Shocking women

It was not so extraordinary in September 1946 when the Third Programme began broadcasting that its schedule should include a weekly discussion of the ‘visual arts’, kicking off with the then director of the National Gallery in conversation with the painter William Coldstream. Radio was still the Queen Bee of the BBC and television a young upstart whose potential was not yet fully understood. The ‘alert and receptive’ listeners of the Third Programme were expected to pay attention and work at their listening so that they could conjure for themselves flickering images of what was being talked about on air. But now, when television has become so sophisticated, so dazzling, so brazenly colourful, it’s an audacious radio producer who decides to make a programme about one of the most famous paintings in the history of art with just a mike and a cast of experts. How can you compete with the digital, crystal-clear trickery of flat-screen TV? How do you make art come alive for the listener? How do you make it ‘relevant’?

In Picasso’s Fallen Women on Radio Four (Thursday), Richard Cork took us to the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and attempted to describe for us what he was looking at.