Picasso was always sensitive to writing and to the beauty of words. Yet this form of expression did not really emerge for him until 1935. While the moment happened to coincide with a personal crisis and the reorientation off his visual production, his writing is not circumstantial, instead testifying to a deep and ongoing connection to his artistic concerns. Anxious to experiment with this new material, Picasso began to write a drawn-out text on his native tongue with no punctuation, which took up more than 30 pages of Arches paper. Picasso the poet, confident in his role as a man of letters, sketched out his first notes on various grounds, including in a highly sensitive blue notebook, a kind of x-ray in which he openly explains himself. It speaks of the writing process, and deals with translation and some of his favourite subjects: love, bullfighting, time, food…. The most varied range of poems arose from his writing laboratory: poems winding like a river, in loops and variations; rhizomatic poems and other more classical poems, with their rhymes and verses.

In his writings from 1937 the disastrous consequences of the war in Spain hang over him. From 15 to 18 June, Picasso does the two plates for The Dream and Lie of Franco, which denounce the brutalities of Francoism.

In the life of the artist another woman had appeared, Dora Maar, who is present in both the texts and the drawings preparing The Weeping Woman (1937). Another more violent and sarcastic painting decries the bond between the Church and Franco’s army: Portrait of the Marquis with the Christian Buttocks Throwing a Coin at the Moorish Soldiers Defending the Virgin (September 1937). In a notebook from February and March 1937, Picasso drew a hieroglyphic on a postcard he sent to Dora Maar, with a written solution to the conundrum: “Buying this postcard gives you bad luck.”

Picasso often revived his poems from 1938 in his engravings, such as the one from 8 February (II), which goes with the engraving from 18 October of that same year entitled Bust of a Seated Woman. Or just as well the one from 22 June, engraved in capital letters in the illustrated book entitled Homage to Lacourière, published by Iliazd.

For the play The Four Little Girls (1947–1948), also written in French, Picasso uses red colour pencil diluted with a bit of blue. The action takes place in a vegetable garden where the girls, who are no longer little, play at rituals that are at once sweet and cruel. They sing and enjoy the relative pleasure they have regained after the war in southern France, bursting with intense flavours and aromas. More tragic tones are expressed in his final work, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1957–1958). This is an atypical piece that breaks down the division by genres; it starts with a dialogue between two characters, numbered 0 and 1, and ends with a long monologue, like a melancholic litany. In this final work, Picasso returns to his native tongue in a final homage to his homeland, which is now barred to him.

Picasso created a set of poems on engravings and lithographs, with Poèmes et lithographies [Poems and Lithographs], published by the Galerie Louise Leiris being the most important. The texts were written from February to September 1941, and illustrated from 6 April to 29 May 1949.

Printed in the workshop of Fernand Mourlot, the 14 lithographs making up the set are divided into four parts, combining text and image. In February 1945, the texts had already been published under the title “Fragments” in the journal L’Éternelle revue.

Previously he had done this with other handwritten poems like “Trozo de almíbar” [Bit of Syrup] (1939), which Picasso chose to accompany The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1969), “XXXIV. El clarín se retuerce…” [The Bugle Writhes] (1939, fragment of the poem written on 18 April 1935), and “Poésie de mots inconnus” [Poetry of Unknown Words] (1949).  

The publisher Tériade was behind the project. Reverdy wanted to do his poems in handwritten version, and Picasso was to illustrate them with a red lithographic crayon, just like with medieval manuscripts. Still, Picasso did not end up only adding ornamental features, but instead intervened on each of the pages, marking off verses, filling in voids, invading the spaces with signs that recall both musical notation and what would be his own handwritten alphabet.

The forty-three poems in the Reverdy book, with the twenty-five Picasso lithographs, can be read as a single poetic work. The cadence of a single voice here becomes a lamentation, a funerary dirge to the human condition.
Printing of Le Chant des morts was finished in Paris on 30 September 1948.

Picasso knew Góngora from his schoolbooks in La Coruña (1891–1895). Later, in 1927, on the 300th anniversary of his death, the poets later known as the Generation of 27 celebrated the event. The following year Christian Zervos published XX Sonnets de Góngora, which were translated into French by Zdislas Milner and illustrated by Ismael G. de la Serna. Picasso himself considered illustrating them for a collector`s edition for Ediciones La Cometa, of the Gustavo Gili publishing group, which in the end did not come to fruition.

The aesthetics of Góngora’s verse, expressed through rhetorical figures like alliteration and hyperbaton, leave their mark on Picasso’s writing as well: “0 I say nothing you know what I am saying I say no more you know what I said. 1 you know what is known, what is known is known” (The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 6 January 1957).

At the age of just twelve, in La Coruña, he created a series of fictional newspapers to send to his family. He composed three papers in total with the names Azul y blanco [Blue and White], La Coruña and Torre de Hércules [The Tower of Hercules]. The publications are done in a journalistic style. In one of them he wrote: “When this newspaper was sent to press no telegram was received.”

True to his interest in journalism and writing, in 1901 he found himself in Madrid, where he founded the magazine Arte Joven with Francesc d’Assís Soler. It was a weekly publication on literature and the art nouveau, modelled after the Barcelona journal Pèl & Ploma .