Gertrude Stein on Picasso

I picked up THIS little volume at the Picasso show in Toronto a few days ago and read it on the road.

And of course, Stein had every right to author this little booklet, being one of the first to discover Picasso and in general one of the best observers and promoters of early 20th century Paris culture, along with being a very significant writer herself. It wouldn’t surprise me if future historians of 20th century culture give her an even more prominent place than she now holds in accounts of that period.

The style of the Picasso book is laced with Steinish mannerisms, just as one would expect, but it’s only annoying for a few pages and then starts becoming quite fascinating.

She’s very inconsistent on chronology, which can be confusing. On one page a certain period in Picasso’s career is said to last from year X to year Y, and on another page it’s said to run from year X to year Z instead.

There are also some things early in the book that sound absurd but turn out not to be absurd. For example, in Steinish fashion she repeats about three times that she understood Picasso because America and Spain have something in common when you think about it. The repetition of this apparently arbitrary and even bizarre claim sounds like something a deliberately stupefied first person novel narrator character would say. But then when you get a bit further into the booklet, Stein explains what she means by this, and it makes more sense the more you start thinking about it. In fact, there are several first-rate cultural observations in there about various European countries that will stick with me.

In general, Stein’s Picasso is a solitary Spanish genius. He doesn’t learn from prolonged rivalry with Matisse, as many art historians have it. He doesn’t begin to decline after the late 1920’s, as Clement Greenberg has it. He doesn’t even learn that much from collaboration with Braque, in Stein’s opinion. Instead, each new phase is triggered by a return visit to Spain that washes away the Parisian veneer of his life and returns him to Spanish things, which for Stein includes a taste of Arabia, a taste of Africa, a calligraphic view of art, and a sense that human landscapes are fundamentally in disharmony with nature and shouldn’t be made to harmonize with nature (this is one of those points where Stein thinks Spain and America overlap).

In any case, when it comes to Picasso, Gertrude Stein has certainly earned a fair hearing, and this 50-page book is worth a read.