The Truth, the condition for Living
Following the Liberation, the two friends met regularly in Paris, united by their political ideals and their shared resistance to the pressures of the Communist Party, which leaned towards socialist realism. They developed an identical conception of poetry, regardless of its means of expression, combining the visible and the legible, a total engagement of the human being, through both the mind and the senses. Eluard admired Picasso's ability to lay the foundations of a new way of looking at the world: "Instead of a single straight line or a curve, he has shattered a thousand lines that have found their unity, their truth in him. Defying the widespread notion of objective reality, he has reestablished contact between the object and the person viewing, and, therefore, thinking it. In the boldest, most sublime of ways, he has given us inextricable evidence of the existence of man and of the world." "Picasso seeks the truth. Not the fictional truth that will always leave Galatea inert and lifeless, but rather an all-encompassing truth that links the imagination to nature, that considers everything as real, and which, constantly shifting from the specific to the universal and from the universal to the specific, encompasses all forms of existence, of change, as long as they are new and fertile." (Essay by Paul Eluard "Je parle de ce qui est bien," published as the introduction to the catalogue Hommage à Pablo Picasso. Petit Palais, November 1966 - February 1967, Éditions RMN.)
However, their dialogue also went in many other directions, addressing their work, everyday life, friendship, and, obviously, the political and intellectual engagement that cemented their mutual respect as artists. For Eluard, Picasso was a symbol, a model: "For you, life is always successful. I see you building your house, lighting your fire and cutting your bread, loving a woman, having children, serving your fellow men - and not playing the game, the infamous game where men are rivals," he wrote in Picasso, bon maître de la liberté, 1947, published by René Drouin in 1948). Eluard wrote extensively about Picasso in articles and exhibition catalogues. He was never pedantic. He frequented the artist because he loved his work, and the man because he appreciated his qualities: " Having seen so much beyond your own hand, you still have the desire to show, to astonish. Having seen so much through your own hand, you trust the hands of others." They felt united by their distrust of cowardice, by the love they carried over to words and forms. They felt mutual respect because they each valued the other's true support. "Are we exemplary friends? Yes, if all men must become friends. Tomorrow, in the well-tended square of our hearts, a crowd will gather; united, intelligent, happy —and victorious," wrote Paul Eluard in Picasso à Antibes. Eluard loved sharing a certain vision of the work with Picasso, and discussing the artist's relationship with the object. Above everything else, Picasso appreciated Eluard's wonderful use of words, the poet's writings about the existence of man and of the world, about universal values and raisons d’être. They shared a yearning to understand art and pursue their own research, both visual and intellectual. There was no such thing as bad and good taste for them. Daily life, the disarming simplicity of everyday objects and words were the elements that fed their minds and their imaginations. Eluard's poems are full of references to situations they actually experienced.
For Ségolène Le Men, "The relationship between Eluard and Picasso, which is of particular interest for its multiple facets and its duration, can be seen from a biographical standpoint as a very close relationship between two men; at an aesthetic level, Eluard's contact with Picasso's work is what helped him define "clairvoyance", which he considered a key attribute for an artist, be it a painter or a poet; finally, at the level of poetry, they shared similar motifs, overlapping themes whose origin is sometimes hard to trace back to one or the other, even though they used different stylistic tools to achieve a similar effect."
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Summary