

The only wars Picasso had ever fought
had been against

the conventions of art.

Oh, yes, he'd mostly been on the side of freedom,

but that had always been creative,
not political, freedom.

No wonder one of his best friends called Picasso,

''The least political person I've ever known.''

What's happening in Picasso's studio

is about as far from the barricades as you can get.

It's all very self-obsessed.

Politics and social conflict
doesn't interest him at all in the 1920s.

Instead, he's brooding on his calling.

So, lots of complicated, super-subtle images
of the artist in the studio.

Lots of reflections of and in mirrors.

Lots of models pulled this way and that.

Body parts artfully rearranged.

He's also brooding
on his increasingly tangled love life.

On their harrowing beach vacations,
Picasso and his wife, Olga,

were in constant conflict.

And when he was feeling
imprisoned by the relationship,

his artistic distortions are grotesque.

Meet praying mantis woman,

with her frighteningly toothed all-purpose orifice.

Not all of his images of women
were brutal and predatory.

When he starts painting Marie Th?rese,

Picasso's jagged lines suddenly become

as curvy and voluptuous as his lover's body.

We are deep in Picasso's world,

where his principal inspirations are his art,
his women and himself.

Picasso often said, ''This is how
modern art is supposed to be,

''free of sentimental attachments
to place and memory. ''

But even Pablo Picasso can't escape history.

In his homeland, Spain,
the old certainties were collapsing.

The country had voted
to throw out the royal family.

A new golden age
of social justice and political liberty

was supposed to dawn.

But the eight years of the Spanish Republic

would be a prolonged torment
for its defenders and enemies alike.

Violence regularly erupted between factions
on the political right and left,

between the past and the present.

In his Parisian exile, the modernist virtuoso

finds himself haunted by a past master,

the darkest genius of Spanish painting,

Francisco Goya.

Goya was the first to make art
look squarely into the nightmare of cruelty

that was modern warfare.

His disasters of war turn the ideal forms of art,

the beauty of a human body, into a sick joke.

So much butcher's chops.

Goya's obsessions infected Picasso.

The old master's bullfights,
with their rituals of slaughter,

pulling him inexorably back to Spain.

In 1934, Picasso crossed the Pyrenees
for a tour of his homeland.

For part of the trip,
he was joined by Marie Th?rese.

Inevitably, here in Madrid,
they went to a bullfight.

The poet Federico Lorca described Spain

as the only country
where death is a national spectacle.

In the mid-1930s,

the spectacle was threatening
to spill from the bullring.

Spain was about to be torn apart.

It was already hopelessly divided.

There was a modern Spain,

urban, secular, industrial.

A Spain of thriving socialist movements
and agitating anarchists.

But there was another, more ancient Spain.

A country of immense landed estates
and a poverty-stricken peasantry.

A Spain suffocated by the heavy presence
of the Catholic Church.

Picasso called this The Black Spain.

The problem was that both Spains
claimed to be the true nation.

Neither was prepared to accept
the verdict of elections.

Had they thought of themselves
as just rival political parties,

well, then hostile but peaceful coexistence
would have been possible.

But they didn't.

Each side, left and right,
old and new, believed the other

not just to be the opposition

but the enemy of reborn Spain itself.

Each side demanded the other's annihilation.

Some Spanish artists

had more than an inkling of what was coming.

None more theatrically than Salvador Dali.

His Premonition of Civil War

is a Surrealist's epic phantasmagoria
of catastrophe.

Dali himself sided
with the conservatives and fascists.

Right-wing intellectuals
made overtures to Picasso,

hoping he might join Dali in their camp.

Picasso stayed aloof,

but there must have been a day when he woke up

and found he'd fallen
into the abyss of native hatreds.

A Spanish fever begins to take hold
of Picasso's deepest creative imagination.

Into the prints and drawings
come all the old ancient antagonists,

who, once summoned, never really go away.

The bull,

the horse

and the bearer of light.

It's not pretty, it is scary.

We're in the bullring.

Entrails spill from gored horses,

sometimes toreadors die,

sometimes bulls.

But we're also in a more ancient world
of the Minotaur,

and the labyrinth of Picasso's mind.

