On Picasso and Stein
By B.P.
If the subject of Gertrude Stein were to ever come up in conversation, most people, including myself, would find themselves at a loss for words. I mean, where do you even start? She’s one of “those” writers, a general of the old guard, the kind to have a whole unit in the back of every modern lit textbook. But I admired her only from a distance. If you know, you know, and if you don’t, you need only to look at any paragraph of hers to figure out why: In every conventional sense, Gertrude Stein feels impossible to read.
“They were in a way both gay there where there were many cultivating something. They were both regular inbeing gay there. Helen Furr was gay there, she was gayer and gayer there and really she was just gay there,she was gayer and gayer there, that is to say she found ways of being gay there that she was using in being gay there. She was gay there, not gayer and gayer, just gay there, that is to say she was not gayer by using the things she found there that were gay things, she was gay there, always she was gay there.”
– Miss Furr and Miss Skeene, 1923
She uses no shorthand, rarely abides by grammar and punctuation, uses exhaustingly long run-on sentences full of repetitions and repetitions and repetitions with no line breaks and, at all times, seems to write as if in opposition to the concept of pleasurable, comprehensive reading. It drove me mad. Why read her, when I could read the work of someone that would meet me halfway, with the knowledge, language, and sensibilities that we both shared? Never did it seem worth the strain, and yet, undeniably, in that seemingly jumbled pile of words, no writer I know has been able to articulate ideas so beyond the bounds of conventional thought. When I was younger, it frustrated me. In her impossible-to-cite work was a confounding kind of singular, internal logic which seemed so far beyond my grasp.
So when I came across that first paragraph of Picasso, a short biography Stein wrote about her dear friend and muse Pablo Picasso, I decided to try again. Not that I had much choice in the matter; No matter how hard I resisted, those uncompromising opening lines grabbed me by the neck and shook.
“Painting in the nineteenth century was only done in France and by Frenchmen, apart from that, painting did not exist, in the twentieth century it was done in France but by Spainiards.” – Picasso, 1938
Picasso, at its heart, is a long form essay disguised as biography. All the hallmarks of Stein’s style appear here, but with an altogether muted color. It begins with Picasso’s birth, running all the way to the date of writing in 1938. The short 50 pages are a relatively quaint stroll through the moments between his exhibitions, observing his afternoon tea times, his poise and opinions, his excursions in Persian calligraphy and African sculpture. But still, it was difficult to parse – like all of her work, Stein is able to condense the whole of her subject into just a few confounding sentences.
Stein asserts that it was with his portrait of her, a few months into their burgeoning friendship, that marked the beginning of his search for cubism.
For Picasso, she says, there was always the signature sight – but little ability to articulate it. Stein argues that for him, cubism was something that came later, and, more so than that, had little to do with his true aims. For most of his life, Picasso would struggle with the fundamental barrier between representation and reality: the two dimensions of a canvas against the four (or maybe eleven) of reality.
“He commenced the long struggle not to express what he could see but not to express the things he did not see, that is to say the things everybody is certain of seeing but which they do not really see. As I have already said, in looking at a friend one only sees one feature of her face or another, in fact Picasso was not at all simple…he did not wish to paint the things that he himself did not see, the other painters satisfied themselves with the appearance, and always the appearance, which was not at all what they could see but what they knew was there.
There is a difference.”“But after all, this problem remained, how to express not the things seen in association but the things really seen, not things interpreted but things really known at the time of knowing them. – with the exception of some African sculpture, no one had ever tried to express things seen not as one knows them but as they are when one sees them without remembering having looked at them.”
But this so-called problem seemed trivial to me. What did she mean by “seen in association”, or the “things really seen”? When I was a kid I thought his humility to be an excuse for a primitive, performative style. So often I’ve been told of his qualities as a master, but in a way that alienated me further. I didn’t know how to see it, nor could I, with any confidence, say I saw any semblance of the “real world” in those scratchy drawings.
