PICASSO – A PAINTER’S DIARY

SELECTED PRESS QUOTES

“Perry Miller Adato has been unusually sensitive to the protean personality of the artist, making a human portrait out of what are usually impersonal art histories…her latest documentary is a remarkable achievement, turning an extraordinary collection of formidable artworks into a richly satisfying human experience.”
–NC News Service

“Picasso – A Painter’s Diary, the 90 minute film is produced and directed by WNET-TV’s Perry Miller Adato, much lauded for her previous films on Gertrude Stein and Georgia O’Keeffe.

In tracing the immense span of Picasso’s creative years, from his days as a wunderkind in his native Malaga to his old age as a wunderkind in the south of France, the film gives us as varied a view of Picasso himself as the Modern’s show gives of his art.

I wanted to give an idea about what Picasso himself thought and felt about painting, life, love; what he had to say on his chief influences, the turning points of his work, the sources of his art…

She (Adato) has managed to accomplish her aim by using movie footage and stills, location shots of Picasso’s landscapes and milieus, readings by actors of his writings, interviews with his children, friends (including the artist Joan Miro) and appreciaters, plus juxtapositions of the artist’s paintings with places and people in his life. To “background” the famous “Guernica” mural done by Picasso in 1937, for example she uses footage with sound effects, of a bombing raid on a small town in the Spanish Civil war.

Of Picasso, the man and the artist, there is plenty of interesting talk…Joseph Palau I Fabre, a prolific Spanish writer on Picasso, credits the artist with creating a new painting style for each of the women in his life. “It’s as if for the new woman he didn’t want the sheets of his former bed. He offered the new woman a new style! He created for her a new world. I don’t think there’s another artist in the world who could have done this.”

The artist Miro assesses him: “what he gave us was a summing up, profound and cruel of the entire history of painting. He opened all doors for us. After this, we had a sense of freedom. We breathed the open air.” And that Picasso was no saint is made clear in a comment from the French photographer Brassai: “He was Machiavellian with women, with dealers. He liked to see them jealous and in competition with each other.”
–Grace Glueck, New York Times

“…thus our society is being accorded the privilege of viewing hundreds of his works at the retrospective on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York…But it is also being accorded the more convenient and perhaps even more revealing privilege of learning about this modern master and his work in a film that should be regarded as a required supplement to a visit to the show or as a substitute for those who may not be able to see the show at all: Picasso — A Painter’s Diary.

This superb film is like Picasso himself in that it has many styles to suit its subject, its period, its moods. This is true of the fascinating music tracks as well…Said Picasso; “Painting is a question-it alone gives the answer.” For laymen and casual art appreciators who have become accustomed to seeing the many styles of Pablo Picasso in museums, in reproduction in homes or books, this film is an extraordinary opportunity to be helped with “the answer.” It is the quintessential art film — allowing you to meet and understand the man as well as the artist.

If you watch only one television show this season, let it be Picasso – A Painters’ Diary.”
– Arthur Unger, The Christian Science Monitor