Descripción
Neither this poster nor its motif have been reproduced on other posters. Picasso had very little schooling. The Spanish writer Pilar Baselga claims that he himself admitted that he never knew the alphabet by heart.
It is true that Picasso, from his early youth, at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, sought the company of artists and writers, especially poets and generally older than himself, in the informal gatherings of “Els Quatre Gats” and “El Guayaba” in Barcelona. He made great friends with many of them. Finally, in Paris, from his arrival, he surrounded himself with intellectuals, especially poets, whom he always respected and recognized for their talent, and with whom he never lost contact. Roland Penrose indicates that “Picasso’s affinity with surrealism led him to meet Paul Eluard shortly after the young man returned to Paris from the war to recover from the illness caused by a gas attack on the Western Front.” At this time, Eluard was still grieving the loss of his Russian wife, Gala, who had left him the previous summer in Cadaqués for the painter Salvador Dalí. One of the first “marks of friendship, which was to be long and eventful, was the pencil portrait drawn by Picasso and dated ‘ce soir le 8 janvier XXXVI’. Six months later, it was used as the frontispiece of the first translation of Eluard’s poems to be printed in London.” It is precisely this remarkable drawing that is reproduced on the poster discussed here, designed as an advertisement for the exhibition in honour of Paul Eluard organised by the Musée Municipal d’Art et d’Histoire in Saint-Denis, France.
