Horsewoman, ”Little Fellow” and ”Musketeer”, 1968

Pablo Picasso

Narrator: At the beginning of the 1960s, a television set entered Picasso’s home. He followed the world on screen with a mix of curiosity and scepticism. In a 1966 interview he remarked: “Sometimes you find excellent things on television, very pleasant, which I like and which interest me. And sometimes, well, sometimes it’s awful.”

His grandson Bernard Ruiz-Picasso has recalled how Picasso often watched programmes about musketeers, Westerns and circus acts such as La Piste aux Étoiles. These images of duels, acrobats and theatrical spectacles soon appeared in his art.

When Picasso began work on his large etching suite Suite 347 in 1968, the flow of television imagery contributed directly to its subjects. Circus scenes, fencers, jugglers, film crews and audiences appear repeatedly. Television offered Picasso a new source of characters and situations, as well as a way of thinking about sequence and variation – elements he was already exploring in his graphic work.

When Picasso paints his musketeers and circus figures, he is not merely staging history; he is also responding to the visual world of his own present day – the images passing across his television screen at that moment.