In 1935, with Spain on the brink of catastrophe,

Picasso suddenly stops playing around

with all those jumbled images of horses and bulls,

and resolves them into an etching,

which somehow has the weight,

solemnity and monumental power of an altarpiece,

a mural or reworking of an ancient frieze.

He calls it The Minotauromachy.

It has all the quality of a dream or memory,

sexual and scriptural.

Weirdly frozen, but disturbingly vivid.

A horse, its mouth agape in death agony,
is spilling its guts.

Over its back is draped
the half-naked body of a woman matador.

A minotaur advances threateningly,

but is stopped in its tracks
by a single candle held by a small girl.

So, the beast can be stopped by light.

The light that comes from the power of art.

It's Picasso the modernist who is doing this,

bringing back all the old ancient myths,
dreams and nightmares.

You think they belong
to the remote past, he's saying.

Wrong, look around, they're still with us.

We've gone back to our future,
and it is again a savage age.

The beasts are out.

General Francisco Franco once said

that to save Spain from Marxism,
he was prepared to shoot half the country.

In July, 1936, he fired his opening salvo,

leading an army rebellion

against the democratically elected government
of socialists and liberals.

A favoured rallying cry of the rebels was,
''Viva la muerte. ''

''Long live death.''

And to help the generals deliver it,
they get enthusiastic assistance

out of the German Luftwaffe
that provides air support.

And the army
that General Franco will use to conquer Spain

includes 40,000 Italian troops
on loan from Mussolini.

For the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis,

the Spanish Civil War is a dry run
for their own coming global battle

with degenerate democracy and socialism.

The Civil War is vicious,
but Franco's armies sweep through Spain,

overwhelming the idealistic militias
defending the democratic government.

Somehow, the besieged capital, Madrid, holds out.

But then a shell breaches
the defences of the Prado museum,

home to Spain's precious art collection.

When Picasso hears about it,
he feels personally assaulted.

The great iconoclastic modernist, Senor Cubism,

suddenly protective of his own ancestry.

All those Spanish masters, especially Goya,

witness to the disasters of war.

So when he's asked to accept
the honorific position of Director of the Prado,

he doesn't hesitate to say yes.

It's a signal to the world
he's chosen to stand with the Republic.

Picasso has got politics.

And he's forced to join the struggle practically
as well as symbolically.

It's decided that the endangered masterpieces
have to be evacuated

from the Prado to Valencia.

El Director Picasso helps select
the vulnerable cargo,

and waits nervously for news

as a convoy carrying Spain's art treasures
trundles to its safe haven.

Picasso's thoughts and passions
are now locked into the Spanish struggle.

Back in Paris, Picasso is confronted
by another crisis. This time, it's personal.

He's in the midst of an acrimonious split
from his wife, Olga.

His lover Marie Ther?se is pregnant.

He feels creatively paralysed.

''It is'', he says, ''the worst time of my life. ''

Then in January, 1937,

Spain comes knocking at his studio door.

A group responsible
for designing the Spanish pavilion

at a world's fair,
to be held in Paris the following summer,

comes to visit Picasso in his studio.

Politically committed artists, they tell him,

have agreed to do work for that pavilion.
Would Picasso join them?

Well, yes, he would.
Just what he was going to paint, he had no idea.

But while he was waiting for inspiration to hit,
he took a day off

to do his bit for the cause.

It was his first stab at popular art,
drawn to raise funds

for the Spanish War Refugee Relief Fund.

It's a comic strip satire on Franco's pretensions

to be Spain's knight crusader.

So instead of a valiant hero on a stallion,

he rides a giant phallus.

He's also a polyp, bristling and squishy,

a creature Picasso himself called a turd.

It takes our genius just one day
to knock off this first sheet,

so it's a bit soon to call him
the hero artist of the Republic.

And then, well, it's back to business as usual.

Yet more muses and meditations on art.

He even thinks one of those might do

for the job he'd promised for the Spanish pavilion

at the international exhibition.

And then life caught up with art.

It's about four in the afternoon
in the little town of Guernica,

15 miles from Bilbao, in the north of Spain.

Seven thousand souls

going about their market-day business
in the ancestral homeland of the Basques.

