Watch Picasso Make a Masterpiece in Five Minutes

Picasso has always been shown in pictures, but here's a video of him. Let's look into the world of his works through the video.

'Le Mystère Picasso' is a remarkable documentary film made by French director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, in which stop-action and time-lapse photography are used to capture Picasso at work.Not many of the works he created for the documentary survive – but three hang in the Royal Academy exhibition, 'Picasso and Paper'.

Whether Picasso ever actually charged a rich lady in a café 5,000 francs for an impromptu portrait, nobody knows. But that he possessed the skills to create a fully realized work of art in five minutes is a matter of cinematic record, and you can witness such an act in the Royal Academy of Arts video above.


The director's tension comes across as clearly as the painter's concentration. "Picasso plays with the drawing," says the video's onscreen commentary, "taking it from flower to fish to chicken to face and builds up from a monochrome drawing with bright, saturated colors."

Experience our Picasso and Paper exhibition from your own home in this video tour of the galleries.

Picasso didn't just draw on paper — he tore it, burnt it, and made it three-dimensional. From studies for 'Guernica' to a 4.8-metre-wide collage, this exhibition brings together more than 300 works on paper spanning the artist's 80-year career.

Picasso and Paper was at the Royal Academy of Arts until April 2020.

More Information: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/picasso-and-paper

For Picasso, paper was both a tool to explore his ideas and a material with limitless possibilities. He experimented with everything from newsprint and napkins to decorative wallpaper. He spent decades investigating printmaking techniques, sourcing rare and antique paper from as far as Japan – and all without losing his compulsion to draw on every last scrap. -Royalacademy