Picasso: Image Writing in Process

Author(s): Louis Marin and Greg Sims

Source: October, Vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 89-105
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778765
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 Picasso: Image Writing in Process*

LOUIS MARIN

TRANSLATED BY GREG SIMS

Ut pictura Poesis erit; similisque Poes

pictura; refert aemula quaeque sororem
ternatque vices et nomina; muta Poesi D
tur haec, Pictura loquens solet illa vocar

-Charles Du Fresnoy,
De Arte Graphica, 1667

The oeuvre of Picasso-poet, now somewhat better known t

exhibition and some magnificent accompanying work, consti
opportunity to join in modern and contemporary discussi
Horatian formula ut pictura poesis. Over the last thirty year
have assumed various forms, ranging from certain great stud
poetics-such as Roman Jakobson's article on Blake, Rous
more recent work in the history of rhetoric, in some cases si
to structural analysis, in others as a deliberate regression
example, to expect a French translation of Rensselaer W. Lee's
poesis," which appeared in the Art Bulletin in 1942(!).4 This i

* This text comes from a talk presented on January 16, 1991, at the
colloquium "Picasso porte," organized by the Ecole du Louvre and the Mu
with the exhibition "Le crayon qui parle, Picasso poete." It was first publishe
de l'ecriture-figure" in Les Cahiers du Musee national d'art moderne 38 (Wint
1. "As with Painting, so it will be with Poetry; what holds for one holds
the sisters refers to the other as its rival, alternating and exchanging nam
and, as we customarily say, a Painting speaks."
2. Linguistic Inquiry 1 (January 1970), pp. 3-23.
3. See, for example, Marc Fumaroli's study "Muta eloquentia: la repre
dans l'oeuvre de Poussin," in Bulletin de l'histoire de l'artfrangais (1984).
4. Reprinted as Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (Ne
1967). This text has indeed been translated into French by Maurice Block an

OCTOBER 65, Summer 1993, pp. 89-105. Translation ? 1993 October Magazin
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Nicolas Poussin. The Gathering of
the Manna. 1636-37.

usual inexcusable delays in publication than of a very "fin de siecle" ret

the past in theory and method.
But apart from these issues of contemporary history and epistemo
the oeuvre of Picasso-poet also provides an opportunity to return to one
avenues of research suggested by verse 361 of Horace's Ars poetica, dev
the relations between "text and image," to employ the more than twenty
old phrase (still used here and there)-thus, an opportunity to go bac
this entire area of research.
Under the rubric of a visual semiotics full of youthful ambition and en-
dowed with the self-assurance that came from working under the banner of
Saussurian linguistics, it used to be wondered whether it was possible to study
the image as a text; yet the reverse-to study the text as an image-seemed
not to possess the same theoretical and methodological urgency. "Read the story
and the painting," Poussin wrote to Chantelou from Rome in 1637, when
sending him his picture La Manne (The Gathering of the Manna). But viewed
as the watchword for pictorial research at the time, his injunction had a double
meaning. To begin with, it meant studying the relations between a text and a
painting-in this case, an ancient text, an episode from Exodus, which Poussin's
painting was supposed to illustrate. But it also meant asking how, beyond simple
questions of iconography, a narrative becomes an image, what requirements
specific to the pictorial medium and to visual substance, to visual modes of
perception and contemplation of the work, the painter had to fulfill in order
"visually" to tell the story that constituted the subject of the work; it meant
inquiring into the constraints imposed on the painter, constraints stemming
from the most general categorizations of space and time and of their represen-
tation, operative at that precise time and place in history and culture, a series
of laws and norms governing the painter's creative inventiveness, as well as the
beholder's contemplation of the work.
Nor could the study of the relations between text and image be confined
to the notion of "illustration" of the text by the image, however complex the

