Pablo Picasso: 80 years later

It's so big it had to spend the best part of 80 years in storage.

This particular piece was designed for the Ballets Russes performance of Le Train Bleu, in Paris, in 1924.

Stretching over more than 34ft by 38ft (famed mural Guernica is just 11ft by 26ft), Picasso, a great friend of influential artistic director Diaghilev, painted a much smaller original painting titled Deux Femme Courant Sur La Plage, showing two rotund women on a beach, two years earlier in 1922.

Diagihlev liked it and Picasso agreed the design could be enlarged to an enormous stage canvas

now showing atthe Victoria and Albert Museum, UK