Tuesday 6th of June - 19:00h
The Documents programme is devoted to the relationship between art and publishing, addressing topics such as the effects of the archive on art historical narratives, the artist's book and publishing as an artistic practice. This edition examines a less explored facet of Pablo Picasso: that of the poet. The visual, sound and performative value of his poetry is emphasised in the dialogue between text, sound and image as the backbone of this activity, which consists of a recital of a selection of poems - newly translated into Spanish by Jèssica Jaques Pi - followed by a conversation between Androula Michael, an expert on his literary work, and the members of the gynocentric collective of the Picasso Doctorate (Picasso Museum of Barcelona, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Université Jules Verne).
Exploring Picasso's production in poetry - and drama - can change commonplaces in the interpretation of his plastic work, given that writing, drawing, painting and sculpture were hybrid and sometimes indiscernible activities for him, although the former does not enjoy the same recognition.
The creator of Guernica (1937) wrote around three hundred and fifty poems in Spanish and French. The earliest poems in both languages date from 1935, although it is probable that he wrote earlier and from his youth in Spanish. The publications of these texts during his lifetime are numerous: "Fandango de lechuzas", which appears alongside the engravings Sueño y mentira de Franco [Dream and Lie of Franco] (1937), and the compilations Scritti di Picasso (1935-1947) (1964), Poèmes et lithographies [Poems and Lithographs, 1954] or Trozo de piel [Piece of Skin] (1960); also the plays Le désir attrapé par la queue [Desire Trapped by the Tail, 1945] and Les quatre petites filles [The Four Little Girls, 1949].
Another quality of Picasso's poetry is its polyglot dimension. As an adult, the painter thought, felt, spoke and wrote in three languages: his native Andalusian Spanish, the Catalan of his youth during his stay in Barcelona and, after settling in Paris, French. It is no coincidence that among his closest friends were such brilliant poets as Max Jacob, André Salmon, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein and Paul Éluard. To this polyglot character, in which languages mix and resignify each other, Picasso added an iconoclastic impulse because poetry served to evoke what painting could not represent, as in "boca llena de jalea de chinches de sus palabras" (1937), a verse from "Fandango de lechuzas" (Fandango of Owls). The multiplicity of his calligraphy and the profusion of signs and geometric figures also bring his writing to the threshold between the image and the word, typical of an overflowing inventiveness.