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Picasso: Image Writing in Process 91

processes involved in illustration might otherwise

just as imperiously, what text could emerge fro
possible to read an image like a text, and what the
entiated such readings? Was it possible to have th
of the image and no longer simply on the image? A
letter to Chantelou suggests that the Master thou
"Read the story and the picture to see whether eve
subject." And he adds a remark that, in my view
generative model of both composition and reading
the left-hand side will tell you exactly what I mea
same order." In short, a whole problematic of the d
of works of art was to be elaborated, making
aground on the twin reefs of painting's "ineffabili
drivel, at best a discourse of impressions or a sim
models that had never been formulated with paint
atic of the text of the image, the discourse of the pain
the concepts that made each of them possible, ope
The relations of the text and the image-"read the story and the
painting"- this was the first way of understanding Poussin's injunction, and of
putting it into practice. But there was another way, which involved studying the
text in the image or painting, or the other way around, studying the image (or
the painting) in the text, the intertwining of text and image where the text
forms the texture of and in the image, where it textualizes the image, and the
image constitutes an icon with and in the text, thus iconicizing it. Hence inscrip-
tions, captions, signatures, letters, marks, signs are mixed and articulated in
specific ways with figures, forms, strokes, patches of color in the image, painting,
engraving, or drawing. Or the other way around, where images, illustrations,
maps, plans, diagrams, outlines, and other figures in the center, the margin, or
on the verso of a page of writing effectively "work" the printed or written text,
and put it to work in the memory and the imaginary, perhaps below the
threshold of the artist's conscious control. And not to forget the middle or the
beginning of a book--frontispieces, vignettes, tailpieces, which are so many
figurative signs of these articulations, so many images that punctuate the written
text with figures, beyond or below the level of the adventitious system of
punctuation. Such images "figure" a certain form of the properly textual spacing
of the text, while displacing its properly graphic configuration, opening up new
avenues of meaning in the very form of the written expression and, through
variations and transformations in this form, provoking unprecedented meaning-
effects, or meaning as an effect.
In short, as one of the privileged domains of the semiotics of the visual,
the youthful semiology of the 1960s proposed these hybrid objects where a
linguistic message and an iconic form are not simply juxtaposed, but cohabit
"symbiotically" in remarkable, concrete entities in which the iconic invests the

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92 OCTOBER

linguistic in t
other way aro
Thus, in Matt
signifying int
Quid tum for
strange flam
envelope one
painter, to w
small work b
him across Eu
on the envelo
image," a dec
As proof tha
of a British jo
itabledisciplin
review of con
underpinning
perhaps becau
of their answ
This symbios
of allowing se
if not the ove
of reading to
in the way of
fication. Bet
constitute, in
cation and de
sign, pictorial
suggesting is
these critical
more exactly
with a critica
writing [icrit
the iconic, a
product of a
inherent crea
possible cons
iconic as rigo

5. The first issu

(January-March
6. I am referrin

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 Stosskopf. Basket of Glasses and
Pate. 1644.

Jasper Johns. Flag. 1954.

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 94 OCTOBER

schean and
phrases, stro
Thus the cr
miological re
the testing g
research wou
of this critiq
understood in
reveal the co
of art, as we
experience, a
terms at onc
I am venturin
figure].
It is worth dwelling a moment longer on these premises of theory and
method, with two examples-one of writing, the other of painting-where the
reciprocal workings of writing and image, the forces of displacement at work
in this creative-critical experiment, are unveiled. The first example is a 1935
"writing-gesture" by Picasso. The second, sixteen years earlier, is a painting by
Paul Klee.
On November 20, 1935, after having noted the date, Picasso writes:

z#~;zzj4 Y.2V

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 Picasso: Image Writing in Process 95

I use this example simply in order to analyze the

from the intrusion of a letter-figure or a figure-
case, "i": a "monogram," made up of the first tw
figure, the monogram, hides the name, sealing it
revealing the matrix of production, here "M"
singular manner. "M. T.," or Marie-Therese Walte
the time.
The letter-figure appears exactly in the middle of the sentence: six words
precede it, and six come after it; yet it does not occupy the visual and graphic
center. The final word 'joie" dominates the whole with the value of a signature,
reinforced by the arabesque pen stroke that underscores it with a virulent
flourish.
First remark: an exact transcription reveals the strange arrangement of
the lines, which must have been deliberate, since Picasso would have had space
enough on the paper to write the sentence out on the basis of its "meaning"
and its syntactic articulations, as in, for example:
Flower sweeter than honey [Fleur plus douce que le miel]
(M,) you are my fiery joy. [(M,) tu es mon feu de joie.]

