That’s right—the Spaniard took up poetry in his mid-50s. Picasso’s poetry period began in 1935, following an emotional crisis sparked by the beginning of his separation from his first wife, the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, and the birth of his daughter Maya by his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, which saw him put down his paintbrush and pick up his pen. By the end of 1935, Picasso’s friend André Breton, poet and founder of the Surrealist movement, was translating Picasso’s poems into French and publishing them in the magazine Cahiers d’art. Breton compared the experience of reading Picasso’s poems to “being in the presence of an intimate journal, both of the feelings and of the senses, such as has never been kept before.”Picasso’s poetry was, in several ways, like his paintings. Years later, in 1949, Stein’s partner, the writer Alice B. Toklas, would neatly summarize Picasso’s poetry era, writing that “the trouble with Picasso was that he allowed himself to be flattered into believing he was a poet too.”What’s the deal with Leonardo’s harpsichord-viola?