A people with their own language, culture
and fierce sense of identity.

In the raging Civil War,
the Basques were stalwartly anti-Franco.

A black speck appears in the blue.

The solitary plane is German,
from the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion.

It wheels over the town,

then, almost casually, drops six bombs.

Waves of German and Italian aircraft,

flying in formation,
created a relentless storm of havoc.

Over 5,000 bombs were dropped
on the defenceless town.

When the people of Guernica
fled into the streets and fields,

the pilots strafed them with machine-gun fire.

A rain of incendiary bombs finished the job,

turning the town into an ashy cauldron.

1,645 die.

Thousands more are terribly wounded.

The commander of the Condor Legion,
Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen,

was extremely gratified by the action.

So surgically precise, so tremendously modern.

Guernica literally
levelled to the ground.

Bomb craters in the streets. Simply terrific.

Perfect conditions for a great victory.

There was nothing in Guernica that
could possibly be designated a military target.

What was special about Guernica
was the brutality and clarity of the objective,

to terrorise defenceless civilians from the air,

and to send a message to the rest of Spain
and to the world,

''This is what we can do
and this is what we will do.''

George Steer, correspondent
for The London Times,

covering the Basque war from Bilbao,
got himself to Guernica.

Blocks of wreckage slithered
and crashed from the houses.

And from their sides, which were still erect,

the polished heat struck at our cheeks and eyes.

Throughout the night, houses were falling,

until the streets became
long heaps of red, impenetrable debris.

Guernica had gone Cubist.

Steer's report is reprinted
in the French paper Ce Soir,

with a dramatic front-page picture.

The nocturnal inferno burns itself
into Picasso's visual imagination.

That's why he pictures Guernica
as a night massacre,

even though it was actually
death in the afternoon.

In his Paris studio, Picasso summons art

for the most serious thing he's ever attempted,
telling the truth.

Of course, he's not going to compete
with Steer's gritty report from Guernica.

But if the painting succeeds,
it will transcend mere factual chronicle.

It will be Cubism with a conscience.

What Picasso was setting out to make

was something foreign
to the very nature of modern art,

the art he had defined.

He was about to try and make
a truly modern history painting.

It was the tallest order of his life,

to turn from icon-breaker to icon-maker.

So everything he'd ever touched
in his art and his life

had to come together for this one moment.

The excitement of modernism,

the obsession with the art of the past

and his own intimate experiences
of love and grief.

He would need all the help he could get.

But there was an accomplice waiting in the wings.

He'd met her in a Paris cafe.

He could hardly have missed her.

Her name is Dora Maar, a Croatian photographer,

intellectual and accomplished Surrealist.

Picasso made an offer for the bloodstained glove,

and won a fiery new lover and a creative partner.

Dora became a fixture in the studio,

and Picasso's unofficial photographer,

capturing him at work as Guernica evolved.

On May 1st, 1937, Picasso gets down to it.

He starts with rough sketches,
barely more than scribbles.

Graphite on paper.

Thoughts racing ahead of the hand.

And the essential cast of characters,
so long on his mind,

so deep in his psyche, reappear.

The wounded horse.

The massive bull.

The candlelight bearer.

Don't imagine, though, that Picasso is
in the remorseless grip of his new vision.

All through the next week,
with the deadline for the Paris fair coming on fast,

he does no work at all on the painting.

He goes to see his other lover, Marie Th?rese,
and their new baby on the weekend.

And he umpires a catfight between her and Dora.

Heady emotions swirl around Picasso,

and he can't resist transferring
the complicated agony of his personal life

to his political art.

Heads of women trapped
with arteries of excruciating pain,

punctured with tears,
begin to appear in the Guernica drawings.

He's become the impresario of anguish.

Marie Th?rese and his young daughter,
Maya, visit the studio, too.

The toddler smearing her hands
in the fresh paint of Guernica.

Visions of domestic tragedy.

Dead babies,

distraught mothers process through his mind.

He begins working on the actual painting.

Twenty feet long and 12 feet high,

the canvas is too tall to fit between
the roof rafters and the floor of the studio,

so it's propped up against the wall.

