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 becoming an early collector of avant-garde art paintings. With her brothers, Leo and Michael, Gertrude moved to Paris in 1903; 
shortly she owned 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 artwork, including Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life). The prior year's
Portrait of Gertrude Stein. 39 3/8 x 32 in. Bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946 (47.106). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Salone d' Automne marked the public arrival of Fauvism -- and Picasso's recognition of Matisse as a potential rival.
Completed in 1906, the Portrait of Gertrude Stein (above) foreshadowed the creation of Cubism, a movement that arose from collaboration between Picasso and Georges Braque during 1908 to 1912. These co-founders discarded the Renaissance conception of painting as the 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 necessitated repeated sittings -- hints at the distortions that hallmark Analytic Cubism. The black outlines around her eyes, the harsh value contrast at the eyebrows, and the misshapen eyes portend the faces in Demoiselles d'Avignon (Women of Avignon), arguably the best known of Picasso paintings.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Oil on canvas, 1907/ 8' x 7'8". Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (333.1939). Museum of Modern Art. 
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