Did you know Pablo Picasso was a poet?
Monday February 27, 2006
with thanks to Anastasios Kozaitis, in whose email Poem of the Day last week we discovered Picasso’s poem “Boisgeloup 18 april XXXV”...
A sampler of Pablo Picasso’s poetry was published in English in 2004 by Exact Change, the book publisher that specializes in “literary classics of surrealism, dada, fluxus, pataphysics, and other experimental art movements of the 19th and 20th century.”
It’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz and Other Poems (compare prices), edited by our favorite anthologist-duo, Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (of Poems for the Millennium fame). You can read excerpts from the book in PDF form at Ubuweb Historical, and you’ll find there a fascinating amalgam of journal-like but exquisitely surrealist prose poems & imagistic, aphoristic lyrics.
As Exact Change notes in their introduction to the book, “Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is arguably the most famous and influential artist of the twentieth century. What few in the English speaking world know is that in 1935, at age 54, an emotional crisis caused Picasso to halt all painting and devote himself entirely to poetry. Even after resuming his visual work, Picasso continued to write, in a characteristic torrent, until 1959, leaving a body of prose poems that André Breton praised as ‘an intimate journal, both of the feelings and the senses, such as has never been kept before.’”
Related resources:
Biography of Pablo Picasso at the About Painting Guidesite
More 20th century poets
A sampler of Pablo Picasso’s poetry was published in English in 2004 by Exact Change, the book publisher that specializes in “literary classics of surrealism, dada, fluxus, pataphysics, and other experimental art movements of the 19th and 20th century.”
It’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz and Other Poems (compare prices), edited by our favorite anthologist-duo, Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (of Poems for the Millennium fame). You can read excerpts from the book in PDF form at Ubuweb Historical, and you’ll find there a fascinating amalgam of journal-like but exquisitely surrealist prose poems & imagistic, aphoristic lyrics.As Exact Change notes in their introduction to the book, “Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is arguably the most famous and influential artist of the twentieth century. What few in the English speaking world know is that in 1935, at age 54, an emotional crisis caused Picasso to halt all painting and devote himself entirely to poetry. Even after resuming his visual work, Picasso continued to write, in a characteristic torrent, until 1959, leaving a body of prose poems that André Breton praised as ‘an intimate journal, both of the feelings and the senses, such as has never been kept before.’”
Related resources:
Biography of Pablo Picasso at the About Painting Guidesite
More 20th century poets
Comments
Interesting, didn’t know that. Just goes to show what a deeply complex man Picasso really was! Interesting fact – Pablo Picasso was a self avowed communist. However, Picasso was also one of the world’s wealthiest artists, leaving his heirs an estate valued at $260 million ($1.5 billion in 2008 dollars) when he died in 1973. Pablo Picasso once remarked, ‘I like to live like a poor man, except with lots of money’. Lol!
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