by Lucy Daniel
The Steins’ Saturday nights were indispensable for Picasso. He was depending on Leo and Gertrude’s money — to live, and to rent a second studio in which to work — but the cachet of appearing on their walls alongside Matisse, Gauguin, Cézanne, Renoir and Manet was invaluable. It was undoubtedly a self-serving relationship for each; Picasso attracted people to Stein, but Stein helped make Picasso famous. In reality the point of intersection for Stein and Picasso came when they were young, and as they got older they grew apart (though they remained friends until her death). However, their shared youth was an extraordinary time, and theirs was an extraordinarily deep friendship which grew from an immediate recognition of affinity. The artistic alliance that Stein keenly played up was no piece of fakery.
Quite apart from finding in her his protectress, there is no doubt that the portrait Picasso painted of Stein was remarkably important to his development. Far from over-egging this in the autobiography, Gertrude Stein tells the story of Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein with languid wit, and a Twainian, deliberately simple-sounding: ‘they do not either of them know how it came about. Anyway it did.’20
By the time she wrote The Autobiography (1932) Stein was very good at creating an image of her own cultural significance by stressing her importance to male artists and writers. It became a pattern in her career, and it worked; it is now a commonplace to link Stein’s writing with Picasso’s painting, though his work is less immediately associated with hers: with the woman, yes — with the writer, hardly at all. Picasso confessed that he never understood Stein’s work. Their mutual influence was at the level of personal rapport and exchange of ideas. There is a question about how detailed their aesthetic dialogues can have been, considering that when they met their only common language was a limited French in which neither of them were yet great or even adept conversationalists. But over 80 or 90 sittings, after three months of staring at each other, a mutual fascination and allegiance grew. In Picasso Stein had met a friend with whom she could trade analogies to her craft.21 Picasso, she felt, was an equal, and importantly for her he was a male one. And Stein was making her own portrait while Picasso was painting his. As she later wrote: ‘She had come to like posing, the long still hours followed by a long dark walk intensified the concentration with which she was creating her sentences.’22 During the sittings, Stein was composing ‘Melanctha’, and Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s lover, as Gertrude became her confidante, gave more than a little of herself, her languid sensuality and proud demeanour, to that character.
Every afternoon Stein made her way up to Picasso’s studio in the Bateau-Lavoir, and on Saturdays he and Fernande might accompany her back to the rue de Fleurus for dinner and conversation, and so the Stein salons prospered; when Picasso entered the Steins’ circle he brought his friends, and so enlarged and changed it. Those he brought along included the crowd of writers and artists who already got together at the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse, including the poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire. More and more visitors began to come, to see the people as well as the paintings. The Saturday evening meetings would start at 9 o’clock and go on until the early hours.
The self-confidence, the impudence of the American siblings in setting themselves up as the authority on the new art movement in Paris can hardly be overstated. Their cosmopolitanism and a certain outcast status worked in their favour — the pair were disdained by genteel acquaintances, and banned from the Café Royal23 for not wearing proper shoes (even though their sandals were made by Isadora Duncan’s brother). Their salon became a meeting place for artists and writers of different nationalities and backgrounds, where niceness and propriety could be left at the door; this was no snobby institution. For one thing, although they were seen as ‘the Stein corporation’ for their mercantile prowess, the Steins could not afford to be snobby. And as Gertrude wryly put it in later years: ‘I don’t mind meeting anyone once.’
In the early years, Blaise Cendrars, Robert Delaunay, Matisse’s friend André Derain, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti could all be seen at the Steins’; people such as Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell, Ford Madox Ford, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and George Moore ‘turned up’ from across the Channel. Marsden Hartley, Elie Nadelman, Alfred Maurer, Walter Pach and Maurice Sterne were among a permanent contingent of American artists. Guillaume Apollinaire was one of the main stars, a sort of master of ceremonies. He wrote a short tribute to the Stein frères (another of their nicknames), an elegant, whimsical doff of his cap to the siblings, whom he thought of erroneously as ‘millionaires’: ‘Their bare feet shod in sandals Delphic / They raise to heaven their brows scientific’.24 Their fame was fast growing, and these were self-consciously portentous times. Stein witnessed the celebrated performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, where Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography caused riotous uproar (there she met Carl Van Vechten, the music critic for the New York Times who would become a lifelong friend); she lived among the crowd where Futurism, Orphism, Vorticism, Dadaism and modernism’s many otherisms were to be born. A time of egoism and manifestos, and the context in which Stein eventually felt herself able to make her own grand, self-mythologizing, artistic statements.
Of course these meetings took place because of the paintings; the Steins would otherwise not have been at the centre of such an in-crowd. But once the Saturday evenings began, the personalities of the host and hostess became as much a draw as the art. Both were impossible to ignore. Leo with his nervous energy and his constant theorizing, Gertrude with her serene intelligence, a great listener, practically silent in these early days, apart from her well-known laugh (so hearty it was compared to ‘a beefsteak’25 ). Alfred Stieglitz said he had never known anyone sit so long without talking. Her quietness may have been down to the fact that she was still learning French. Later she would fire unnerving questions at the guests. Vying with such a profusion of talented and vociferous men was a crucial part of her self-determination; it was no shrinking violet who would make her mark.
