Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

It was in early 1935, then, that Picasso (then fifty-four years old) began to write what we will present here as his poetry – a writing that continued, sometimes as a daily offering, until the summer of 1959. In the now standard Picasso myth, the onset of the poetry is said to have coincided with a devastating marital crisis (a financially risky divorce, to be more exact), because of which his output as a painter halted for the first time in his life. Writing – as a form of poetry using, largely, the medium of prose – became his alternative outlet. The flow of words begins abruptly (“privately” his biographer Patrick O’Brian tells us) on 18 april XXXV while in retreat at Boisgeloup. (He would lose the country place the next year in a legal settlement.) The pace is rapid, violent, pushing and twisting from one image to another, not bothering with punctuation, often defying syntax, expressive of a way of writing/languaging that he had never tried before

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