Picasso: Collected Writings

Picasso wrote almost 350 poems hovering somewhere between surrealist automatic writing and Dada nihilism. Unconstrained by grammar and punctuation, his free-form verse is a kind of primal soup in which one finds morsels steeped in his obsessions with eroticism and death, his mental rehearsals of pagan or mythical rituals. The prose poems, more than three-fourths never published before, appear here in only the original French and Spanish, along with 184 manuscript pages in facsimile, many adorned with sketches. Also included are the texts of his two plays; one, written in 1941 during the Nazi occupation of France, is a surreal satirical fantasy; the other (1947-48) is set in a vegetable garden haunted by fantastic apparitions. No English translations are provided for Picasso's texts. Appendixes include early journal entries. This unique volume, with preface and introductory essays in English, sheds light on a little-known side of Picasso, furnishing clues to the psychic structure of his pictorial universe. (Dec.)