Pablo Picasso first entered my consciousness when I was a boy of about eight years old.
My eyes are at different levels and my right ear’s a bit bigger than my left – which showed up particularly in school photographs – so my mother used to call me her ‘little Picasso’.
It’s perhaps ironic that it was my Scottish mother Cora, rather than my Spanish father Luis, who introduced me to the Malaga-born artist, but he often talked of masters like El Greco, Velázquez and Goya, who influenced Picasso.
Michael Portillo says his new show paints a fresh portrait of Picasso - and reveals his own moving tale behind the artist's Spanish Civil War epic
Not only that, but Picasso’s most famous painting, Guernica, has a special resonance for me. Had it not been for the aerial bombardment of the Basque village of Guernica by Franco-supporting German and Italian warplanes during the Spanish Civil War, I wouldn’t exist.
As a result of that atrocity, the British Government allowed a group of children to take refuge in Britain. Two years later my father, also exiled to Britain, met my mother when they worked with those refugees.
So for those reasons, and many more, I travelled to Spain and France to try and unravel the genius of Picasso, and the effect Guernica had on his life.
To understand the great man, I met bullfighters, art experts and Picasso’s granddaughter Diana on a journey that began in Malaga where the artist was born in 1881.
From there, I travelled to Madrid where Picasso studied art, then to Barcelona which was the last place in Spain he ever set foot. Barcelona was also the last city on my father’s escape route out of the country, because in 1939 General Franco won the war, and for those who had backed the losing side, to remain in Spain was to invite imprisonment or death.
Picasso divided his time between Spain and Paris from the turn of the century, but after he painted Guernica in 1937 he was never able to return to his homeland.
He lived out much of his life in Southern France, but even 40 years after leaving Spain his Spanishness remained at the core of the man. He painted about 50 versions of Spanish artist Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, and a series of lithographs to illustrate a book on bullfighting. But for me, the key to it all was Guernica.
Picasso divided his time between Spain and Paris from the turn of the century, but after he painted Guernica in 1937 he was never able to return to his homeland
Commissioned by the Spanish Republican Government in 1937 to produce a giant canvas for their display at that year’s World Fair in Paris, Picasso was initially uninspired; until the bombing of Guernica on 26 April claimed 1,600 lives, the first time the German Luftwaffe had entered the war in support of Franco.
Using incendiary and high explosive bombs, they razed the strategically unimportant Basque village to the ground, while German troops machine-gunned fleeing civilians.
Outraged, Picasso set about committing his emotions to canvas in a vast 3.5m x 8m masterpiece. The finished work, created in a Paris studio, remains breathtaking.
Rather than showing the actual bombing, Picasso depicted the horror and brutality of the massacre of civilians by featuring a disembowelled horse dying in agony and a mighty Spanish bull among nightmarish images.
It is this universality that makes the piece so important. Precisely because he doesn’t recreate the actual incident – as Francisco Goya had done when he painted a Spanish patriot facing a firing squad of Napoleon’s invading French soldiers – the death, fire and grief are not limited to one place and one date.
It is also a complete original, unlike any other Picasso. The grey, black and white coloration, in contrast with Picasso’s often vibrant palette, adds to its exceptionalism.
When I met Picasso’s granddaughter Diana, she told me she thought the colours were drawn from the printed words and images of newspapers, for the atrocity reached the outside world in black and white. And, of course, it goes without saying that no reproduction does it justice.
Viewing it at Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum was a climactic moment. Three-quarters of a century after it was painted it has not lost the power to shock and its scale and ambition still overwhelm.
After it was painted it toured Europe raising funds for the Republican cause, only entering Spain decades later after both Picasso and Franco were dead. Even then it required an armed guard, so powerfully evocative did it remain of the passions of the civil war.
For the rest of my journey I sought to make sense of the famous work, and the man. Picasso never liked to explain his paintings, complaining that if he were a composer no one would ask what his music meant.
I met bullfighter Javier Conde and his wife, flamenco singer Estrella Morente, who both shed light on the connection between Picasso, his famous painting and the bull ring. Morente likened the suffering in Guernica to the drawn-out lament of a flamenco song; and Conde insisted that art and the encounter between matador and bull were the same thing.
Picasso never liked to explain his paintings, complaining that if he were a composer no one would ask what his music meant
‘At any time I could put down my matador’s sword and take up a paintbrush; and at any time Picasso could have put down his paintbrush and taken up the sword.’
The true symbolism of every facet of Guernica can only be guessed at, but we do know that it haunted Picasso.
Back in England at the Tate Gallery I was shown Weeping Woman, which is a thematic continuation of the tragedy, focusing on one woman’s grief at the loss of her child in the bombing.
Antony Penrose, whose father was Picasso’s biographer and who bought the painting from Picasso before the paint had dried, showed me how the ghosts of the massacre were imprinted on Weeping Woman.
The reflections of aeroplanes can be seen in the pupils of her eyes. She was dressed up for market day when the bombardment shattered her life and ended that of her child.
For all those who experienced it, the Spanish Civil War was devastating. To be able to see it through the eyes of the country’s greatest artist is deeply affecting.