Episode 1: The Rebellious Apprentice
In Barcelona, 1899, afternoon sunlight filters through the stained-glass windows of Els Quatre Gats—a bohemian tavern—and casts kaleidoscopic patterns on the wooden floor. Twenty-year-old Pablo Picasso (played by Adrien Brody), dressed in a faded linen shirt with cuffs rolled up to his elbows, leans over a corner table sketching. His drawing captures the tavern’s owner: a man with curly sideburns, a clay pipe clamped between his fingers, his features exaggeratedly elongated yet brimming with vivid life. By this time, Picasso had already made a small name for himself in the local art circle. His father, José Ruiz—a conservative art teacher—had hoped he would follow the "proper path" at Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando to become a classical painter. But Picasso’s brush had long since turned toward a wilder, more unbridled form of expression.
Just a week earlier, he had slipped his withdrawal application from the academy into his father’s briefcase. When José discovered it, he flew into a rage, smashing his cherished porcelain plate and roaring, "You’ll ruin your future!" Picasso, however, only clutched the invitation to Els Quatre Gats in his pocket and whispered, "I don’t want to paint those stiff plaster casts. I want to paint living people, living emotions." The tavern was a gathering place for avant-garde artists: poet Carlos Casagemas would recite his latest works by the bar, flamenco guitarists played impromptu melodies, and painters pinned their creations directly to the walls. It was here that Picasso first felt "art needs no rules": he and Casagemas squeezed into a garret studio, smearing Symbolist dreams onto canvases with charcoal. They argued late into the night about "whether color could express pain"—so fiercely that they knocked over their coffee cups, leaving even their fingertips stained with indigo and ochre paint.
Here, the series’ dual-timeline narrative creates a poignant parallel: in 1940, after the fall of Paris, 79-year-old Picasso sits in his dimly lit studio, his fingers gently brushing the frame of his early work The Old Fisherman. The fisherman’s skin is as wrinkled as tree bark, yet his eyes hold the calm depth of the ocean—a piece Picasso painted at 18 to emulate the lighting techniques of Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas. "Back then, I thought precision was everything," he whispers to his assistant, who is organizing sketches nearby. His thumb traces the fisherman’s sleeve in the painting. "But the day I finished it, I looked at these ‘perfect’ hands and felt they were as cold and lifeless as plaster."
The turning point comes at Picasso’s first solo exhibition. The tavern walls are covered with his works: academic-era sketches of plaster casts, alongside the avant-garde portraits he had created at Els Quatre Gats over the past six months. On opening day, Pedro Fernández—a senior critic from Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes—stands before one of Picasso’s exaggerated, distorted portraits, sneering and prodding it with his cane. "This is not art—it’s a desecration of classical technique!" No sooner had he spoken than applause erupted from the corner. It was Josep Catalanès, the mentor of avant-garde artist Salvador Dalí. He stepped forward and clapped Picasso on the shoulder: "You’ve shattered the chains of academic art. This is the future of our craft."
That night, Picasso returns to his studio and spreads three award-winning academic sketches across the floor. He stares at the rigidly precise plaster casts depicted in them, then suddenly grabs a palette knife and slashes at the canvases—thin, jagged tears splitting the white paper. "Imitation is the death of art!" he shouts into the empty studio, his voice trembling with the resolve of a young man breaking free. Outside, Casagemas runs up, holding two bottles of red wine. He sees the shards scattered across the floor but says nothing. Instead, he sets the bottles on the table: "Tomorrow, we start over. We’ll paint what you truly want to paint." Meanwhile, in Madrid, José Ruiz takes Picasso’s photograph out of its frame and tucks it deep into the bottom drawer—from this moment on, the rift between father and son would never fully heal.
Episode 2: Blue Awakening
In February 1901, snow pellets tap against the window of Picasso’s tiny garret on Montmartre, Paris. He huddles on a creaky iron bed, clutching a crumpled letter—news that Casagemas had committed suicide in a suburban Paris hotel after being rejected by his lover, Geneviève. Picasso jolts upright, knocking over a stack of empty wine bottles beside the bed. The pungent smell of alcohol mingles with the scent of wet paint from his canvases, filling the narrow space. "Why didn’t you tell me?" he roars at the empty room, tears dripping onto the letter and blurring the words: "I am too miserable."
For the next three months, Picasso locks himself in the garret. No longer does he chase light and shadow through the streets as he once did; instead, he pours all his emotions onto his canvases. First, he lays down a base of cobalt blue, then layers on slate gray-blue, and finally outlines with indigo. The faces in his paintings are always pale, with sunken eye sockets and fingers curled like withered branches. While creating The Death of Casagemas, he went 48 hours without sleep. His initial sketches showed Casagemas lying on a hotel bed, but by the third draft, he suddenly grabs his brush and paints the figure’s face a ashen gray, its lips pressed into a thin line, and the curtains in the background twisted into swirling vortices. "This isn’t what he looked like," he whispers to the canvas. "This is the darkness inside him." When his assistant arrives with bread, he finds Picasso’s hands caked in blue paint—even the crevices of his fingernails stained—and his eyes carrying the same gloom as his work.
