Semantic domains in Picasso’s
poetry
............................................................................................................................................................
Enrique Mallen
Department of Foreign Languages, Sam Houston State University, USA
.......................................................................................................................................
Abstract
Correspondence:
Luis Meneses, Electronic
Textual Cultures Laboratory,
University of Victoria,
Mearns Centre / McPherson
Library A314, 3800 Finnerty
Road (Ring Road), Victoria,
BC, V8P 5C2, Canada.
E-mail:
ldmm@uvic.ca
The question of why Pablo Picasso dedicated a considerable amount of his time
to writing around 1935 is open to speculation. Many have cited, among possible
causes: the Spanish artist’s emotional crisis, the political turmoil in Europe in the
period between the two wars, and the menace of a confrontation in Spain. All of
these views are predicated on an assumed irreducible conflict between visual
composition and verbal expression. However, we cannot forget that Picasso’s
interest in alternative methods of expression might have started with his fascination for linguistic structure as a whole during his cubist period. In this article,
we explore the possibility that the transition into poetry that we observe in
Picasso is simply one more manifestation of his pursuit of alternative approaches
to language as a means of representation. In this sense, one thing that remained
to be determined was how concrete concepts in both languages cluster into representative semantic categories and how these categories interact with each other
in semantic networks.
.................................................................................................................................................................................
1 Introduction
The question of why Pablo Picasso dedicated a considerable amount of his time to writing around 1935 is
open to speculation. Many have cited, among possible
causes, the Spanish artist’s emotional crisis, the political turmoil in Europe in the interwar period, or the
menace of a confrontation in Spain. All of these proposed reasons are predicated on an assumed irreducible conflict between visual composition and verbal
expression. However, we cannot forget that Picasso’s
interest in alternative methods of expression might
have even started with his fascination for linguistic
structure in general during his cubist period.
For some time now, our research has taken us
through different approaches to analyze Picasso’s
artistic legacy (Meneses et al. 2011) and his bilingual
poetry (Meneses et al. 2008). However, we felt that
some aspects of Picasso’s poems needed further investigation. In this article, we examine the possibility that the transition into poetry in Picasso is, in
fact, one more manifestation of his pursuit of alternative approaches to language as a means of representation. In this sense, one thing that remained to
be determined was how concrete concepts used in
his Spanish and French texts cluster into representative semantic categories and how these categories
interact with each other in semantic networks. For
this purpose, we developed tools to examine how
he used subtle oppositions between words within
specific concepts in both languages to build his
poems.
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Luis Meneses
Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory, University of Victoria,
Canada
L. Meneses and E. Mallen
2 Background—The Online
Picasso Project
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A semantic domain (Taylor, 2003) is a linguistic
term that recognizes that languages tend to divide
up the spectrum of concepts differently. Using the
bilingual lexicon derived from Picasso’s poetry
(Audenaert et al. 2007), we devised a mechanism
to extricate the set of semantic domains in his literary creation using the English translations for the
Spanish and French terms as our basis.
Picasso’s case presents additional complications
when narrowing down the items in this poetry into
a smaller set of semantic units. Words and images
are interrelated in Picasso’s creations. His groundbreaking approach to poetry is directly linked to his
innovations in the plastic arts. During synthetic
cubism, Picasso started incorporating verbal language into his pictorial compositions by means of
pasted newspapers. In these cases, the verbal elements were intended to play a visual role, but simultaneously they introduced a verbal sphere into a
previously purely pictorial domain, emphasizing
the arbitrariness of verbal and pictorial language.
In the late 1920s, with the arrival of surrealism,
Picasso reversed his strategy, and the words in
pasted newspapers, which had by now almost fully
integrated into the composition, were intended to
be considered in their full physicality, thus acknowledging their capacity to establish a new magical
presence.
When Picasso turned to poetry in the 1930s, he
pursued the same ideas he had already explored both
in synthetic cubism and surrealism: words were adjoined in collage-like combinations, but they also
gained in physical presence, exerting their magical
power over the reader. Figs. 1 and 2 show examples
of the visual and verbal elements in Picasso’s poetry.