We thus unearth a dual segmentation. Onto the "expected" one shown in this
latter example is superimposed another, shown in the first, which plays with
and works on the latter in the written space. This second reading places
"Flower," "honey," and "fire" at the beginning of the three graphic lines, the
third of which is very short, since the word 'joy" is moved over to the right, in
the position of a signature ("I, Joy").
Flower-honey-fire, second remark: as we know, honey comes from flowers,
the pollen gathered by bees; it is sweetness itself. Hence the surprise of the
"hyperbolic" inversion, since here it is the flower, from which honey is made,
that is sweeter than the honey that comes from it. At the same time, the semantic
affinity of sweetness that links flowers and honey is opposed to the burning fire,
a fire whose burns are treated with honey. Over and above "honey," we have a
semantic opposition between flower and fire; but graphically, the words are
"wedded" to each other, since all that separates "flower" [fleur] from "fire" [feu],
and vice versa, is a single letter, "1."
Third remark: W, M.-T., Marie-Therese Walter. The "M" is an inverted
"W," the "W" coming from the name Walter, Marie-Th6rese's patronymic. By
adding on to it and inverting it, the letter-figure develops into Marie-Therbse
Walter. The "T"(hWrese) is planted in the "M"(arie) and the "W"(alter) is inverted
into an "M," and a "T" planted between the two legs of the "M"-just as the
bee raids the flower to make honey. The letter is the explosion of Pablo's fiery
love in the flower of Marie-Th~rbse, sweeter than honey.
Fourth remark: the "T" is also the torero's sword planted between the
bull's horns, or the cross on Golgotha placed between the two thieves, a cruci-

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 Paul Klee. Villa R. 1919.

fixion that Picasso freely derides by placing Marie (Madeleine) and Christ
by side on the "T" (the cross), in a profane blasphemy.
Fifth remark: the letter-figure "M" is also Toi and Moi, You and Me u
in the same fiery joy, a brief love poem addressed to M.-T. W., Marie-Th
Walter, "you are ..." [tu es]. Now, the "T" also graphically underlies the "
"flower" (a flower that is already You [Toi], Therese), before being plante
the "M" of Marie. But it is also found in the word "are" (ets): it is "T" [t'
what "you are" [tu es], thus cutting in two the being that "you are" [tu e
this sense, the monogram as a letter-figure or as letter of the figural is everyt
at once, as Kant wrote, the best approximation of the schema of pure im
nation, and the very letter of the unconscious in the graphic system, reali
the short form of a word-poem that- literally--"makes," "performs" lov
The second example is a small painting by Paul Klee entitled The Vill
(1919). Here the movement is reversed: we are dealing with a painting
with the writing of a poem or a song. To begin with, we have an iconic ens
that invests the letter "R," a consonant that can only be pronounced
vowel. And yet there is no vowel: the letter is mute, unless the pictu
whole gives voice to it. The painting depicts a landscape with a river or r
running through it, heading off into the background, alongside a vill
letter "R," in red, is placed on the landscape so that it neutralizes the impr
of depth, in particular that created by the road or river. Placed in the transpar
plane of representation, it turns the picture into a play, a show, which is f
suggested by the small section of curtain in the top right-hand corner. T
whole painting becomes ideogrammatical: the letter makes it tend toward
ing, toward the planar, as if it were painted in this first plane, thus imp
an opacity on its transparency. But at the same time, there is an inverse t
at work, where the picture actually strips the letter of its literality, convertin
into a "walking" figure thanks to the "legs" of the "R" that seemingly dev
from the road or river to cut across the fields.
The Klee example-and any number of others could be used-shows us

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Picasso: Image Writing in Process 97

how the intrusion of a letter into an iconographi

experiment on this ensemble to the extent th
conditions of representation: the letter is an ope
language of the laboratory) of opacity, blockin
representation. The letter or printed character
no longer the conventional transcription of a
diaphanous, a mimetic representation of a walkin
On the basis of these historically different ex
are nonetheless modes of experimenting with or
ures), it is worthwhile elucidating the two key, co
and transparency of the sign and representation
of which can be found clearly traced out in the
thinkers, thought as a whole is a sign. Thus, acco
Royal: "To conceive a thing is simply to view tha
the mind. For example, we are conceiving whe
sun, an earth, a tree, thought, being, a circle, or
judgment about the thing. The form by which we
is called an idea."' The idea is a sign or, in other
something else. We know the outside world thro
called "ideas." But the functioning of signs ha
ample: when I read, I am not aware of the charac
only of the ideas represented by the character-w
these ideas through the intermediary of signs. B
attention to the characters themselves, I rapidly
sent. The functioning sign is at once absent
opaque: when the Port-Royal logicians write th
both as a thing and as a sign: as thing, warm ash
reveal the fire,"8 they reveal, within representat
istic of the sign's transparency and opacity.
Theoretical experimentation on texts and "i
tations, writing and figures, which is what th
consists of, would devote its rigorous attention to
opacity of the sign and representation, in particul
substances of expression, according to the specif
voice, writing, drawing, color, etc.), and the eff
imagination, the sensibilities, and the pleasure
voice has an effect even on the wisest," notes Pa
employ the theoretical discourse of Renaissance p

7. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logic, or the Art of

Patricia James (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company,
8. Ibid., p. 47 (translation slightly modified).

