Introduction

"After all, the arts are one and the same. You can write a painting in words just as you can paint feelings in a poem." [1]

"If I were Chinese, I wouldn't be a painter, but a writer; I would write my paintings." [2]

The exhibition "Picasso the Poet" shows the importance of poetic writing in Pablo Picasso's creative process. The artist wrote over 340 poems between 1935 and 1959. The presentation of these graphically magnificent manuscripts illustrates the close links between writing and painting, and the extent to which Picasso's complex work on the text (through collage, repetitions and variations) echoes the pictorial process. The autobiographical content of these writings – which form a real "diary, both sensory and sentimental" [3] – reflects the historical context and reveals the artist' rich personality. The exhibition explores the sources of Picasso's relationship with poetic writing, the way it came into being, the thematic correspondences between his texts and paintings, and the extraordinary inventiveness with which he shaped this verbal substance as freely as his other forms of expression.

[1] Quoted in Roland Penrose's Picasso, Paris, Flammarion, 1982, p. 488.

[2] Quoted in Claude Roy's La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, Cercle d’art, 1954, p. 43.

[3] André Breton, "Picasso poète", Cahiers d’art, no. 7-8, Paris, 1936, p. 187.

Early years and the appearance of writing

Picasso's bent for writing and literature dates back to his childhood. In his early drawing pads, like the "Catalan sketchbook" (1906), the artist recorded his love for writers such as Alfred de Vigny and Joan Maragall. Around 1912, words and letters appeared in his Cubist compositions, both as "optical textures", as Michel Butor puts it, and for their multiple meanings. The syllabic fragment "jou" could then mean "diary", "day" or "to play". The calligraphic aspect of his poetic writing could already be seen in experiments with the visible and the legible: in Il neige au soleil (10 January 1934), the artist varies the same sentence on sheets of Arches paper, deploying linear writing to transform it into a figure.

Friendships with poets

Picasso read various poets and writers throughout his life, ranging from the Spaniards he admired (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Luis de Góngora y Argote and Joan Maragall) to the French authors whom he discovered in their original language, like Blaise Pascal, Alfred Jarry and Stéphane Mallarmé. A close friend of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, André Breton and Paul Eluard, the artist often illustrated their poetry collections.  Although he was not strictly speaking a collector, he yet owned various manuscripts, including L'Immaculée Conception (1930) by Breton and Eluard and Jarry's Le Mousse de la Pirrouïte (1906-1907). Picasso, who himself was the artistic director of the literary review Arte Joven, which he created with Franciso de Asís Soler in 1901, considered his entire work in a poetic light. "In the end," he said, "the arts are all one."[1] [1] Quoted in Roland Penrose's Picasso, Paris, Flammarion, 1982, p. 488.

1936. Poems, drawings and paintings

Between April and May 1936, while he was staying in Juan-les-Pins, Picasso produced drawings almost every day, accompanied by manuscripts written on sheets of Arches paper folded in half. These poem-drawings were the starting point for several paintings (Portrait of a girl, 3 April 1936, Woman by the dresser, 9 April 1936, Sleeping woman with shutters, 25 April 1936, Straw hat with blue leaves ,1 May 1936). The artist made numerous studies of his companion Marie-Thérèse Walter's head, contrasting a realistic profile and the schematic simplification of a head made of wire on the same sheet. Sometimes the painting gave rise to the text. For instance, Woman with watch, dated 30 April 1936, is described in a poem of 6 October 1936. In the artist's work, images and words are closely linked, as in The talking pencil, a drawing of 11 March 1936.

1936. Poems, drawings and paintings

Between April and May 1936, while he was staying in Juan-les-Pins, Picasso produced drawings almost every day, accompanied by manuscripts written on sheets of Arches paper folded in half. These poem-drawings were the starting point for several paintings (Portrait of a girl, 3 April 1936, Woman by the dresser, 9 April 1936, Sleeping woman with shutters, 25 April 1936, Straw hat with blue leaves ,1 May 1936). The artist made numerous studies of his companion Marie-Thérèse Walter's head, contrasting a realistic profile and the schematic simplification of a head made of wire on the same sheet. Sometimes the painting gave rise to the text. For instance, Woman with watch, dated 30 April 1936, is described in a poem of 6 October 1936. In the artist's work, images and words are closely linked, as in The talking pencil, a drawing of 11 March 1936.

1935. Experimental writing

Picasso really began writing poetry in 1935. Although he wrote his first long poem on 18 April 1935 in his mother tongue, he then kept on switching from French to Spanish and vice versa. In his writings, he explored various media: small notebooks, Arches drawing paper, loose sheets, envelopes, and even toilet paper. A wide variety of texts emerged from his experimental writing: narrative poems, loop poems, series and variations, rhyming and strophic poems, rhizomatic poems that proliferated with the cumulative additions. The labyrinthine poem lengua de fuego written between 24 November and 24 December 1935, and first sketched in a small blue notebook, unfolds in eighteen successive states. Published in Cahiers d'art in 1936, it accompanied André Breton's article "Picasso the poet", which acclaimed him as a writer in his own right.

Words and images

As André Breton commented, Picasso's poetry made the timbre of his inner voice resonate, laying bare the very depths of his being. The main themes of his texts echo those of his paintings: love, eroticism, bullfighting, food, crucifixion and sacrifice - topics that often closely intertwine. In both his writing and drawing, Picasso mingled the grandeur of myth with the triviality of everyday life. He portrayed himself as a Minotaur moving house with Marie-Thérèse and Maya to Juan-les-Pins, or as a bearded faun looking tenderly at a little girl crying in her cradle. Words and images respond to each other: "You can write a painting in words, just as you can paint feelings in a poem," as Picasso said to Roland Penrose.

1937-1945. The sordid years

The tests of 1937 are haunted by the disasters of the Spanish War. In January and June, Picasso produced two versions of Dream and Lie of Franco, condemning the atrocities of Franco's regime. The poem that goes with the engravings is full of sound and fury. In September the same year, Portrait of the Marchioness with a Christian backside throwing a douro to Moorish soldiers defending the Virgin, whose sardonic poem-title is painted on the canvas, denounced the link between the Church and Franco's army. In both his texts and drawings, Dora Maar appears as the Weeping Woman, her face transformed into a mask of pain. The sketchbooksbooks of this period contain tortured drawings of Dora Maar and texts on terror. The characters inDesire Caught by the Tail, a play written during the Occupation and set in "Sordid's Hotel", exorcise their fear by singing of love, hunger and cold.

1947-1959. Plays and engraved poems

At the end of the war, Picasso combined his work as a poet with his intense activity as an engraver and lithographer. In Poems and lithographs (1949), he copied poems from 1941 in capital letters, adding a series of images of faces, birds and still lifes. The manuscript of The Four Little Girls (1947-1948), written in red pencil, echoes the scarlet signs illuminating Pierre Reverdy's Le Chant des morts (Song of the Dead). While the four little girls in the eponymous play enjoy playing out cruel and gentle rituals, there is a more tragic feel to Picasso's last text, The Funeral of Count Orgaz (1957-1959). With this atypical piece that goes against every literary genre, the artist returned to his mother tongue in a final tribute to the heritage of his native country.