“One must never forget that the reality of the twentieth century is not the reality of the nineteenth century, not at all and Picasso was the only one in painting who felt it…Matisse and all the others saw the twentieth century with their eyes but they saw the reality of the nineteenth century, Picasso was the only one in painting who saw the twentieth century with his eyes and saw its reality and consequently his struggle was terrifying, terrifying for himself and for others, because he had nothing to help him, the past did not help him, nor the present…”
As expected of an artist’s biography, peppered throughout the book are reprints of his work, all equally befuddling. But as I kept struggling through, I began to notice a change. I tried to stop seeing what I expected to see: a portrait, a picture, paint on canvas, a cubist work. Forget everything I knew about painting, about portraiture, about color and shape. Without labels and pretense, what did I see?
First the eyes. The way they faced both away and towards each other. Their contour towards the ears, back down to the chin, into the lapel. Down those gentle, sloped shoulders to the back, wrapping all the way around to the hips, down to the hands... Slowly, I began to see the “whole” of something, appropriated and rendered through the medium of shape and color. Sleeves, collars, a boyish complexion began to form in my mind. Like a stereo photograph, what I once saw as disparities began to pull together into a visage, both the side and front and back, all at once. Understanding this fundamental aspect, of “seeing,” of “deconstruction,” is when it struck me that Picasso and Stein were fundamentally similar in their approach. This painting in particular reminded me of something I’d read of hers a long time ago. In an old college textbook I found that first poem in Stein’s Tender Buttons:
A Carafe, That Is A Blind Glass.
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
I read it again and again until it hit me: My struggle to understand, to cease being a bystander in my understanding, was in itself the truest form of seeing. It wasn’t the painting, it was me. And it was then that I began to see something.
In the current zeitgeist, Stein’s subject may seem small and insignificant. But in Picasso, I see a philosophy that extends far beyond the sight of any century, one that attempts to capture the “reality we cannot see” that many, like Picasso, spend their entire lives trying to express. In the parlors of Stein’s Parisian home, what was developed was not any particular style, or any concept hinged on the avant garde, but something as detached from “art” as possible.
Being a member of the 21st century, it is impossible to say whether or not either of these visionaries succeeded in capturing reality. Yet this is what I’ve learned through them:
We live in a world of patchwork. Most everything has been defined for us from the second we are born. We are told what society is supposed to look like, what a good person is supposed to look like, what a bad person is supposed to look like. We bring a farmer’s market mentality to the supermarket, a sports mentality to war and tragedy, a spectacle irony to the terrifying – anything to make the world seem digestible.
But now, more than ever, as our definitions of gender, politics, and religion are falling apart, I can’t help but ask myself: have I ever really seen anything for what it actually is? When I look out into the world through the detached lens of my phone, whose eyes am I looking through?
Picasso exhausted me more than any textbook or novel I’d ever read. But this difficulty, I assure you, is well worth the effort. I recommend Picasso because Stein's body of work, though undeniably rooted in its time, transcends any particular era in its meaning. More than a biography, Stein’s Picasso is a treatise on seeing in its most digestible form.
“One must not forget that the earth seen from an airplane is more splendid than the earth seen from an automobile. The automobile is the end of progress on the earth, it goes quicker but essentially the landscapes seen from an automobile are the same as the landscapes seen from a carriage, a train, a wagon, or in walking. But the earth seen from an airplane is something else. So the twentieth century is not the same as the nineteenth century and it is very interesting knowing that Picasso has never seen the earth from an airplane, that being of the twentieth century he inevitably knew that the earth is not the same as in the nineteenth century, he knew it, he made it, inevitably he made it different and what he made is a thing that now all the earth can see.”
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Twenty-year-old B.P. is a rising Junior currently residing in the New England area. He served as a Cheuse Center intern and helped organize and curate the inaugural Cheuse Center Busboys and Poets Lecture, delivered by Azar Nafisi in April 2023, at the Sherwood Community Center in Fairfax, Virginia.
Other Essays from B.P.
Knife: On The Outline Of The Divisible World
Bookmarks: The 9 Books Which Defined My Year