Picasso’s Poems: Cubist Word Experiments

While Picasso wrote more than 350 poems and three plays in his lifetime, there is still relatively little academic research on his literary work. In 1935, Picasso stopped producing artworks and chose to focus on writing, which he did daily between 1935 and 1936. He kept producing texts until 1959. Picasso wrote mostly in French and in Spanish --- sometimes mixing both languages in the same poem. Picasso’s French poems are particularly interesting as he was freer to experiment in this language than in his mother tongue.
While these texts have sometimes been dismissed as the hobby of a middle-aged man, I will argue that they constitute a true extension of Picasso’s work. For Picasso, the border between word and image was fluid, as his own practice of integrating words in his paintings shows. I will demonstrate that in his poems Picasso was applying identical techniques to those used in his visual arts in the pre-1935 period. I will use intersemiotic translation theories to explore different equivalent techniques in his literary and visual production and their impact on the viewer/reader. I will argue that his literary works were not a break from his artistic creation but an expansion of his artistic methods to the written word. Therefore, this literary period should not be seen as “non-productive,” but rather as a generative experimental time in the artist’s career.