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 98 OCTOBER

and Alberti,
ency, it cons
has to serve
and a surface
a plane on w
time exploit
generally all
them with p
could not co
nition of its
representatio
of this refle
power of exp
[je pense] th
mulated toda
ciation and a
very existenc
Correspondi
the image by
representativ
the sign, all
tional and in
by the opaq
Gorgias to Fo
hypotyposis,
them puts it
seem to "see" them as we listen to the words? But who does not also realize
that, if periods and strophes, sentences and verses, words, consonants
vowels paint or depict things, if language makes things visible, it is through
force that traverses it, and which is articulated by these same hierarch
organizations-a force that displaces, so to speak, the instituted transparenc
It is through the flesh of the voice that signs and letters, words and senten
convey information, what Poussin, along with sixteenth-century Italian mu
theorists, called the sound of words, on the analogy of the properly picto
modes of colors and the arrangement of figures. Below or above the level
words and sentences, the force of these figures of language traces in the b
of the work-whether pictorial or linguistic-the opaque syntax of desire th
animates the painter or the orator and his pathetic effects, of which the
holder's or listener's body becomes in turn the locus. Semiotic theoretical
perimentation thus aims to account for the effects of these forces of opac
for the presentation of representation, effects in which the imaginary ident
cations of the subject take shape.

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Picasso: Image Writing in Process 99

It goes without saying that these symbiotic

concrete creative experiments with the vari
between the substances and forms of content a
the studio of Picasso-poet thus becomes a labor
linking together of heterogeneous elements an
effects. No doubt we need to recognize-in ord
it-the considerable distance that separates th
tory from the artistic laboratory of writing an
forms of experimentation. I shall come back t
ratory, "it thinks" [La pense]. Art "thinks" in t
the poet-painter, but this thought, in all its f
always constitute itself with and in meanin
paradigms of properly semiotic significance
pathetic sentiments-a meaning of which the w
to poetry, is the incarnation in the fullest sens
Let us examine one of these complex wor
such "creative" experimentation. The exampl
only writing, but it "plays" on this writing, wo
it through a desiring force-in a repetition
same and a transformation of difference: I have in mind the series of eleven
pieces Il neige au soleil [It is snowing in the sun], dated in the lower left co
"Paris, January 10, XXXIV," and numbered from I to XI. What is the proto
of analysis-by which I mean the theoretico-semiotic experimentation-of th
work (or play) of writing? One of the exhibition organizers, Christine P
neatly evokes it in a single sentence: "The phrase 'January 10, 1934' shows
linear (temporal) writing can be developed graphically (spatially)." And she
other examples taken from the group of Royan drawings from 1939-40
from the portraits of Sabartes from February 1935. It is best to conduct th
research as the study of a process of variation in an identical syntagm
grammatically speaking, constitutes a complete meaning: "Il neige au soleil.
It is this process of variation in the writing (in the sense of its graphi
inscription) that is progressively subtended by a mechanism of transforma
where writing becomes a form of drawing, and the sequence of written text
transformed into a figure, or rather a visual, graphic configuration. The st
of the process of variation here bears on a semiotic ensemble deriving from
same substance and form of expression and content, language.
On the other hand, paradoxically, language will prove to be at once
producer and the product of a mechanism of transformation that itself invo
two heterogeneous semiotic ensembles (text-image; writing-figure; the lingui
iconic) differing in the substance and form of their expression and con
Our theoretical experimentation in the Picasso laboratory should seek not ju
to describe the process and the mechanism, along with their successive oper

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Pablo Picasso. Il neige au soleil.
1934.

:: ~~~N _: iiiiz--i ;?