Words and phrases were distributed on the page as if
they were pictorial signs, entering into relations with
other visual elements such as hyphens, blotches, and
brackets. Nevertheless, in spite of their physical presence, the words employed still interacted with each
other in clearly delineated semantic domains. Thus,
readers were forced to discover potential interconnections between the words employed while at the
same time taking into consideration their non-verbal
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The Online Picasso Project (http://picasso.shsu.
edu) originated from an emphasis on an interactive, digitally encoded art publication, moving
away from an understanding of art criticism as
predominantly stative and print-based. It consists
of a complex system of interrelated databases
which include both texts and images pertaining
to Pablo Picasso. As a result of close collaboration
between art scholars and computer scientists, the
Picasso Project has adopted an innovative architecture with three major objectives: (1) to facilitate
the maintenance of a large collection of artworks
along with its associated historical narratives, (2)
to overcome the limitations of printed art publications, enabling users to create and visualize a dynamic art catalog, by combining and linking the
different components in the collection, and (3) to
provide new ways for composing, browsing, and
exploring a collection of artworks, creating multiple transformations from traditional chronologically based narrative, allowing users to browse
through artworks in ways not possible with printed
versions.
By 2018, the Picasso Project has reached over
29,000 artworks, 39,000 notes/commentaries, 8,000
references, and 18,000 archived articles. It also includes all of Picasso’s literary works and a comprehensive lexical concordance. His poems and plays
provide a great opportunity to explore Picasso’s
conceptual world in a way that encompasses both
his pictorial and literary output.
The Online Picasso Project continues to be used
by thousands of people on a daily basis. Registered
users include Picasso collectors, museum directors
and staff, gallery owners, auction houses, scholars,
students, and the general public. More so, the
Picasso Project illustrates how new computerbased techniques and information science can
collaborate to enhance learning in the visual arts,
creating new ways to interconnect visual and textual
data that allow for discoveries using digital research
methods.
3 Semantic Domains
Semantic domains in Picasso’s poetry
distribution on the page. Given these semantic interconnections, it is important to first classify the concepts behind those words Picasso used and see how
these concepts may then group around specific semantic categories.
4 Approach
At first, we decided to approach this problem from a
purely computational perspective and expand on
our previous efforts based on statistical models
and algorithms (Meneses et al. 2016; Estill and
Meneses, 2018). More specifically, we attempted to
solve this problem by analyzing Picasso’s poetry
corpus using topic modeling and Latent Dirichlet
Allocation (Blei et al. 2003). After running our analysis through different iterations and different
Fig. 2 sur le dos (1), December 14,1935. Musée Picasso,
Paris. OPP.35:076
numbers of topics, we concluded that this analysis
was not highlighting the patterns and trends that we
needed. Therefore, we decided to implement an alternative analysis to the corpus of poems.
We decided to use a taxonomy-based approach.
We created a set of database tables that allowed us to
manually specify concepts and then map them to
their related terms in Picasso’s poetry. It is important to note that these concepts are not bound to a
given language per se: we were able to overcome the
language barrier by linking concepts using the
English translation of relevant terms—a language
that Picasso did not use in his poems.
Additionally, we created Web interfaces to define
and view these semantic relationships, which in
turn are also linked to an automatically generated
bilingual concordance of terms. Fig. 3 shows a
screenshot of the user interface displaying words
and their corresponding categories in French.
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Fig. 1 poca vergüenza (1), December 7,1935. Musée
Picasso, Paris. OPP.35:068
L. Meneses and E. Mallen
Given the acknowledged semantic interconnections
between the concepts Picasso explored in his poetry,
we proceeded to manually classify the uncovered concepts behind the words to determine how these concepts could be grouped around specific semantic
categories using Wordnet (Miller, 1993) as reference.
Despite its complexity, we believe that the computational significance of our approach does not lie within
its implementation but rather in the detailed analysis
that this framework allows.
5 Analysis
By isolating the semantic categories Picasso worked
with, we may start to get a clearer picture of how
words in his poems relate to each other. Of course,
these results are only preliminary, since we have not
yet classified all the concepts into distinct semantic
categories and even those we have completed will
have to be further refined.
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And yet we already see that some of the existing
semantic categories are linked to a higher number
of concepts than others. For example, we find a
high number of nominal artifacts in his poems.
Some are related to art, such as engraving, fashion, festoon, illumination, image, impression, imprint, ornament, paint, paintbrush, painter,
painting, and palette; others related to war, such
as armor, axe, blade, bomb, bow, bugle, bullet,
camouflage, fighter, gallows, gauntlet, knife,
knight, rampart, and rapier. These may appear
antagonistic, but in Picasso’s world there is a
close relation between destruction in war and creation in art. Not surprizingly for a painter and
writer, nominal communication is another frequent semantic category, with such concepts as
advance, advice, agreement, alert, allusion, alphabet, ambiguity, announcement, answer, argument,
art, articulation, canticle, fable, language, news,
nonsense, note, noun, outcry, and parable.
