Picasso: The Beauty and the Beast

Episode one follows Picasso’s years as an emerging artist in Paris. As his renown grows he meets his first love, artist’s model Fernande Olivier, forms close friendships with other artists and poets, including Henri Matisse and Guillaume Apollinaire, and starts the pattern of his lifetime when he falls in love with another woman, Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova.

Now established as one of the greats of the art world, in 1932 Picasso holds an extraordinary one-man show in Paris, a huge retrospective featuring a new body of work. Among it is a series of highly charged erotic pictures of his 25 year-old mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, sitting alongside portraits of his wife.

Age doesn’t dim Picasso’s artistic creativity as he explores ceramics and film. After his relationship with Dora Maar sours, he falls in love with a much younger artist, Francoise Gilot, only to find she has a strong will of her own.