Stein’s new, star-studded life as an accidental, if natural-born, Paris salonière contrasted sharply with her private life as a writer; here in the atelier on the rue de Fleurus the writing habits of a lifetime began, and her writing life, as her apartment filled with people, was necessarily solitary. An important condition of Stein’s writing life in France was that it left her linguistically isolated. She relished the fact that the language surrounding her was not English; while the daily business of life might be conducted in French, she would not write in French until very late in her career, in 1938, her book Picasso being her first sustained effort to do so. It was an accident, not a planned manoeuvre, that she ended up in a place that gave her what she saw as this linguistic freedom, ‘all alone with my English and myself’, as she wrote in The Autobiography.26 Most of the people around her could not read what she wrote, but anyway at first they did not even know that she wrote.
She loved the perverse privacy of this double life, that nobody intruded on or made demands of her as a writer. She wrote through the night and went to bed at dawn. Hidden away upstairs she began writing in pencil in French children’s schoolbooks of the kind she would use for the rest of her life. Here there was freedom from her teachers’ sanctions about her style that had made her revise her work, and her famous refusal to edit began during the writing of The Making of Americans as she nurtured the belief, and later clung to it desperately, that the more she put into it the better, or truer, it would somehow be, willing it to become her magnum opus. Solitude, and deliberate artistic loneliness, imbue that book, and became its self-reflecting subject.
By 1906 Picasso had nearly completed his portrait of Stein, but he was dissatisfied with it and finding it hard to finish, so, as Stein put it, he ‘painted out the whole head’.27 Stein went off to Fiesole for the summer (where there was another colony of American writers and artists surrounding Bernard Berenson, the art critic). And then, after all that time spent gazing a
t her impressive and inscrutable face, Picasso completed her head without her. John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, calls Stein’s head ‘this little area of repaint that won Gertrude recognition as one of the most familiar twentieth-century icons’.28 It is not her face. It is Picasso’s idea of her face, made of his impressions of her as much as what she looked like: a mask, and one of her many masks.
When friends complained that Stein did not resemble the great, prismatic face and the huge androgynous body, the heaped flesh and folds of girth, Picasso’s shrugged shoulder of an answer was simple: ‘she will’.29 Characteristically unperturbed by the fact that he had painted her portrait by removing her head, or decapitating her, Stein said of the portrait that it was more herself than she was, in a typically tricksy comment on identity. ‘It is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me’, she wrote in Picasso.30 Hers is a happy re-appropriation of her own image, because Picasso had created an image of her that would become famous on the other side of the Atlantic in her native country before she herself did. She loved it, and was often photographed with it. It became the first of the icons of her celebrity and as such it was priceless. He gave it to her, free of charge.
Stein is at her most Sphinx-like in this portrait, in which Picasso used a ‘very small palette’ of unbecoming brown and grey.31 Picasso’s Stein seems to be listening and confiding at the same time, or perhaps about to impart some insightful gem. It was the pose in which she might have sat with Picasso and discussed their future careers, their fantasies of triumphant future burglaries in which the intruder would make off with his pictures and her writing instead of money or silver. The art critic Roger Fry published the portrait in The Burlington Magazine, next to a portrait by Raphael, suggesting that both were of equal importance. What came after it was ‘the heroic age of Cubism’ (Max Jacob’s phrase), on which Stein continued to dine out for the rest of her life.
This portrait would stay on Stein’s walls for 40 years (surviving the German occupation during the Second World War), until she died. Then Alice Toklas was its guardian, until it was sent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the first of Picasso’s works to be acquired by that institution. Alice wrote about the day it was removed for shipping. Picasso came round and they mourned together over the loss of Gertrude and their youth. ‘Neither you nor I will ever see it again’, said Picasso.32
There is no doubt that during the painting of this portrait, particularly in the solution to the problem of her face, Picasso resolved issues that would lead him to the transition to Cubism. Perhaps talking to her also helped clarify his ideas, but her image certainly inspired him. Richardson reproduces a series of Gertrude Stein ‘look-alikes’ in Picasso’s work from around this time, 1906.33 No doubt intrigued by her lesbianism, he was depicting pairs of women who shared her robust frame. The nudes seem to be modelled on Stein, and the new kind of femininity which she seemed to represent. In 1906–7 Picasso was working on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which could be seen as the first Cubist painting, and the studies for which were acquired by Stein. His portrait of Gertrude Stein, a kind of rejoinder to Matisse’s portrait of Madame Matisse (also on the Steins’ walls), enabled a breakthrough in his style, which was one of the paths by which he recreated twentieth-century art. Indeed, her claims in The Autobiography were not so exaggerated after all.
Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, 1906, oil on canvas.
Nevertheless Stein did not buy a Cubist painting until 1911, and it was according to Leo the first painting at the rue de Fleurus that she had been solely responsible for purchasing. Stein was not a connoisseur in the same way that her brother was. She liked things she could relate to herself and her work. She immediately grasped the ways in which Cubism unlocked the possibilities of expression and description that could also be applied to literature; she too was moving away from realistic copying from life and beginning to appreciate the interception of the artist’s consciousness as the thing of major interest. From Picasso she said that she also learnt that true artistic creation was necessarily ugly.34 It was up to the followers of greatness to make art beautiful. Like Picasso she became, according to her own natural leanings, an iconoclast. In the late 1930s, when she wrote Picasso, she saw him as an inventor, and by extension herself also, in the tradition of Edison and Ford. She linked herself with Picasso because his work was ugly but maybe he was a genius — and maybe she was too. Leo’s adverse reaction to Cubism also spurred her into liking it; it was her reaction against him and his intellectual dominance. Also, Picasso appealed to her vanity. In 1912 he painted her calling card into The Architect’s Table — a canny move in order to get her to buy it, at a time when her financial interest in his work was flagging. She then started buying more of his Cubist works, as well as those of Juan Gris, although it cannot be denied that the earlier Picassos, the Cézannes and the Matisses that Leo had first fostered and gone out of his way to get hold of were better works of art.35
Gertrude’s art appreciation was more limited than her brother’s, though she did make her own independent purchases as well as choosing them with him. It was not surprising that the first painting Marie Laurencin ever sold was to Gertrude Stein, considering that it was a portrait of the habitués of the Stein salon, which was why Stein wanted it: another prop for the reputation. Like salon ladies of old, who commissioned portraits of themselves by the members of their own circle, Stein gathered laurels and homages from all the young and talented people around her. But she was happy to leave the role of art critic to Leo, for the while to be touched with genius by association, spurred on by an image of herself eventually basking in the limelight of literary creation. The Picasso portrait was her talisman.
The salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, c. 1912.
In Picasso Stein writes that everyone was ‘disconcerted’ by the things Picasso was creating; it was her ambition that she too would disconcert with what she had come up with during their months together. In 1906, after sitting for Picasso, Stein completed the stories she had been working on the previous winter, eventually published as Three Lives. These ‘three lives’ are three portraits, written while sitting underneath Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne with a Fan, so the legend has it.36
The three stories of black and immigrant working women were to be the making of Stein’s genuine reputation as a writer, and remained at its heart for many years. They are still the most widely taught of her works. Three Lives differs from what came after it in the Stein oeuvre because it is still fairly easy to gather its meaning in a traditional way; in other words, the story is still fairly straightforward. Nevertheless at the time it was seen as a bewildering breakthrough in style. It caused Israel Zangwill to lament: ‘And I always thought she was such a healthy minded young woman, what a terrible blow this must be for her poor dear brother.’37 He would not be the last to mourn for her sanity. Stein reported this story with relish, but throughout her career, while her experiments and involutions, repetitions and departures became ever more radical and braver, she remained adamant that the language she was using was transparent and easily understood.
Three Lives was really the last point at which Stein’s writing touched the ground, or rather the moment it took flight. The use of immigrant speech patterns in the two flanking stories ‘The Good Anna’ and ‘The Gentle Lena’ made them remarkable, but ‘Melanctha’ was the story that broke the mould. This was the beginning of her lifelong struggle to represent consciousness in words, ‘the problem’, as Edmund Wilson put it in a 1929 review of Stein’s Useful Knowledge, ‘of language itself’.38
The book began as ‘Three Histories’, written at the instigation of Leo, who thought Stein might try her hand at translating Flaubert’s Trois Contes to improve her French. Both this book and Cézanne’s paintings used working-class subjects. In her notebooks, Stein admired Flaubert and Cézanne both for their emotional attachment to their means of expression rather than emotional investment in their characters or subjects. In looking at Cézanne’s pain
ting she understood that her version of realism need not be about verisimilitude, and that — although on the surface the subject of Three Lives seems to coincide with that of American literary naturalists such as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, or even that of Israel Zangwill — in fact she was not very interested in being a realistic novelist. She was more interested in revealing the way the mind worked.
Her ‘realism’, then, in Three Lives, was an attempt to get at an inner value, an inner reality. The spatial relationships between objects or people, as Leo had taught her, were paramount in Cézanne. The painting became a separate object, rather than a pretence to exact representation. So, ‘Melanctha’ is ‘about’ the way the characters move in relation to each other.39 This painterly metaphor allowed her to step back and look at the language itself and make of it an object seen from various angles, allowed her to be analytical of language and description and dialogue as parts of a composition. Her implicit notion of making demands on the reader is partly down to Cézanne, as is her idea that each element of the composition is as important as the next.