Dora snaps Picasso as he perches on
a ladder to reach the top of the painting.

Picasso chain-smokes his way through it
in a storm of furious creativity.

In the early versions of the painting,
there are images of hope and defiance.

But as Picasso gets deeper into Guernica,
those slight gestures of optimism

collapse into the bleaker, overwhelming tragedy.

A clenched socialist fist of resistance
rising from the pile of bodies

appears in several early sketches,

but this thought fades and disappears
from the final painting.

In earlier versions, the shrieking horse
with the fatal gash in its side

had a little winged horse, Pegasus,

the mythical symbol of the birth of art and poetry,

born out of the wound, as if to say,

something good may come from blood.

But it ends with a deep, black,
lozenge-shaped hole in the horse,

right at the optical dead-centre of the painting.

The fallen warrior originally was grander, stronger,

his head helmeted like a classical hero.

But Picasso has turned the warrior on his back,
mouth open, gaping,

slack-jawed, helpless.

If he's a good partisan,

Picasso ought to be delivering
something upbeat amidst the carnage,

but he hasn't the stomach for callow optimism.

So the signs of redemption now are puny,
though telling.

A single daisy.

And on the fallen warrior's hand,
startlingly, an unmistakable puncture mark.

The stigmata of the martyred Christ.

What brought this into Picasso's head?
Wasn't he supposed to be the worldly modernist?

Wasn't it General Franco
who was supposed to be the Christian soldier?

Well, that was the point, of course.

The idea was to turn the tables
on all those holy rollers.

What was in Picasso's head now
was one more indelible image

of the agony of his nation.

And one which every Spaniard would have known,

Goya's 3rd of May, 1808.

This, too, was the response of an artist
seething at cruelty and massacre.

In this case, the execution in Madrid

of the rebels who had risen against
Napoleon's invading army.

But it's coloured by an ancient Christian hope,

especially deeply rooted in Spain,

that of salvation.

The defiant rebel is dying a saviour's death,

arms flung wide like the crucified Christ.

The stigmata appearing on his opened palm.

There's something else that ties
Goya's execution to Picasso's slaughter,

something that turns
the conventions of art on their head,

and that's the alternation of light
from good to evil.

In everything ever written about art,
everything ever done in painting,

light is the bringer of beauty, of sublime dignity.

Not here.

Here it's the instrument of slaughter.

The sallow gleam in which
the machine men go about their dirty business

in the dead of night. Just obeying orders.

Now, look at Guernica.

You feel the heave and swell
of that pyramid of writhing bodies,

thrusting up through the painting, don't you?

But what do they strain towards?

An evil eye.

And within that evil eye,

the merciless glare of a single electric light bulb.

It's the incandescence of the exterminating angel,

the searchlight of the death squad
and the targeting bomber.

The bare bulb of the torturer's cell.

Against it is the candlelight, held straight out

by a heroically beautiful arm.

An epic battle, then,
of the good and the wicked lights.

Art versus evil.

It's almost done.

But there's one more necessary touch.

He and Dora cover the body of the dying horse

with a field of sharp little downward strokes,

that make the body
dissolve into a sea of newsprint

or the light of a newsreel projector.

The marks are unreadable.

They're the visual equivalent of static.

Towering above them is the force of art,

breaking through the drone of news.

When he's finished painting,
he knows he's done the impossible.

Created something that reaches
deep into modern nightmares,

hectic, terrifying, burning, screaming.

There's no way out.

It's defiantly modern,

but it also pulls us back
into the tragedy of the ages.

A Cubist commotion,
yet also a classical monument,

with it's wailing women
flanking the massive pyramid of death.

It's just paint and canvas,

but it has the authority of stone.

It's unbombable, it's indestructible.

For this picture achieves a miracle.

Despite all the images of violence
and disaster with which we're bombarded,

it makes us feel it.

It gets under our skin.

This, for me, is what all great art has to do,

crash into our lazy routines.

The routine that Guernica tears into

is a sickness of our, as well as Picasso's, time.

The habit of taking violent evil in our stride.

The yawn at the massacre.

Seen it before, go away.

Don't spoil the fun of art.

But Guernica isn't with us for fun.

