‘Fixé par les cris des hirondelles au vol géométrique du désir’ (Picasso, 7 June 1936)

Abstract

Between 1935 and 1939, Picasso wrote nearly 350 prose poems, mainly in French, revealing, according to André Breton, his ‘besoin d’expression totale’, driven, according to Tristan Tzara, by his “‘imagination torrentielle’. This chapter seeks to explore and appreciate the creative tension in Picasso’s prose poems between irrepressibly inventive improvisation and a complementary tendency to connect and orchestrate, through the use of multifarious patterns and serial permutations. These formal qualities reveal and emphasise the writer’s personal and political desires and preoccupations. Threads of symmetry and anaphora in Picasso’s literary manuscripts, sometimes extending from one text into others over long periods of time, invite comparison with similarly continuous lines of graphic experimentation in his sketchbooks, confirming the intergeneric persistence and consistency of his creative impulses and strategies.