The elderly Picasso’s timeline weaves through these somber scenes: in a Paris air-raid shelter in 1942, a light bulb sways overhead, and the rumble of German bombing echoes outside. Picasso’s lover, Dora Maar—a photographer and painter—sorts through his Blue Period works. She pauses at The Sick Child and asks, "Back then, you only painted suffering, never resistance—wasn’t that escapism?" Picasso lights a cigarette in silence. As smoke curls through the dim shelter, the scene cuts abruptly to 1901, on the streets of Barcelona:
Fresh from Paris, Picasso squats beside a market, wrapped in a tattered overcoat. In his sketchbook, an old beggar huddles against a wall, his exposed ankles purple with cold, only two coins in his chipped ceramic bowl. Picasso’s pencil moves rapidly: first, he outlines the beggar’s hunched back, then fills the background with soft blue—a shade darker than the sky, colder than the sea, so vivid it feels as if one could feel the bitter chill through the paper. A woman selling oranges leans over to look. "Young man, this is so sad," she says. Picasso doesn’t look up; he just tears the sketch from the book and slips it into the beggar’s hand. That evening, he writes in his sketchbook: "Blue is the shadow of the soul. I don’t paint beggars—I paint the wounds of an entire city."
The episode also includes a deliberate detail about Picasso’s study of El Greco: in Barcelona’s art museum, he stands before View of Toledo for three hours straight. Back home, he spreads open a book of El Greco’s works and scribbles notes in red ink next to the figure outlines in Saint Martin and the Beggar: "Elbow angle: break perspective to emphasize tension" and "Facial lines: distorted yet more truthful." Later, when painting Self-Portrait in Blue, he deliberately mimics the elongated faces of El Greco’s figures—even capturing the same sense of detachment in the eyes. "He taught me that art isn’t about copying what the eyes see," the elderly Picasso tells Dora Maar, his finger tracing El Greco’s signature in the book. "It’s about amplifying what the heart feels—even if that feeling is pain."
Episode 3: The Cubist Manifesto
In 1907, in Paris’s Montparnasse district, Picasso’s studio is cluttered with curious "treasures": wooden African tribal masks, a reproduction of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, fragments of ancient Greek sculptures, and even a few sheets of Egyptian hieroglyph rubbings. Thirty-six years old, he stands before a massive canvas, charcoal in hand, his brow furrowed. This is the 37th draft of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—the outlines of five nude women are already visible, but something still feels missing.
"This painting has no perspective—who’s going to buy it?" complains his model, Marie-Thérèse, rubbing her sore shoulders. She had held her pose for two hours, and as she looks at her body "split into geometric blocks" on the canvas, she frowns. "The woman on the left has a face like a mask, and the one on the right has a bent arm that looks wrong—it’s ugly." Picasso suddenly sets down his charcoal and walks to the corner, picking up an African mask. He had found it the previous week in an antique shop along the Seine: its wooden surface carved with exaggerated eyes and a grinning mouth, raw knife marks still visible along the edges. "Look at this," he says, holding the mask next to the canvas. "Africans use lines and shapes to express power—not whether something ‘looks real.’ I’m not painting your bodies. I’m painting the ‘structure’ inside them. The eyes see the front, but the mind can imagine the side—why can’t I paint both together?" He grows suddenly impassioned, grabbing a red charcoal stick and slashing a diagonal line across one nude’s face, splitting her rounded cheek into two triangles. "This is the truth!"
At that moment, the studio door swings open, and Henri Matisse steps in. Fresh from his Fauvist exhibition, he holds an album under his arm. The instant he sees Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, he raises an eyebrow. "You’re mixing Cézanne’s geometry with African savagery? Be careful you don’t end up with a mess that’s neither one thing nor the other." Picasso doesn’t take offense; instead, he hands over his sketches. "You’re right—but ‘not looking like anything’ is exactly what I want. We’ve been trapped in Renaissance perspective for too long. It’s time to break free." This conversation becomes his catalyst: for the next month, he lives practically in the studio, revising the composition late into each night. He even erases the male sailor he had originally painted in the corner, leaving only the five nudes. With overlapping geometric blocks and sharp lines, he completely overthrows the "single perspective" of traditional painting.
Here, the series inserts the "historic encounter" between the young Picasso and Georges Braque: at a Cézanne memorial exhibition, the two argue fiercely over The Card Players. "Cézanne’s focus was on color harmony!" Braque says, pointing to the warm yellow table in the painting. Picasso fires back immediately: "No—it’s about structural stability. Look at the shoulders of those two cardplayers—they’re triangular supports. That’s the backbone of the painting!" Their shouting draws a crowd, but the more they argue, the more they connect. By the end of the day, they’re sitting in a café talking until midnight. Braque later recalls: "That day, we realized we both wanted to turn ‘what can be seen’ into ‘what can be understood.’ That was the start of Cubism."
The elderly Picasso’s timeline builds to a climactic moment: in 1944, a Nazi officer bursts into his studio, jabbing a finger at a reproduction of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon with a sneer. "Is this even art? Chaotic, ugly—it’s an insult to civilization." Seventy-three-year-old Picasso sits in his wicker chair, taking his time to draw on his cigarette. Then he points to the masked figure on the far right of the painting: "What I paint is the truth. You destroy cities with guns and cover up atrocities with lies. All I do is paint the ‘many sides’ of the world. Compared to what you’ve done, this painting is far more honest." The officer’s face turns crimson with rage, but he dares not harm the world-famous artist. He storms out, defeated.
The episode ends with a freeze-frame in the 1907 studio: sunset streams through the window, gilding the African mask with a golden edge. Picasso carefully places the mask beside his easel, then picks up his charcoal and makes the final stroke on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. A faint smile tugs at his lips, his eyes filled with unshakable certainty. The mask’s shadow falls across the canvas, overlapping with the nudes’ outlines—as if it’s a dialogue between two cultures, or a gentle declaration of war by a genius against "tradition." In this moment, Cubism is born—and with it, Picasso’s lifelong legacy of unceasing self-transformation is sealed.
