The Private Life of a Masterpiece

'My Brothel' is the title that Picasso gave to his masterwork Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the painting of five towering prostitutes that began the art of the twentieth century. It was a work that shocked even his friends when they first saw it, with one saying that Picasso would be found hanged behind it one day. The programme relates how the painting grew out of a fierce rivalry between Matisse and Picasso and just why it was and remains so revolutionary.

One of the most sensual of paintings, achieved in the extraordinary intellectual climate of turn of the century Vienna by a male artist of prodigious sexual appetite. Yet it may portray the shift of sexual power towards the female.