Pablo Picasso, portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906

(Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso lived in Paris in 1906. They liked each other and continued a friendship for many years. The avant-garde American authoress Gertrude Stein resided with her brother Leo in the Rue de Fleurus. Gertrude Stein conducted weekly salons in her Paris apartment and became the focus for European and American artists and writers. She was quick to embrace the artistic revolution in Europe and provided support to Matisse, Braque, Gris, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. Over time the Stein's apartment housed a substantial collection of modern art, which increased by regular purchases and their good judgment in such a way that at times four or five pictures hung one over the other on the walls. Already famous artists' works were mixed with the pictures of unknown artists.

Picasso was at that time neither famous nor rich and the appreciation of the Steins and their picture purchases brought gradually a little light into the poor life in the "Bateau Lavoir" studio of the young Picasso. The Steins and Picasso felt an immediate affinity and Picasso reserved a special affection for the authoress Gertrude, who wanted to free the language from contents in the area of the literature. She wrote experimental novels using techniques of flowing consciousness associations and rhythmic repetitions. A feedback of the language on itself - like a feedback of the painting on  their elements, for example on cubic basic forms as well as the simultaneous  description of article in the Cubism -- connects Gertrude Stein and Picasso. Both found creativity by reducing or eliminating the contents and breaking through traditional limits. At the beginning of their acquaintance, Picasso asked Gertrude Stein to sit for him. It was at the end of his Harlequin period and before he took up Cubism. It is the first time that he had worked with a model since he was  sixteen years old. Stein describes the beginning of many tormenting meetings as follows: "Picasso sits on the chair edge, the nose to the canvas, a tiny pallet in the hand, whose colours consist of a uniform gray-brown mass; and thus he begins to paint." After approximately 80 sittings he suddenly scraped the head from the canvas and leaves the work unfinished. The face, which had pleased Gertrude Stein's friends so well, was now only a smeared place. With Fernande, Picasso traveled first to Barcelona and spends the summer months in the Pyrenees. There, in Gosol and Horta de Ebro, he again changes his style. He paints more restfully, almost monochromatically. The figures become more sculptural, the faces appear immobile and mask-like, similar to the strict archaic Iberian sculptures and the chapel frescos of the Catalan Romanesque period. An important step is made, which leads Picasso directly into the new "period negre." Returned to Paris, Picasso painted the face onto the painting from memory without again seeing Stein. Thus the face is paint largely, strictly, sharp-edged and immovably like a mask, while the hands and the rest of the picture seem rounder and more softly painted. The dark draping of the garb forms a circle with the hands. The hair seems strict and without transition to the new face. The playful bright scarf leads the viewer to the hands. Always, however, the viewer is drawn back to the strict face with the unequal heavy lidded eyes. Picasso's recent encounters with African, Roman and Iberian sculpture are all evident. The association of the picture is created by the nearly monochrome colors, in which the light-dark contrast plays the most important role. Face, hands and scarf shine out from the picture and create a spatial tension. Beautifully, the warm red-brown tone of the background reflects itself in ear and brooch and animates the asymmetrically sitting person in the picture. The renouncement of realistic details becomes particularly visible in the completely unworked ear. The image offers an attitude of active and strong dignity: no feeling values, no uncertainties, and no conventional beauty and appeal. Instead, it seems like a "sculpture" with the new conceptions of area, volume and mass, in which particularly the face progresses into abstraction.

Despite the unusual representational form, Gertrude Stein liked this portrait, and the other new works Picasso brought from Gosol and Horta de Ebro. When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will."

Christel Arnold, Paul and Barbara Hoffstein.

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