Picasso's Poetry

"And where the young girls roam The grindstones whet their whistles", wrote Picasso in one of his poems. Arguably the most influential painter of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso, was not only an innovative visual artist but also an absorbing poet. He was surrounded by a group of avant-garde writers and poets, among them such luminaries as Max Jacob, Andre Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau and Gertrude Stein. In 1959 Picasso published, in a run of 263 copies, "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz" a collection of poems named after a painting by El Greco. Picasso was a wordsmith of enmeshed verse, of embroiled language in a torrent of words that burst forth with astonishing liberty. But in contrast to the musicality and cadence of many poems, Picasso's oeuvre was visual. "Who said jealousy is green? It is fuming red", he wrote in one of his pieces. His lines can be simple and engagingly witty, like: "i don't have the time to wait for dawn." With his savagely flung wordscapes Picasso demolishes traditional form. Yet his work, similarly to his paintings, is often fraught with surrealist imagery, like the failing painter who ‘shaved his wife's fur coat'. Often, it is also impenetrable, populated by whimsical things, Including "fingernail fish" and "armless menus (stop) pink cathedral fingers (stop) ". However, Picasso wrote also lyric lines: "Maybe you are my survival… The glory of the sun scatters in waste, For you are not there to reflect it." In the 1940s he produced two puzzlingly weird surrealist plays, "Le Desir attrape par la queue" (The Desire Caught by the Tail) and "Les Quatre Petites Filles" (The Four Little Girls) . Plotless and nonlinear, these stream-of-consciousness works appear suggesting that the human condition is a farcical tragedy. Picasso identified art with poetry. He said, "Everything that you find in poems you can also find in my paintings. Poetry is the most important thing in painting". He also said that long after his death he would be recognized as a poet and encyclopedias would write: ‘Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) —Spanish poet who dabbled in painting.'