À Pablo Picasso

A collection of all the texts Éluard wrote about his close friend Picasso, beginning with the lecture “Je parle de ce qui est bien,” delivered in Barcelona, Madrid and Bilbao on the occasion of the first Picasso retrospective in Spain in February 1936. When Éluard entered his intimate circle, the artist was going through a grave crisis: separated from Olga, he had stopped painting and begun writing poems. The two men shared everything: the same taste for poetry, the same vision of artistic creation, and for sixteen years, until the poet’s death, their friendship continued without shadow or rift, giving rise to joint works such as Les Yeux fertiles, the first of their books, published in 1936, in which one’s drawings answered the other’s poems.

A moving tribute: “In this exalted place that is Picasso’s work,” Éluard wrote, “I wanted to share the inexhaustible pleasures it gives me; I wanted to prove, in terms and in forms, the trust that man places in man.”