Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso

Gertrude Stein's Personal Vision Of Pablo Picasso

Gertrude Stein's novel Picasso shows the engagement of a great literary artist with that of a great artist of the canvas. It melds Stein's forceful, direct, and spare prose with the images of Picasso and images of the artists that inspired his work. Stein hoped to create images with her words, of childlike sparseness and clarity, a similar aim, she states, of Picasso's art. Thus, her book is both illustrative, in the sense that it shows a titanic author of letters grappling with the similar implications of the 'plastic' arts in the modern world, though also rather biased, given that Stein's ego as an author occasionally causes her to see her own artistic aims in the artistic works of Picasso.

Stein states that Picasso rendered himself through the bodies of other individuals, creating not a visual exhibition of prostitutes in his first foray into cubism, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, but rather a text of his inner self and life. But Stein's tendency to look into a mirror rather into Picasso's own work can be seen in her stress upon repetition in this and other parts of Picasso's collective works. Stein's own use of the literary technique of repetition was extremely effective. It is true that Picasso did make use of similar shapes and images in this first cubist work. He also used reoccurring motifs of color, as evidenced in the paintings of the blue and rose periods that form the focus of a number of Stein's works upon the artist, as well as the browns and grays of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Picasso also was fond of looking at repeatedly returning to subjects whom he had relationships with, such as his later series of "Dora" portraits, a commonality of Stein, whose most famous work is her Autobiography of her lover Alice B. Toklas, a woman who made a frequent 'appearance' in Stein's literary works.

But repetition as an artistic technique is really only evidenced in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in shapes used to portray the women. No singular individual comes to the focus. Only the repetitive 'triangularity' of the female structures is in evidence. But even though the work may be structured around relatively simple and similar shapes, the overall effect upon the viewer is not repetitive, unlike the effect of Stein's prose. Rather the effect is of a harsh and angular world. Stein's prose, with its use of similar phrase structures and vocabulary, does strike the reader as repetitive. Stein's repetition might be better compared to the work of another artist, that of Andy Warhol, whom once said, upon the sight of a repeated image, better and emptier one feels. Picasso's work is more asymmetrical in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and leaves the viewer feeling anything but empty.

However, Stein's analysis of Picasso cannot be completely dismissed, particularly as she brings to the forefront a number of factors about Picasso's background that might have been otherwise lost, given the increasingly international view of this formative artist. For instance, Stein stresses the Spanish aspect and influence upon Picasso's art. The return to the artist's native Spain, she says, spawned the tones of his 'blue' period. The monotony or repetition of the tones of Spain and the blue period she sees as an enrichment of Picasso's art and a spawn of his innovations of cubism, which required a level of self-examination the comparatively bright tones of France and Picasso's rose period did not fully bring forth from the artist's soul. The mask-like primitivism and earth tones of Picasso seem to justify Stein's analysis of the importance of the artist's cultural origins, on this point. Also, it is observed that the glass-like or broken quality of the world the women inhabit in the painting may reflect the artist's sense of despair, rather than any physical quality of the studio where the work was painted.

The 'broken' texture of the background of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ties into why Stein sees a kinship between herself and Picasso. Stein states that she feels such a connection between their two artistic aims because, that rather than seeing the 'subject' of painting as something on the outside, and relying upon models, Picasso attempted to create 'himself' in his art. In other words, in looking at Picasso's early forays into cubism, one does not see the image of the individuals portrayed, but how Picasso saw himself reflected in their forms. The jagged life of the Demoiselles of the Paris streets is not what the painting is 'about' rather it is how they reflect Picasso's point-of-view. An online guide to the painting notes that indeed, Picasso called the work his "first exorcism painting" and hoped to use the masks upon the women as a way to ward off disease in a folkloric manner. "A specific danger he had in mind was life-threatening sexual disease, a source of considerable anxiety in Paris at the time." (MoMa Online, 2003)

Stein also stresses the childlike nature of Picasso's work, an effect that is indeed similar to the simplicity of her own prose. Again, rather than the artist's repetitive quality, this may be a more 'fair' statement to make about the artist. Picasso stated, according to Stein, that he attempted to recreate the childlike point-of-view in his own works, to focus on only a few features, rather than upon a detailed multitude. Again, the self rather than the subject's recognition is in evidence, for rather than rendering the mother's soul in its entirety, or in this case, the prostitute's souls, the artist shows how he sees them in a childlike fashion -- as an eye or a nose, like a child recognizes his or her mother across the room. Similarly, Stein's own encapsulation of Picasso in prose is admittedly limited, childlike and direct and confined to only a few features -- yet potent in the spare nature of these details.