Picasso seems to have had an ambivalent relationship to letters.  He tortured himself by reading tirades from his ex-wife, and here, suspends letters in full view, like clothes on a line, to reproach himself.  For what?  For whatever they accused him of, or for simply not responding?

‘The so-called more important letters, which he didn’t answer either but kept before him as a permanent reminder and reproach, were pinned up, also with clothes-pins, on to wires that stretched from the electric-light wire to the stovepipe.’

Source: Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1966) (McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 154

Photo credit: Caspar Rubin, unsplash.com