Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein , 1905–06, oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking at Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:11] Standing in this gallery, filled with paintings from the early 20th century, this really fits in, but the problem with that is that we don’t recognize necessarily how revolutionary this painting seemed in 1906 when Picasso completed it.
Dr. Zucker: [0:23] There’s a famous anecdote that goes with this painting. Stein was an important collector. She was a poet and a writer. She asked Picasso to paint her portrait. According to Stein, she visited Picasso’s studio 90 times.
Dr. Harris: [0:35] At the end of months of sitting, he actually scraped away what he had done on the face and came back to it later. Although he spent 90 sittings, the face itself was not painted with Stein in front of him.
[0:46] The story that you alluded to is that when people saw this portrait, they said, “This looks nothing like her.” Picasso is said to have responded, “Everybody thinks she is not at all like her portrait, but never mind, in the end, she will manage to look just like it.”
Dr. Zucker: [1:00] Which is about the primacy of the portrait, the idea that the portrait will live on.
Dr. Harris: [1:05] A portrait by the great artist Pablo Picasso of Gertrude Stein, this is the way that we remember her.
Dr. Zucker: [1:10] Which calls into question, what is the function of a portrait? Is it likeness? This particular portrait may look more like an ancient Iberian sculpture, one of the archaic figures that Picasso was then studying, than Gertrude Stein’s own facial features.
Dr. Harris: [1:23] Which is an odd thing because a portrait for hundreds of years was about likeness. This is not about how she looked, but it is very much a portrait of her presence.
Dr. Zucker: [1:32] What a powerful presence. She’s got this great sense of gravity. That mask-like face seems to come towards us.
Dr. Harris: [1:38] She leans forward. Her body is in the shape of a pyramid, so you do have all that weight at the bottom of the canvas.
Dr. Zucker: [1:45] We know that Picasso was looking at several other earlier portraits, notably Ingres’ “Portrait of Monsieur Bertin” at the Louvre as well as two other portraits that Stein owned, one by Cézanne of his wife and one by Matisse of his wife.
Dr. Harris: [1:59] Clearly, Picasso has borrowed from all three of those paintings. There are aspects of them that inform his painting of Gertrude Stein. This is really radically different, especially that mask-like face, the disjunction between the eyes, the flatness of the plane of her face. These are things that don’t look right.
Dr. Zucker: [2:19] The sitter felt that this was the truest portrait that had ever been made of her.
Dr. Harris: [2:24] In fact, she wrote, “For me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I.” Although this isn’t about a likeness, she felt that this portrait really represented her.
Dr. Zucker: [2:35] Stein also asserted that she did in words what Picasso would do in paint. Stein was looking at words as if they were the kind of material that could be constructed and reconstructed as one places strokes on a canvas.
Dr. Harris: [2:47] Speaking of strokes on a canvas, we really see evidence of the artist’s work here. There are places where the paint is applied very thickly, for example in her fingers, even though they still seem very abstracted and unfinished. There are also places — for example, around the shawl that has a clasp around her neck — there’s areas of paint that are very thin, where we can almost see the canvas underneath.
Dr. Zucker: [3:09] There’s a tension here between Picasso’s love of illusionism and his interest in beginning to undo that illusion.
Dr. Harris: [3:16] The conventions of illusionism that had come down in European art beginning in the Renaissance just didn’t speak to the late 19th and early 20th century, and so this searching for a new visual language, both in African art and in ancient art or pre-classical art, where figures are represented very abstractly. This finding in abstraction [of] force and power and alternative language.
Dr. Zucker: [3:43] Look at the way that he’s finding the angles of the forms of her face, almost as if it’s a kind of architecture.
Dr. Harris: [3:49] The right side of her face seems to be at a sharp angle to the front of her face because of how stark that shadow is on the right side.
Dr. Zucker: [3:57] The left side of her face is further away from us. Her face is turned even though we have as much access to the left eye as we do to the right.
Dr. Harris: [4:05] The eyes are also very much abstracted. They’re not given a lot of expressiveness.
Dr. Zucker: [4:11] It’s as if the eyes are behind that mask.
