00:16In my 90th year I haven't got a great deal of time and I've got years to cover and I'll
00:21go as
00:22far as I can. I hope to get almost to the end because I want to reach the period in
00:28Becaso's
00:28life when I knew him well and saw him on a very regular basis and he was extremely generous
00:34with information and answered questions which he didn't always do.
00:42Becaso met Marie-Thérèse when he was cruising the Grand Boulevard and she would be really one of the
00:50great loves of his life. Marie-Thérèse, who lived by the river and kayaked all the time, was in her
00:56kayak. It rolled over, she was pinned under the water, very nearly drowned, got infected with rats
01:02in the river and she lost her hair but she was rescued all right and Becaso was obsessed by this
01:09incident and there are many, many, many canvases and references to it and here is Marie-Thérèse
01:16rescuing Marie-Thérèse from the water with a third Marie-Thérèse down there.
01:24Dora Maar was a good friend of mine and she told me a whole lot of things. She understood Picasso
01:30intellectually much better than any of the other mistresses. She was brought up in Argentina,
01:34very beautiful, very intelligent and very, very masochistic. That was always something of an appeal
01:44to Picasso. Dora is nearly always black tragic images. I mean he very often portrays her as crying
01:52and she became the weeping woman in Guernica.
02:02François, you wouldn't Picasso took this painting to show it to Matisse?
02:06Well you see at that time Matisse was not in good health and so to cheer him up we used
02:11to go there
02:12about twice a month and bring drawings and also some paintings. To show him, not to give him. No, exactly.
02:20So that time Picasso had brought this, which is called a landscape in winter. Matisse saw that,
02:29he was absolutely enchanted, he said, oh I have to have it.
02:34Physically she was exactly what he wanted in his work. Cezanne's favourite motif was this Mont
02:42Saint-Victoire and his house was on the slopes of this mountain. I used to say to Picasso,
02:48how are you going to paint the Mont Saint-Victoire? And Picasso said, well you'll see. He did Jacqueline
02:55in the shape of this. Her head is one end of this mountain range and he very ingeniously sort of
03:03did a sort of pun on Cezanne by having this mounted full on but turning it into Jacqueline.
03:13No holes were barred. I mean they're very in your face. Picasso's considered this modern master so that
03:22just closes him into some kind of books. In a way I think he's much more contemporary than people would
03:28like to admit. Many things that are possible today are possible because of some of the things he did.
03:34He challenged the craft itself and I think every time everything went the way he decided it would go.
03:41And this is very striking. He had this confidence about himself. Once he set himself to do something,
03:52to work on something, he really went at it with great immediacy and determination.
04:10And this has been a step forward.
04:11I've always been very strange to say.
04:11I've never been very strange to myself.
04:11I love that.