It's there to rip away the scar tissue.

To make us bleed, to rob us of our sleep.

So, what can art do
when the bombs start dropping?

It can instruct us
on the obligations of being human.

In all the ways that really counted,
Picasso had won,

art had won, humanity had won.

So, does Guernica storm
the Paris World Fair and the world of art?

Well, no, not really.

The response is devastatingly polite.

Critics are more bemused than blown away.

Left-wing visitors to the Fair
from Spain and beyond

looked in vain
for muscular proletarians in heroic attitudes.

Or even the grim-faced bad guys
in malevolent poses.

One critic described the painting
as nothing more than a private brainstorm,

which, of course, it partly was.

Whilst Guernica is bathed
in rather lukewarm praise,

Picasso is off to the Cote d'Azur with Dora
and his posse of friends.

But there is now more to Picasso
than the bohemian beach-bum act.

He is an artist transformed.

An artist who believes his art
has a political purpose

and a political message.

In Guernica, and all my art,

I express my revulsion of the military caste

who have sunk Spain into an ocean of pain.

Two years after Guernica,

Franco was victorious in Spain

and fascism was eviscerating Europe.

Guernica was not just a painting,
it was a prophecy.

In 1944, after four years of gruelling war,

Paris was liberated from Nazi occupation,

and Picasso was free to meet an adoring public.

And how they flocked to the studio,

hungry for stories about Guernica's creation.

He obliges the fans and groupies
lingering on those years,

like an old field marshal
reliving his finest campaign.

Well, this was his finest campaign.

Picasso once described the creative process
as a kind of complete emptying.

He'd put so much of everything
he had to offer in the world into Guernica,

during those few, feverish months of 1937.

But afterwards, there was not much left
in the creative tank.

He had 30 years of work ahead.

The longest, saddest anti-climax
in the history of art.

Pablo Picasso becomes Comrade Picasso,

the Cote d'Azur communist,

knocking off hack work
for the party of peace and goodwill.

And what's worse than being a poster boy
for Stalin? Well,just being a poster boy.

Settling into celebrity,
the Riviera tan ever-deepening,

Picasso leaps from the pages
of Marxist critiques to the fashion glossies.

In contrast, Guernica accumulates symbolic power.

The painting takes up residence in New York City

where, for three decades, it burns with moral heat

on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art.

Its creator had done something no one
who'd known him could ever have predicted.

He'd rescued modern art
from the curse of its own cleverness,

from the curse of novelty.

Guernica's always been bigger than art.

Uncontainable by mere museum walls.

It's one of those very rare creations

that gets into the bloodstream
of the common culture.

It's become the shared heritage
of an appalled humanity,

and a mirror of the suffering of civilians
in every conflict.

In 1981,
with Franco dead and democracy at last alive,

Guernica found its way home to Spain.

Picasso never saw its return,
having died eight years before,

but he relished the prospect
that his painting would outlast Franco.

Here's the old thing,
comfortably settled in Madrid.

And just when you think,
''Well, it's a magnificent relic,

''what can it possibly have to say to us

''in our video-saturated, digitally-enhanced age?''

something comes along to awaken
from those old black-and-white characters

the tempestuous force of their original creation.

In February 2003,

the American delegation to the United Nations

decided to make its pessimistic case

for the likelihood of armed intervention in Iraq.

Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council
was to be followed by a press conference.

And then, at the last minute,

someone noticed something inconvenient
about the location.

There was a tapestry reproduction
of Guernica hanging on the wall.

''Oh, dear. Screaming women,

burning houses, dead babies, jagged lines. ''

''Cover it up, ''said the TVpeople.
''It's too distracting. ''

So Guernica was shrouded by a big blue drape.

The news handlers could have said,

''Hold on a minute, we could show the painting.
After all, this is what tyrants do,

''death, suffering, misery. '' But they didn't.

However you massaged it,

there was something about the way that
damned picture would look on the news

that would upset people.

Much better to cover it up.

It was, I suppose, the ultimate
backhand compliment to the power of art.

You're the mightiest country in the world,
you can throw your armies around,

you can get rid of dictators.

But, hey, don't tangle with a masterpiece.