Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson and the team behind the witness history strand.

This week some of the key figures from 20th century art, including the tortured life of Mexico's Frida Carlo.

After the amputation, she really didn't want to go on living.

To have lived with such a broken body would have been difficult even for someone with such a strong character because she was strong.

Plus from the 1960s the first international festival of Black Arts, the Russian paintings that were

saved from Stalin's cens senses and the sometimes solitary life

of one of America's leading modernists, Georgia O'Keefe.

She was very generous and very philanthropic with the community, but she seemed pretty much on her own.

She didn't like to be bothered.

That's all coming up in this podcast and you'll notice that all of that is tied to what we might loosely

modern art.

Well that's because we focus on those who've lived alongside these significant figures.

And arguably for 20th century art there is no more significant a figure than Picasso, so that's where we'll start.

In the summer of 1951, when a young art historian called John Richardson, met one of the greatest painters of the modern era.

Richardson was part of Picasso's circle in the south of France for the rest of the 1950s

and then spent the rest of his life writing the definitive biography of the Spanish master.

John Richardson died in 2019, but a few years earlier

in 2011, he spoke to Laura Sheeter.

It's 1951, and John Richardson has gone to France to seek out the greatest living painter in the world.

I used to watch Picasso.

If there was sort of eight or so of you having lunch or dinner in the studio,

you'd watch Picasso sort of getting each person, getting their energy and he'd,

...