Gertrude Stein’s Three Picassos
"Every one was forced by the war which made them understand that things had changed to other things and that they had not stayed the same things, they were forced then to accept Picasso."
At the recent Met exhibit Cubism and the Trompe L’Oeil Tradition, I bumped into “Miss Stein and Miss Toklas.” The meeting wasn’t a surprise. Stein is big, she is complicated, she is and was everywhere during Picasso’s time and career. The subtlety of her presence in this particular exhibit reminded me of how much my perception of Picasso is shaped by her utterly unique voice. It was with this piece that the exhibit as a whole zoomed into context for me.
In the collage, “Dice, Packet of Cigarettes, and Visiting Card, 1914,” Picasso inserts the actual calling card of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas beside drawings of a pack of cigarettes and dice. It was exhibited beside another collage with a calling card of Andre Level, another patron important to Picasso’s career. As the exhibition description noted, Picasso tore off one corner and repainted it downturned, a symbolic gesture meaning the card had been personally delivered. By implication, drawing a realistic element that was not actually real, was Picasso implicating those who helped put him on the map were now calling on him, are we simply not to know how the cards were originally received, or is he mocking the social tradition of calling cards in general? For me, the implied gesture and composition emphasizes relationships, the relationship between Stein and Toklas and the relationship between Stein and Picasso.
This glimpse of Stein inspired me to return to Stein’s writing about Picasso, starting with the small portrait that she wrote in 1912 for Steiglitz’s Camera Work, her longer book on Picasso (1938), and her odd and oft-quoted poem, If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso (written in 1923 while visiting Picasso long after he completed her famous portrait) and also referred to in Stein’s brilliant Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). I hadn’t read Stein’s word portraits about Picasso in this succession before. I also haven’t been quite so gut-punched by her writing in the same way. My increasing age and experience, I suppose. What I remembered from reading them previously was the exuberant tone, what she calls “gaiety,” that permeates on a first read, a tone so different from other Modernists such as Virginia Woolf. Now, I see so much war.
The short portrait “Picasso” published in 1912 in Steiglitz’s Camera Work just after she’d finished The Making of Americans has for one of its refrains, what Stein called her “continuous successions”:
This one was working and then this one was working and this one was needing to be working, not to be one having something coming out of him something having meaning, but was needing to be working so as to be one working. This one was certainly working and working was something this one was certain this one would be doing and this one was doing that thing, this one was working.
Like she would explore in her longer Picasso, she juxtaposes Picasso’s working with periods of his “not completely working.” Both the writer and the painter are young, working, and obsessed with working and finding meaning for their work within the work. In the later Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the character Picasso remarks on how much work he was able to produce when they were young. In 1912, the publication year of this short portrait, the war had not come for Stein yet. The work and the needing to work and the meaning of the work came out of the working itself.
In the longer Picasso, published sixteen years later, the reader is given Stein’s first civilian glimpse of World War I:
I very well remember at the beginning of the war being with Picasso on the boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not yet seen it and Picasso amazed looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is cubism.
In her deceptively joyful or almost naïve tone, Stein’s Picasso takes credit for his vision being an inspiration for camouflage (as would the Surrealists and other contemporaries). The gaiety perhaps is what makes the scene so melancholy to me as a reader now, that artistic endeavor of mixing of the real and unreal unraveling mixing with the military need to visually manipulate “reality” for killing and self-protection.
But the urgency is tied into the sense that their (Picasso’s and Stein’s) artistic vision becomes necessary. Art steps out of the gallery and into their everyday lives as well as into the war room.
Also in Picasso, Stein connects the method of Cubism—compositions without beginnings and endings, important corners (I’m reminded of the redrawn corners of the calling card in the collage), constant movement, and disorder or uncentering––with war strategy:
Really the composition of this war, 1914–1918, was not the composition of all previous wars, the composition was not a composition in which there was one man in the centre surrounded by a lot of other men but a composition that had neither a beginning nor an end, a composition of which one corner was as important as another corner, in fact the composition of cubism.
A war one physically witnesses, even as civilian, can never be like other wars one learns elsewhere. Like other artists and writers, Stein never recovers from trying to depict her war experience. Like the Cubist artists recording and replicating to create their disordered new vision, Stein in her book on Picasso returns to the subject of war again and again, in “continuous successions” trying to piece together a reality that can no longer be pieced together as it once was.
In thinking about the collages in the exhibit at the Met, this section in Stein’s Picasso on inserting “real objects” into paintings gained relevance:
“…that was the reason for putting real objects in the pictures, the real newspaper, the real pipe. Little by little, after these cubist painters had used real objects, they wanted to see if by the force of the intensity with which they painted some of these objects, a pipe, a newspaper, in a picture, they could not replace the real by the painted objects which would by their realism require the rest of the picture to oppose itself to them.”