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Fig. 3 Screenshot of the user interface displaying words and their corresponding categories in French
Semantic domains in Picasso’s poetry
With the tools we have developed, we may
examine how he used subtle oppositions between
words within specific concepts in French and
Spanish to build his poems. An example of his
choice of words may be found in the concept
‘kill’. Picasso used four words (and their morphological derivatives) in French for this concept: abattent (knock); égorge, égorgeant, égorgée, and
égorgées (slit); éteignant, éteindre, éteint, éteinte,
and éteints (extinguish), and tue, tuer, tuera, and
tuez-le (slay). These words impose a clear lexical
demarcation within that concept. For Spanish, however, Picasso chose one single word (and its morphological derivatives) for that same concept:
matar, mataran, mate, maten, and mato. That is,
he left the concept more ambiguous.
An opposite situation occurs with the concept
‘anguish’, where three words (and their morphological derivatives) are used in Spanish: angustia,
angustias (‘passive’); and congoja, congojas, or
acongoja (‘active’). Here Picasso chose words that
further specified the patient’s role in the feeling,
clearly demarcating the concept in its lexical implementation. In French, however, he used only one
word: angoisse(s).
We analyze these contrasts further to determine
how concepts are either demarcated or left open in
his poems. Where word–concept relations overlap in
Spanish and French, common conceptual domains are
established between the two languages. Where word–
concept relations differ substantially, we would have
differing conceptual domains in the two. This new
approach may be able to answer the question of why
Picasso chose to write in a specific language about
some specific content. Fig. 4 shows a screenshot of
the user interface displaying the relationship between
the ‘Noun.Person’ semantic category, the ‘Actor’ concept, and their related words in Picasso’s poetry.
Our final goal is to group the uncovered semantic
categories into macrocategories that would get us
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Fig. 4 Screenshot of the user interface displaying the relationship between the semantic categories, concepts and words
in Picasso’s poetry
L. Meneses and E. Mallen
6 Conclusions
First, our analysis has allowed us to see correlations
between concrete themes as identified by certain
lexical terms and different languages, which becomes particularly interesting in the case of a bilingual poet such as Pablo Picasso. For example,
psychological concepts (such as madness) are
handled preferably in French, while more physical
references to his immediate surroundings (such as
scorch) are circumscribed to Spanish terms.
However, in cases where both languages (Spanish
and French) are used to communicate a similar concept, Picasso chooses Spanish when he intends to
apply a more folkloric tone (such as maggot).
Using the English lexical list of terms, we were
able to highlight and identify the interconnections
between his poems in different languages.
And second, we have determined that, in Picasso’s
poems, certain semantic domains are predominant in
each of the two languages he used—Spanish and
French. For instance, Picasso is more inclined to
refer to food items and everyday objects in his
Spanish poems, which thus provides a clear reflection
of his physical environment and of the harsh economic
situation of this time. On the other hand, given the
influence French Surrealist writers exerted on him, his
French poems concentrate on more abstract concepts
involving politics, religion, and sexuality.
To summarize, in this article we analyzed how
concepts in Picasso’s poems and plays cluster into
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semantic categories, and in turn, how these categories interact with other concepts within a complex
semantic network. More so, through the use of a
carefully defined taxonomy of concepts we have
been able to identify and pinpoint representative
themes and correlations across different languages.
While our analysis can point toward certain patterns
and interconnections within Picasso’s writings, accurately characterizing the nature of these relationships remains a work in progress and a real
challenge to contend with.
References
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closer to main semantic domains that Picasso operated with. Again, we know that Picasso’s style, both in
his visual and his verbal compositions, was very much
inspired by collage. So the interesting thing is that
those elements he placed together belonged to a restricted set, so that their interconnection, while not
obvious to the viewer/reader, must have been somewhat determined in Picasso’s ‘view’ of reality. It is that
determined interconnection that Picasso saw that we
want to explore with our study of the semantic categories in Picasso’s poetry. In other words, we want to
get closer to Picasso’s ‘vision’ of the world through his
poems to investigate how that ‘vision’ may differ from
what he depicted in his graphic works.