This poem is a homage to the work of Rafael Alberti’s friend, the famous painter and fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Alberti met the artist in 1933; in the following decades, they collaborated on various projects and remained close until Picasso’s death.

The poem forms part of To Painting (A la pintura), dedicated to Picasso, in which Alberti pays tribute to the form of expression that he had once pursued and that he never ceased to love. To Painting is the culmination of Alberti’s lifelong effort to “pintar la Poesía / con el pincel de la pintura” (paint Poetry with the paintbrush of painting). The last poem of the collection, Picasso, brings this project to a magnificent closure.

Drawing his inspiration from Picasso’s oeuvre, Alberti weaves together many themes that he had explored throughout his earlier work: the relationship between poetry and painting, the place of the artist in history, the ties between art and politics, and the potential of poetic language as a form of creative expression.

The poem unfolds into a panoramic retrospective of Picasso’s paintings, tracing the trajectory of his art from early works, through the blue, rose, and cubist periods, building up to and ending abruptly with Guernica, Picasso’s monumental black-and-white masterpiece dedicated to a Basque town that a German aerial attack eradicated on April 26, 1937. Alberti masterfully guides his verse to mimic the intensely expressive style of Picasso’s paintings. The endless cascades of rhymes (“araña, / braña, entraña, cucaña, / saña, pipirigaña . . . se laña y se deslaña, / se estaña y desestaña”) re-create the dazzling web of Picasso’s artistic world while at the same time sweep the reader into the often mischievous world of Alberti’s poetry.

These worlds do not exist in a vacuum. For Alberti, both painting and poetry draw their vigor from the lives of real people whose collective destiny art is charged to represent. Through verbally re-created sketches of Picasso’s protagonists (naked boys running along the beach, a woman ironing, a pregnant girl), a grave face of the country emerges at the onset of historical darkness.

By its side is the bull, the symbol of Spain and also of death, the omnipotent force that has always fascinated Spanish artists. Guernica is another instance of an artist confronting this force, this time particularly terrifying because it originated in the people themselves. The painting (and the poem) is also a warning: “el juego del arte comienza a ser un juego explosivo” (the game of art becomes an explosive game). A diversion after all, art may not triumph over death, but true art waits only to reveal its explosive power.

Bibliography

Alberti, Rafael. To Painting: Poems. Translated and introduced by Carolyn L. Tipton. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997.

Categories: Literature, Spanish Literature, World Literature

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