WWI Touches Pablo Picasso
By David Allen Sullivan
While award-winning poet David Allen Sullivan visited the Tate Museum Great War Art exhibition, he was most struck by a painting that seemed almost irrelevant to the other artistic representations of battle carnage in the museum: A Family by the Sea by Pablo Picasso. Sullivan, who has written poetry from the hard lens of the Iraq War in his book, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, contemplates WWI, Picasso, and the ethics of subtlety and beauty in the face of violence. For the poem, he recasts his visit to the Tate as one to the Paris Louvre exhibition, "Disasters of War 1800-2014," Read his poem, "WWI Touches Picasso," published for the first time on WWrite this week.
Famille au bord de la mer, by Pablo Picasso
The art of World War I,
displayed on the grey walls
of the Louvre’s special exhibit
are numbing: ranked files
of death-masked soldiers,
faces crumpling into hands,
a brass general fashioned
from spent shell casing…
War (triptyque,1929-1932) by Otto Dix, included in the Louvre exposition, Disasters of War. Image credit:franceculture.fr
*
But in one eight-inch frame
beauty’s hung—three figures
frozen in a pastel-hued beach scene.
I want to live inside this painting:
hovering shawl of Mother,
inquisitive pudge of Son whose finger
probes the still neck
of sleeping Father’s sprawl.
*
The placard reads 1922,
says Pablo Picasso
was Spanish, so exempted
from France’s war,
but not the war from him.
He was spit on
walking the streets of Paris—
too hearty, too well fed:
Qu’est-ce que tu fous lá?
(Why the fuck are you here?)
What did he say?
What could he have said?
*
He painted cubist distortions
of women, painted
his need for them,
painted them in pieces
while bodies burned,
were bayoneted,
gassed, gagged,
bound, bled, evicted diarrhea,
held up hands to have fingers shot off
so they’d be sent home—drank,
shat into holes they used petrol
to burn, grew gardens by trenches,
grew lonely, gave each other
hand jobs, haircuts, porn cards—
wrote letters, poems, prayers.
*
Paris Louvre Museum presents exhibition called "Disasters of War," which includes paintings from all wars 1800-2014. This painting is entitled L' Oublié by Emile Betsellere, 1872. Image source: ouest-france.fr
But Picasso’s painting
is not about particulars—
its figures are statues
stolen from sun-baked Greece,
marbelized marionettes
on a suggestion of a beach.
Father’s eyes are closed,
but the warmth of his nipples
stare at us, pale pink
of sea anemones, drifting—
their quiet hunger, their need.
*
Picasso never learned to swim,
feared Marie Therese
might drown so depicted her
being rescued again and again.
I imagine Marie loved water,
the cascade of it over her limbs,
the way her hands cupped
and pushed it back to pull her forward.
She both feared and loved him,
and contracted a disease
from the dirty waters of the Seine.
*
Picasso eases us into
this beach’s simulacrum
of suffering. A dead body
washed up on sand—
or did someone drop it here?
Famille au bord de la mer,
is all his title tells us.
Blue grey sky layers down
to green metallic bullet sheen
of an ocean, then sand’s band
of orange. The three stripes
form a dulled-out flag.
*
Detail of finger in Picasso's Famille au bord de la mer
Mother rises up monumentally,
capstone of the three,
white wrap half undone, her hand rests
on the back of the Son. At the base
is the prone form of naked Father,
hand cupped over genitals.
The Son’s arm, extends down
to press a finger
to the pulse-place of Father’s neck.
More detail here than anywhere else
in the painting, death-mask
laid over his form.
The man’s visage undoes
calm—Picasso’s face
from the self-portraits.
*
Father by dull sea—
pieta of nobility—
no marks mar his body,
no contorting
from mustard gas inhalation.
What he suffered
has been drained from his visage.
The storm
that took him has moved on.
*
The dead walked
the streets of Paris
on crutches, on
improvised limbs, dead eyes
burrowed in, burrowed
through him, and Picasso
could’t paint them into
or out of existence—
couldn’t touch them.
Poetry books by Sullivan. Top left: book translated by Sullivan with Dr. Abbas Kadhim
Author's bio
David Allen Sullivan’s books include: Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a book of co-translation with Abbas Kadhim from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet, and Black Ice. He won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing, and his book of poems about the year he spent as a Fulbright lecturer in China, Seed Shell Ash, is forthcoming from Salmon Press. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students, and lives in Santa Cruz with his family. His poetry website is: https://dasulliv1.wixsite.com/website-1, a modern Chinese co-translation project is at: https://dasulliv1.wixsite.com/website-trans, and he’s searching for a publisher for an anthology of poetry about the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel he edited with his art historian mother who died recently.
