Famous Paintings: Portrait of Gertrude Stein
Posted by Susan Benford
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) was the rare famous painter whose influence on the history of painting was inarguable during his life. One of his earliest collectors was Gertrude Stein, an American expatriate who studied at Radcliffe and Harvard before becomg an early collector of avant-garde art paintings. With her brothers, Leo and Michael, Gertrude moved to Paris in1903 and shortly had a leading contemporary art collection as well as the leading salon for post World War II intellectuals, whom she defined as the "lost generation".
After meeting Picasso in 1905, she introduced him the next year to Henri Matisse; Picasso saw the Stein's early and expansive collection of Matisse's art paintings, including Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life). The prior year's Salone d' Automne marked the public arrival of Fauvism -- and Picasso's recognition of Matisse as a potential rival.
Completed that same year in 1906, the Portrait of Gertrude Stein foreshadowed the creation of Cubism, a movement that arose from collaboration between Picasso and Georges Braque from 1908 to 1912. These co-founders discarded the Renaissance conception of painting as translation of three dimensional form onto the flat picture plane of a canvas through perspective and illusionistic drawing. Instead, the Cubists contended that objects didn't have any fixed or absolute form, so that every vantage point could be captured in one pictorial whole.
Gertrude Stein later reported that it took ninety sittings for Picasso to complete her portrait. He portrays her in an untraditional yet confident pose, with her right arm and hand contoured and the left flat and stiff. Her bulk floods the picture frame, leaving her lifeless and more like a stone statue than flesh-and-blood. Her hair seems placed on her head rather than growing there. Most significantly, her mask-life face -- the hurdle that
Portrait of Gertrude Stein. 39 3/8 x 32 in. Bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946 (47.106). Metropolitan Museum of Art.
necessitated repeated sittings -- hints at the distortions that hallmark Analytic Cubism. The black outlines around the eyes, the harsh value contrast atthe eyebrows, and the misshapen eyes
Demoiselles d'Avignon. Oil on canvas, 1907/ 8' x 7'8". Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (333.1939). Museum of Modern Art. portend the faces in Demoiselles d'Avignon (Women of Avignon), arguably his most brilliant and controversial art painting.
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