Poetry into painting: Mallarmé, Picasso, and punning

Shingler, Katherine

Abstract

This article gives a critical assessment of the relationship between the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and the Cubist painting and collage of Pablo Picasso. Taking in a range of critical sources that have insisted on Picasso’s ‘mallarmisme’, the article sets out to shift scholarly debate away from its focus on Picasso’s punning reference to Un coup de dés in a 1912 collage, and its suggestion of a dialogue between poet and painter around high art and its relationship to popular, commercial forms of production. It proposes that we instead focus our attention on the punning structures shared by Mallarmé and Picasso’s work more generally – structures which give rise to a sense of simultaneity, or overlaps of meaning, and which ultimately suggest that in engaging with Mallarmé’s poetry Picasso was self-consciously reflecting on the notion of painting as a kind of language, with its own syntax.

Citation

Shingler, K. (2013). Poetry into painting: Mallarmé, Picasso, and punning. French Cultural Studies, 24(4), https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155813501118

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 30, 2012
• Publication Date: Nov 1, 2013
• Deposit Date: Jun 10, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 10, 2016
• Journal: French Cultural Studies
• Print ISSN: 0957-1558
• Electronic ISSN: 1740-2352
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 24
• Issue: 4
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155813501118
• Keywords: Cubism, linguistic analogy, Stéphane Mallarmé, Pablo Picasso, pictorial syntax, simultaneity, text−image relationships
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/718218
• Publisher URL: http://frc.sagepub.com/content/24/4/346.abstract
• Contract Date: Jun 10, 2016