Picasso Poet

«If I were Chinese, I would not be a painter but a writer: I would write my paintings.»
«When it comes down to it, all arts are one. You can write a painting with words, just as you can paint feelings in a poem.»
Picasso emerged as a full-fledged writer starting in 1935; André Breton had then consecrated him in his text “Picasso poète”, which was published in Cahiers d’art that same year. Even so, his inclination for words, for writing, poetry and language, goes back to when he was a young adult, when he created small newspapers and sent them by post to his parents.

This exhibition seeks to reflect the importance of poetic writing in Picasso’s creative trajectory, which should be considered from a broad, global perspective. In the presentation of his hand-written texts, which are beautifully presented, we see the strong bond between writing and painting, which accentuates the complexity of his textural work (in collage, repetitions, variations, successive additions, and so on). His autobiographical character is like an “intimate, sensorial diary”, poetically laying bare the artist’s personality.

For these reasons the sources and beginnings of Picasso the writer are featured here, as well as the relationship between his texts and his paintings, the persistence of certain subject matter and his extraordinary poetic creativity, breaking language up as if it were a “verbal mass”, exercising the same degree of freedom he applied to all other media. In a confession to his friend Roberto Otero he is unwavering: «In the end I am a wayward writer.»