Pablo Picas­so was born not long before the inven­tion of the motion pic­ture. With a dif­fer­ent set of incli­na­tions, he might have become one of the most dar­ing pio­neers of that medi­um. Instead, as we know, he mas­tered and then prac­ti­cal­ly rein­vent­ed the much old­er art form of paint­ing. That said, cin­e­ma did seem to have been fas­ci­nat­ed by both Picas­so’s work and the man him­self. He made a cameo appear­ance in Jean Cocteau’s Tes­ta­ment of Orpheus in 1960, a few years after play­ing the title role in Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot’s doc­u­men­tary Le Mys­tère Picas­so. The short clip from the lat­ter above shows how Picas­so could cre­ate an expres­sive face with just a few strokes of a pen.

By the time he made Le Mys­tère Picas­so, Clouzot was already well estab­lished as a direc­tor of ele­vat­ed genre films, hav­ing just made Le salaire de la peur or (The Wages of Fear) and Les dia­boliques (or Dia­bolique), which would turn out to be one of his defin­ing works.

To film­go­ers fol­low­ing his career, it may have come as a sur­prise to see him fol­low those up with a doc­u­men­tary about a painter: a genius, yes, but one whose work had already seemed famil­iar. But Clouzot took as his task not telling the sto­ry of Les Demoi­selles d’Av­i­gnon or Three Musi­cians or Guer­ni­ca, but cap­tur­ing Picas­so (whom he’d known since his teenage years) in the act of cre­at­ing new works of art — works nev­er to be seen except on film.

That was the idea, in any case; though most of the 20 paint­ings and draw­ings cre­at­ed just for Le Mys­tère Picas­so were destroyed, some weren’t. One such sur­vivor, a chick­en-turned-dev­il­ish-vis­age that emerges in one of the film’s more tense sequences (an inter­sec­tion of Clouzot and Picas­so’s artis­tic instincts), was actu­al­ly restored a few years ago for inclu­sion in the Roy­al Acad­e­my of Arts’ exhi­bi­tion Picas­so and Paper. He could also work on glass, as evi­denced by the clip just above from Vis­it to Picas­so, a 1949 doc­u­men­tary short by the Bel­gian film­mak­er Paul Hae­saerts. In it he paints — in less than 30 sec­onds, with the cam­era run­ning just on the oth­er side of the pane — an evoca­tive image of a bull, demon­strat­ing that, no mat­ter how ful­ly he was embraced by the Fran­coph­o­ne world, a Spaniard he remained.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thou­sands of Pablo Picasso’s Works Now Avail­able in a New Dig­i­tal Archive

What Makes Picasso’s Guer­ni­ca a Great Paint­ing?: Explore the Anti-Fas­cist Mur­al That Became a World­wide Anti-War Sym­bol

Pablo Picasso’s Mas­ter­ful Child­hood Paint­ings: Pre­co­cious Works Paint­ed Between the Ages of 8 and 15

14 Self-Por­traits by Pablo Picas­so Show the Evo­lu­tion of His Style: See Self-Por­traits Mov­ing from Ages 15 to 90

Pablo Picas­so Pos­es as Pop­eye (1957)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.