C-l~i.-"r";?Y-'?
\ x ,.. _?l:~iiri': ::$I ........i::' .... -': :;-: ......
' ' .............:::::
;;(:~iiii~j_ "i::- ..........:i
, i:i...d ." ,

:: ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ < 1 <~~ii~iiii~~iiiii,:-:::i- :::iii- :..i:: :-:

. ..... ~ : ...... :. : : :-i:::::::- : :: : :::: :: :::: -::

::: :: :::':::: ::il-,iiii::'i . _:?:..?
't::i' :i-::?:liii?::- ~.:: ?: i:: :U:ii:,i
: i
-- -I /{ K, [+ .

. . . . . . I... . I;

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 Picasso: Image Writing in Process 101

tions in the eleven experimental moments or "essa

also seek to elicit the rules governing the process o
behind the mechanism of transformation, princip
cess and the mechanism-in other words, the struc
soleil-the eleven sheets of Arches paper (26 cm
written in Indian ink, in French, the sentence(s) "
less obvious-and here I would like to underscore
retical and the artistic laboratories--that semiotic,
mentation has as its sole aim to raise the "thought"
a concept, or to formulate as rules of variation and
the dynamic of repetition (of identity and differe
writing and the graphic that produces the work. Th
and practical problems; I shall limit myself to p
indications for research.
First remark: throughout the group of "essays," the sentence is certainly
written in a "linear" fashion, but in the first one, the writing is set out in three
lines-"il neige / au / soleil"; in the second, it occupies two lines: "il neige / au
soleil"; in the third, four lines-"il / neige / au / soleil"; in the fourth, three
lines again, but differing from the first-"il / neige / au soleil." Like language,
the sentence is a quantified entity, and iconicity is produced in the "poetic"
sentence when the marks of quantity in language and drawing join to create a
single effect-in other words, when linguistic quantities become lines, surfaces,
cuts and breaks, frames and borders, which comes about through the mediation
of writing. To return to our "sentence," the same sentence is certainly written
in a linear form, but it is composed of four elements, four discrete entities-
words-which are in turn composed of letters: two, five, two, six. Their group-
ing into lines is organized on the paper by defining the surfaces, the different
divisions and various framings.
Second remark: the writing is unquestionably linear and linearly temporal,
but through writing and repeating the same phrastic utterance, in its breaks
and spacings, its positionings, correlations, parallelisms, enjambments, even its
permutations or displacements of smaller units in the written body of the
phrastic ensemble and the subensembles of words, the line is fragmented into
incessant variations, spatial combinations, and positionings, and, as a result, the
time of phrastic linearity is also fragmented, shattered; the successive, linear,
homogeneous time comprised of a string of moments or "now's" arranged in a
straight line, the metaphysical imaginary of Western time, is gone. This linearity

9. Marin is exploiting the polysemy of the French word "6preuve" to describe this series of
writing-drawings: its meanings include "trial," "test," "proof" (as in "page-proof"), and "ordeal,"
all of which are relevant to his analysis. I have opted for the somewhat archaic "essay" as the most
appropriate English equivalent [trans.].

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102 OCTOBER

is doubly shat
ciation of the
"positionings"
it is shattered
the repetition
-different sit
phanic, shatte
kairoi, eleven
of each "essay
figured by its
Third remar
present. This
tense, the pre
present of enu
which marks
of snow and s
inversely, it is
that the coupl
capture or pro
in its written
lation, if they
Better still, h
ducing the co
understand th
sentence "il n
reciprocal tran
Which bring
moron "snow-
defines the fi
second, graphi
and in final p
ei that, on som
the other han
rather than th
as vowel and
thus repetitio
the phrase "n
to the letter-
are very diffe
Fifth remark
time, and wea
oxymoron, we
the first essay

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Picasso: Image Writing in Process 103

