A Picasso doc that – amazingly – focuses on how great he was

Earlier this year, the Guardian took a break from arguing that ‘cancel culture’ is a right-wing myth to ask the question, ‘Should we cancel Picasso?’ He is, after all, ‘the ultimate example of problematic white guys clogging up the artistic canon’.

Given the programme’s title – and the BBC’s increasing loss of nerve – you could be forgiven for thinking Picasso: The Beauty and the Beast was bound to get bogged down in the same tedious and apparently non-mythical 2020s obsessions. Instead, Thursday’s first episode of three proved gratifyingly deft at dealing with them.

Much as we might wish otherwise, it would now be somewhere between odd and impossible for a Picasso documentary not to raise all over again the well-worn questions of his behaviour towards women and his use of African-art techniques to make money for himself. Having raised them, though, this one gave its answers with a mixture of no-nonsense briskness and even a touch of cunning.

On the women issue, for example, modern pieties were used against themselves, especially the one deeming that women should never be seen as victims. We were therefore told that Picasso’s first love, Fernande Olivier, was so strong, independent and empowered that it was very much her choice to agree to the conditions he put on their relationship: basically that she should give up more or less everything in her life, including her career, when they moved in together.

As for the African influence on ‘Les Demoiselles D’Avignon’, there was essentially nothing to see here. Artists have always been inspired by other work – so all talk of ‘cultural appropriation’ is, as Julian Schnabel starkly put it, ‘absurd’. The programme then got down to the more important business of discussing at length how great the painting is.

Happily, the same pattern remained in place throughout.