This experimentation, putting real alongside painted objects to see if the intensity of the image can overtake the “intensity” of the original, occurs in many of exhibition’s works. The grafting of the real against the unreal to rearrange perception of reality also creates a discomfort. Another piece by Picasso in the exhibit, Guitar and Wineglass:
Here, headlines of atrocities lie next to the objects of everyday life. While the image description indicates the reference to the Balkan War in the headline is more about rivalry between artists of the time, the image is haunting. We often read headlines of war with gruesome facts and figures while simultaneously reading mundane stories or thinking about our next cup of coffee. Cubism fractures, experiments with, and challenges our understanding of “reality” by experiment as war does by force.
Finally, another refrain in Stein’s Picasso: the responsibility of writers and artists and creators to rise to the challenge of being able to see before others what is most true and original in their own time, to see before others “the contemporary.” In the text, Stein again illustrates her theory of the artist, using a wartime example:
Lord Grey said when the war broke out that the generals thought of a war of the nineteenth century even when the instruments of war were of the twentieth century and only when the war was at its height did the generals understand that it was a war of the twentieth century and not a war of the nineteenth century. That is what the academic spirit is, it is not contemporary, of course not, and so it can not be creative because the only thing that is creative in a creator is the contemporary thing. Of course.
Just as a general who fights with strategies and materials from a previous war cannot win a war in the present with ever changing strategies, visions, and weapons, the artist’s originality or genius, seeing what has not been seen before, must be contemporary. This theme comes up often in Stein’s writing. In fact the story of Lord Grey returns to illustrate a similar point in Stein’s “Composition as Explanation.” Lack of originality, relying on forms of the past instead of seeing more deeply into “the contemporary” or present, is death to the artist. Stein’s Picasso is an exemplar of one who sees so deeply into the present, the contemporary, he catches glimpses of a possible grim future.
Of course.
And so comes the “epilogue” to this very Steinian book Picasso:
“So the twentieth century is that, it is a time when everything cracks, where everything is destroyed, everything isolates itself, it is a more splendid thing than a period where everything follows itself.”
Echoing her first glimpse of the “Great War” with Picasso when they saw the camouflage truck in Paris on the boulevard Raspail, Stein sees Cubism imitating life (or life imitating the intensity of Cubism) again when she rides in an airplane across the United States and observes below fields and landscapes and wide swaths of colors moving in an out of patterns that can only be viewed from above.
.... a creator is contemporary, he understands what is contemporary when the contemporaries do not yet know it, but he is contemporary and as the twentieth century is a century which sees the earth as no one has ever seen it, the earth has a splendor that it never has had, and as everything destroys itself in the twentieth century and nothing continues, so then the twentieth century has a splendor which is its own and Picasso is of this century, he has that strange quality of an earth that one has never seen and of things destroyed as they have never been destroyed. So then Picasso has his splendor.
In the early years of Cubism, Picasso had not been on a plane, but he was able to see the world in different perspective before others did. In Stein’s portrayal, he saw the “splendor” of the earth that already existed before others did. And though it is not Picasso’s purpose, this similar ability to see the world in this new way also enables the technology that could destroy this earthly splendor.
Gertrude Stein’s book Picasso, and its epilogue was published in 1938. World War I was over, World War II was already brewing. The Basque city of Gernika was bombed by German and Italian forces had just happened in 1937, which Picasso famously portrayed that same year. Bombs would fall on Nagasaki and Hiroshima seven years later in August 1945, and Stein would die in July 1946.
The ending of this exploration turns back to the haunting abrupt ending of Stein’s much shorter A Completed Portrait of Picasso:
Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.
Resources:
Resources that sent me into a rabbit hole of distraction disguised as “research.” An exhilarating trip:
BBC Great Lives, Gertrude Stein. This witty portrait of Stein from the BBC contains a recording of Bertrand Cerf recounting a scene in which Picasso comes in with his poetry for Stein to read.
“A Face is a Face is a Face” https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/conservation-and-scientific-research/conservation-stories/2020/picasso-gertrude-stein
The Steins Collect A video of a series of lectures delivered during the 2012 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Avant-Garde. The lectures consider Steins work as a collector, writer, portrait muse, and purveyor of one of the most important salons of her time.
The National Portrait Gallery online exhibition: Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories
Gertrude Stein recites “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (From Open Culture)
Someone Says Yes to It” One of several of Janet Malcom’s pieces on Stein in the New Yorker. This one describes cutting up with a kitchen knife her 925-page copy of Stein’s The Making of Americans to read it more easily. Janet Malcom, not necessarily a Gertrude Stein fan, is among those who have investigated and asked important questions about Stein’s choices and activity during World War II.
Stein, Gertrude. Picasso (Dover Fine Art, History of Art). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.
Stein, Gertrude. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Vintage Books Edition, 1990. Kindle Edition.
Great show at the MET. Super interesting. I thought the jokes with signatures and signing their work was pretty cool. What made Picasso's signature authentic, by the way?
Thanks for your interesting observations of and responses to these particular paintings in a perhaps too vast exhibit. I think of Cubism as a useful, brief, segue for Picasso and others, and now might spend a little more time with it. P.S. In your third from last paragraph, I think you mean to cite WWI and WWII, but mention WW1 twice. Not fiction.