tense, of which it is the impersonal subject, a scriptura

but in the subsequent essays it becomes isolated. Throu
nectedness, "il" points to the sudden apparition of cos
determined only by the physical meteor "neige au sole
tions that these terms in the position of verb and circu
on the semantic plane. I should point out that the t
performing on Picasso's own rewriting draws on Be
kernel of all phrastic utterances, an analysis that esse
the classical grammarians: "The bird is flying" [1'oisea
(is), the flying bird" [il est, l'oiseau volant], where "fl
placed in apposition to an impersonal "it is" [il est],
language, that is then articulated by various empirical
ners. I should also point out that, in the final essa
gradually absorbed, first by the "S," then by the "0"
Sixth remark: in light of what has just been said, t
pursued by examining the graphic variations in the le
words in "il neige au soleil" in order to study the conn
these variations create between the different word
meaning-effects that they produce on the level of the
an exhaustive analysis is clearly out of the question. Su
and "0" of "soleil" are gradually given more prominen
like an immense accolade, in the fifth essay the "S" en
porating the syncategoreme "au," the semantic connec
matic) and graphic link for the oxymoron "neige-soleil
noun "neige" between the "n" and the "e," crosses the lo
the "a" of "au," and finally frames the entire sentence
besque-like tangent to the "0" of "Soleil." As for the "
sentence, it very quickly abandons its position and its
in "soleil" in the first essay, gradually acquiring a qua
omy, or at least a conspicuous "pregnancy" that, in th
ends up encompassing all of "neige au."
To conclude, I shall try to describe the final rew
soleil": in the center, we have the solar circle of the "0" that has absorbed
"neige au" and cuts through the "1" of "il." This circle is framed on the left by
the whip-like accolade of the "S" and on the right by the long, swan-like line of
the "L," which ends, in turn, in the flourish of a single, upward pen stroke:
"eil," outside the "0," parergon of the solar "0," which is like an external-ironic
-graphic echo, bursting into song, so to speak, with the dot on the "i" so clearly
marked, echoing the "ei" of "neige," stifled by the "n" and the "ge," and whose
tractus fades into evanescence in the clarity, distinction, and pregnancy of the
"O" (see my fourth remark). Added to this is a graphic variation confirming
the injunctions of the voice and writing. The reader will have noticed that, on
the level of the writing, the text literally begins and ends with "il": "il (neige au

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 104 OCTOBER

sole)il;" but w
"il" is integra
neige" as oppo
confirmed b
rhymes: the
disappears in
of "il neige au
of the graphi
poet writing,
identically. It
every sense o
features.
These eleven variations on the same sentence, or rewritings in the form
of variations, are expressly designed to bring out this expressive force, present
but latent from the first essay on, and to reveal the power of the visual, its virtit,
or the work of figurability in writing and speech, in the phone. We can therefore
return to the question of repetition (eleven "proofs," as they say in the printing
world, eleven "experiments," as they say in physics labs, eleven rewritings, as
they say in linguistic circles) in order to focus on the articulation of the series
and the cycle, and on the emergence of a properly poetic (or poisic) temporality
from the scheme of variation and the mechanism of transformation, a tempor-
ality of the visual and the textual, a zoographic temporality (which is how the
Greeks described painting), an intensive temporality that is neither successive
(i.e., linear-the phrastic or discursive line), nor circular (reproductive of the
same-the drawing or the mimetic image), but which, in the same locus and
the same utterance, exhibits meaning: this is the epiphany of a force, the advent
of a power whose poetic emblem would be the resolution of the initial meteo-
rological oxymoron in the solar triumph of the final essay, which, in their
overlapping, integrates snow and sun.
The eleven essays can thus be considered as a series of eleven sequences
that graphically recount the evolution of the weather, the evolution of this
meteor, a snowfall in bright sunlight in Paris on January 10, 1934-an evolution
that, in the final analysis, ends with the snow being obliterated in the heat and
light of the sun. But, simultaneously, the obstinate repetition (in the musical
sense of basso ostinato) of the same tense-the present of "il neige"- turns each
occurrence of "il neige au soleil" into a single, unique, always new moment
(here I'm quoting Benveniste) in which verbal enunciation, speech,
and the referential event coincide: each enunciation of "il neige au soleil" enacts
a self-sufficient, complete "now," a moment of pure presence. It is because this
enunciation is written down, and because writing ensures the presence, the
"nowness," of the utterance on the material medium of the paper that this
inscription marks the definitive absence of the event, its disappearance, while
simultaneously transforming it, "rebuilding" this absence in the graphic mon-

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Picasso: Image Writing in Process 105

ument. It is this monumentality that is signified by

and date ("Paris, January 10, 1934") on the sheet
the catalog tells us, written in French in Indian ink
datee]: thus, not "il a neige au soleil " Paris ce-jour
Paris that day], but "il neige au soleil" [it is snowing
eleven sheets of paper, the repetition of the same s
scheme of variation that traverses this repetition, a
formation manifested by the eleven variations reveal
tense referring to a present weather, a present-time
time of poisic creation, or, to put it more precisely,
visual in the textual, the eruption of the gaze in
germination of a cosmic, solar eye in the gray and w

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