nothin Pablo Picasso, Writer? | New Haven Independent

Pablo Picasso, Writer?

picasso4.jpgA new exhibit asks whether one of the world’s greatest visual artists was at heart really a word guy.

Picasso and the Allure of Language, an eye-opening exhibition that debuted at the Yale University Art Gallery Wednesday, suggests the answer just may be YES, oui, si!

Hanging out with Gertrude Stein, that word-experimentalist par excellence, Picasso developed not only an early love for visuals of the newspaper, which he used in his epoch-making Cubist work in the early part of the century and beyond. He also, the exhibit suggests, took Stein’s maternal career advice:

She said, in effect, Aanyone who can paint like you, Pablo, has no business hanging out with other painters.” What might he learn from them that he didn’t know already! Instead she suggested he befriend writers, and so he did.

Among them was the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who became a champion of the Cubists like Picasso and Braque, and charged them not only to Invent, but invent violently.”

The exhibition, curated by Susan Greenberg Fisher and running through May 24, uses some 80 objects, nearly all from Yale’s remarkable collections. The objects on display include illustrated books, sculpture, paintings, drawings, audio recordings, and prints to trace Picasso’s language-inspired inventiveness.

For example, in the first Cubist-illustrated book, Saint Matoral, Picasso illustrated a Max Jacob story with illustrations that often had little to do with the text and, even per the wall labels, subverted the text. Nothing like this had ever been done before.

Language was absolutely central to Picasso,” said Fisher, and then she went, provocatively further. We always think of women as Picasso’s models and inspirations, but we should also think of language as one of his models as well.”

By language she meant it in the largest sense: words and letters as visual elements, the use of collage, the plasticity of words. I think Picasso,” she said, thought of language as this great treasure. An earlier name for the exhibition was going to be Picasso and the Word, but I thought that too limiting.”

picasso6.jpgOf course the incorporation of words, books, scrolls, and trompe l’oeil inscriptions, the abecedaries, are a staple of artist compositions from the Renaissance, if not earlier.

Picasso and the Allure of Language, however, suggests that Picasso was taking language to a new visual depth in his work. He may even have felt during the various peaks and valleys of his creativity, that words might take him where visual imagery could not or dared not to go.

After all, don’t the most brilliant practitioners — think of not only Picasso but James Joyce or Ezra Pound — drive their medium to the end of a creative cliff? Didn’t Pound say, in a moment of frustration or elation, that poetry simply was striving to become music?

So it’s perhaps not a surprise that Picasso began writing poetry himself in the 1930s. He produced hundreds of poems, along with two plays. Fisher said that this period, which produced the great anti-war painting Guernica, in 1936, slights the poetry of that chapter in Picasso’s life. In this example from Picasso’s collection Poesie de Mots Inconnus (Poetry of Unknown Words) he is also struggling with the depth of outrage, feeling, and shame aroused by the painting:

on the blazing pyre where
the witch was roasted
I had fun
paying lip service
to this afternoon
with my nails
gently flaying
the skin of all
the flames
at five past one
in the morning and later
now ten minutes to three my fingers still
smelled of warm bread, honey
and jasmine

picasso%5B02%5D.jpgWhich is more successful? And doesn’t’ this sound as modern as if it might have been written by John Ashberry or any number of collage-istic poets today?

Among the highlights of the exhibition is the iconic First Steps, a painting Picasso did in 1943 and perhaps the most important Picasso at Yale. A kind of preparatory drawing he did for the child’s feet is also included in the exhibition. It was done on a copy of Paris-soir, showing a return to the newspaper, that impermanent, evanescent, yet attention-getting medium with which he helped launched Cubism. Fisher said Picasso disliked formal palettes and used newspapers as a kind of ground for his paints, and when he was done, he crumpled up the papers and threw them out.

There are also spectacular voice recordings of Gertrude Stein reading from her book about Picasso and a touch-screen computer where you can go page by page through Picasso’s brilliant orange illustrations. It read like huge grammar marks, a personal calligraphy, accompanying the poems of Le chant des morts (The Song of the Dead), a post-war work of his long-time friend the poet Pierre Reverdy.

Might Picasso have been a great writer had he not been unstoppable as a visual artist? Curator Fisher did not want to commit, except to say that he kept every single letter, postcard, note, or scrap of writing sent to him by his artists and especially writer friends. And while that is not the point of the exhibition, it is one of many provocative questions it raises while also providing, of course, Picasso’s roller coaster of visual delights.

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