Watch Pablo Picasso Draw His Masterpieces In Real-Time

In 1956, the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot released a documentary focusing on one of art history’s greatest masters: Pablo Picasso. Titled Le mystère Picasso (“The Mystery of Picasso”), the film wasn’t a sweeping overview of the artist’s life, nor an attempt to reveal the stories behind specific masterpieces. It was, instead, an artifact that memorialized Picasso’s artistic process in real-time.

Across its 75-minute running time, Picasso produced 20 drawings and paintings, many of which were destroyed after filming so that they existed only in the documentary itself. At first, Picasso drew with inks that bled through his paper, with Clouzot recording the act of creation from the backside of the easel. The artist then began painting with oil, this time with Clouzot employing a stop-motion technique to illustrate Picasso’s movements. Every scene is a tantalizing glimpse into how Picasso developed, modified, and ultimately completed his unforgettable canvases.

One sequence, for instance, depicts Picasso drawing a woman’s face, his hand gracefully dancing across the paper. Each stroke is loose yet intentional, exuding an almost deceptive sense of ease and simplicity. Interspersed throughout are close-ups of Picasso’s own face as he draws, capturing how he scrunches his nose and arches his eyebrows in response to his own composition. In the last few moments, Picasso defies our expectations, transforming the face into a dove clutching a bundle of sprigs in its beak.

Another snippet sees Picasso sketching a chicken, whose body is covered in intricate flowers. It doesn’t take long before the artist reconsiders his approach, aggressively etching over the bird with a pair of eyes, nose, and mouth. From this monochrome base, Picasso saturates the canvas with bright colors, including explosive blues, reds, and, at the very end, a deep black. The final composition resembles an impish and devilish sort of creature, with horns sprouting from its head. Picasso painted it in only five minutes.

Even though a majority of these works have been lost to time, this devil drawing—called Visage: Head of a Faun—survived. In fact, it was restored a few years ago for Picasso and Paper, an exhibition held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

When Le mystère Picasso was released in France in May 1956, it won the Special Jury Prize at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. Clouzot’s film arrived seven years after Visit to Picasso, a Belgian documentary originally released in 1949. In this earlier version, Picasso painted on glass, the surface of which was also filmed from the backside. Visit to Picasso was a similar testament to the artist’s exceptional instincts and decisiveness, with one scene showcasing a drawing of a bull completed in less than 30 seconds.

Creating art is often a solitary activity, unfolding privately and without many witnesses until a work is publicly displayed. In that way, Visit to Picasso and Le mystère Picasso provide something rare: a moment with an artistic genius as he sits by his own canvas.