Alfredo Valenzuela I Seville, (EFE).- Picasso’s literary magnetism. As Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño defined Picasso as “The Magnet of Literature” because of the attraction that the genius from Malaga always exerted on writers, something that now reflects the “whimsical anthology” -not academic or critical, but designed for the common reader- , carried out by the editor and writer José Esteban.
“Picasso: Magnet of Spanish Writers” (Cordelia’s Kingdom) is the title of this anthology of texts by 56 writers. Among them two Nobel Prize winners and half a dozen poets from 27. It groups poems, portraits, articles, evocations, testimonials, memorial fragments and critical approaches to the artist who revolutionized painting.
“What is the most determining reason that makes Picasso a true magnet for writers? And I mean writers in general, and not critics or art historians”, Gaya Nuño wondered. Amazed by the amount of literature generated by the work and life of the painter. And Rafael Alberti seems to answer him in the pages of this anthology.
“Picasso was a painter for poets. In all the various stages of his life he was close to them. Let us remember Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Reverdy, Cocteau, Prévert, Breton, Aragon and Paul Eluard. They all knew how to collect something from Picasso’s great river of permanently flowing”.
painter of poets
Although among the first Picasso books in Spanish were those by Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Eugenio d’Ors, both authors of very personal and ingenious works, the attraction to Picasso “has been felt and suffered” much more by poets, according to José Esteban, who warns:
“In a circle of poets, Picasso’s painting began to develop when he had recently arrived in Paris. And it was they, the poets, who surrounded him through a magical attraction. And to that first and significant circle and to Picasso’s lyric, very high poets who could not meet the artist have gradually joined”.
Among the selected texts there are also those by painters. Like the brief note by Joan Miró in which he shows his pride in the return to Spain of “Guernica”. And he remembers how he visited Picasso in his Parisian studio while he was painting it. Like that of Antonio Saura, which he himself described as “libel” and titled “Against Guernica.” And that it was a succession of aphorisms like these:
“I hate Guernica because without being a history painting it is sadly one of the most extraordinary compositions in the history of art”, and “I hate Guernica because it did not fall into the trap of socialist realism and did not try to ‘photograph’ the war, but to do it from the painting”.
a spanish miracle
The painter and writer Ramón Gaya affirmed that “Picasso is, without a doubt, one of the greatest Spanish miracles” and added: “What Picasso does is not, in effect, painting, but it is ‘creation’, or better, a brilliant contribution to a creation felt with greatness, understood with generosity. He took away from art a lot of accumulated sentimentality, a lot of sentimentality, a lot of softness, a lot of imprecision ”.
This anthology published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the painter’s death also brings together texts by Pío Baroja, Pablo Neruda, Vicente Aleixandre, Donisio Ridruejo, Corpus Barga, Max Aub, Maruja Mallo, Ramón J. Sender, Pedro Garfias Caballero Bonald and Carlos Edmundo de Ory, that is, writers from exile and from the interior, from several generations, from poets, novelists and journalists who also reflect the enormous influence of Picasso.
Esteban recalls that Picasso “in his particular way” also “devoted himself to poetry and literature and theater in general. He established himself as a poet, a loose poet, vehement, as a kind of lyric guerrilla fighter”, in the same way that he illustrated many books of poets and there was a generation of them who dreamed of seeing their verses illustrated by “the least illustrative artist of current painting.
For all this, perhaps, Esteban has chosen a quote from Picasso to present his anthology: “I paint in the same way that others write their biography. The finished paintings are the pages of my diary.” EFE