Dr. Harris: [4:13] Portraits often have things in them that help us to identify the interests and personality of the sitter. If we think about Manet’s “Portrait of Zola,” for example, we have his library, images of art that he was interested in in the background, but here the background is sketchy.
[4:29] It’s even hard to make out the left side of that chair. It is a painting that refuses to give us the information that portraits generally are supposed to give.
[4:39] [music]
Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1905–06, oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The laundry barge
Anonymous photographer, undated photo of the Bateau-Lavoir, Place Émile Goudeau, Montmartre, Paris © Le Vieux Montmartre
In 1904, Picasso rented a studio in an old, dilapidated building in Paris filled with artists and poets. Located at 13 Rue Ravignan, the building was dubbed the Bateau-Lavoir (or laundry barge) by poet-in-residence, Max Jacob.
It was at this time that Picasso first came into contact with French painter Henri Matisse, as well as the American expatriate Gertrude Stein. Gertrude commissioned a portrait by Picasso in 1905, around the same time that her brother Leo bought Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre. As the strong solid woman of Picasso’s painting suggests, Gertrude Stein was a formidable presence in Paris of the early 20th century. An influential writer, she, along with her brother, was an important patron of the arts, known for hosting salons that brought together some of the period’s most famous artists, writers, and intellectuals.
Henri Matisse, Bonheur de Vivre, 1905–06, oil on canvas, 175 x 241 cm (The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia)
Gertrude and Picasso
At the time of his commission, Picasso hoped to cultivate a relationship with the wealthy Stein, who had already been impressed by the innovative style of Matisse.
In contrast to Matisse’s bright colors and sensuous undertones in paintings like Bonheur de Vivre, Picasso’s portrait demonstrates the angular distortions and formal experimentation that would characterize his artwork through the invention of Cubism.
Left: Alvin Langdon Coburne, Photograph of Gertrude Stein, 1913 (George Eastman House Collection); Right: Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1905–06, oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The story goes that Stein sat for Picasso so many times (as many as 90 sittings) that eventually he said he could no longer see her when he looked at her. He then wiped out her face in the painting and left on a trip to Spain. When he returned to Paris in the fall, Picasso quickly completed the portrait—supposedly from memory—in a way that challenged traditional expectations of portraiture. According most portraits tell us about the sitter through their physical likeness and expressive detail, Picasso instead showed his subject staring blankly past the viewer.
Detail, Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1905–06, oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Iberian female head, c. 299 and 100 B.C.E., sandstone, 15 x 17 x 10 cm (National Archaeological Museum of Spain; photo: Luis García, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Painted in dull, muted colors, Stein’s body fills Picasso’s canvas. She sits on a large armchair or sofa and stiffly leans forward, imposing in the way she rests her arms and large hands heavily on the folds of her skirt. In contrast to the rounded forms of the figure, Stein’s face has a planar quality that seems hard and mask-like—an effect heightened by the geometric treatment of the eyes, nose, and mouth, and the dark modeling that distinguishes its angular contours from the rest of her head and body.
Picasso’s odd rendering of Stein’s features reflects the influence of African and Iberian art on the artist, but it might also allude to art’s inability to reveal the truth about an individual. Like many European artists at the time, Picasso looked to ancient and non-western art as a source of primitive inspiration—a colonialist notion that viewed “uncivilized” cultures to be more spiritually authentic than the “sophisticated” cities of Europe. Thus, while Picasso admired the formal qualities of these sculptural influences, he also believed them better able to communicate deeper meaning and ideas that could not be conveyed through the established traditions of Western art.
Detail, Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1905–06, oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The power of the artist
By reworking Gertrude Stein’s portrait in a primitivist style, Picasso claimed for himself the power to represent the woman as she really is, not merely as a likeness of her physical appearance. Stein’s response to the image supports this point of view. In her book on Picasso, she wrote:
I was and I still am satisfied with my portrait, for me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me. [1]
Stein’s repetitive word play demonstrates her own interest in how language could convey meaning through formal effect instead of descriptive content. Both Stein and Picasso challenged the conventions of their media in order to explore the power of art to communicate in new ways that would be appropriate to the modern era.
