Viewed by David Hockney

On January 18, 1951, Picasso made a painting entitled "Massacre in Korea". The next day he went back to painting children. The Zervos catalogue raisonne shows it somewhat isolated in a number of portraits of children -innocence and the future.

The Korean war had begun in June 1950 and in December that year there were stories in newspapers of atrocities in Korea that included accounts of the shooting of women and children.

Picasso's picture was reproduced in the newspapers at the time (I remember it, I was a fourteen-year-old schoolboy in Bradford). It was generally dismissed as propaganda and compared very unfavourably with "Guernica", and was rarely discussed again.

Years later, on seeing it in the Picasso show at MOMA, I was struck by it. It stayed with me, and I began to see another interpretation.

In 1950, images from the Second World War were still vivid and shocking; recovery from the war was just under way, when news of a new conflict far away from Paris arrived -- journalists' reports but no pictures. Picasso's painting was a response.

Its sources are obviously Goya and Manet, but I think also, and more importantly, the widely seen photographs of the Nazi death camps. These had a big impact at the time (they were exhibited in Bradford, on a bomb site in the city, where I saw them as an eight-year-old).

My point is that his image is a universal one, yet Picasso realized that the photographs were after the event, indeed in a way not telling us of the terrible brutal activity of the camps but of the survivors -- the few as against the terrible number of deaths. So his subject is perhaps a painter's response to the limitations of photography, limitations that are still with us, and need some debate today.