Picasso´s work: Desire trapped by the tail

Le Désir attrapé par la queue (Desire trapped by the tail) is a satirical play, inspired by Alfred Jarry and written in French by Pablo Picasso in Paris between 14 and 17 January 1941, during the Nazi occupation.

The first performance of the play took place at the home of Zette and Michel Leiris on 19 March 1944, a few months before the liberation of Paris, directed by Albert Camus and performed by Dora Maar, Raymond Queneau, Zanie Campan, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre before an audience of friends including Georges Braque, Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan, among others. It was officially staged for the first time in July 1967 at the fourth Festival for Freedom of Expression in Saint-Tropez.

For Jean-Jacques Lebel, the discourse of Desire is a collage of universes, flows and various spatio-temporal planes whose plethora of content is difficult to delimit and includes references to traditional cuisine, mathematics and dance, evoking different smells and love affairs.

Throughout the 1930s, Picasso turned to writing as a means of exploring a non-visual language, producing a body of work that interested André Breton, the driving force behind surrealism, who in 1936 recognised his gift for language, stating in his essay "Picasso the poet" for Cahiers d'art, that Picasso's poetry "cannot be assigned or assigned a qualifier because it is the work of a man with an unquenchable thirst for exploration".