Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (8 page)

Much has been written about the relation of Stein’s writing to modern art, not least by Stein herself. Perhaps the most significant creative relationship of her life was that with Picasso, whom she characterized with typical, teasing, affectionately snobby humour as a ‘good-looking bootblack’.
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The collision of this Californian malcontent and the aspiring Spanish genius happened in 1905, when Picasso was 24 and Stein was 31. He had emerged from his Blue period into his Rose period, full of harlequins and figures from the Cirque Medrano, where Picasso, according to Stein, went once a week, and where Stein herself was sometimes to be seen. By the winter of 1905–6 Stein was sitting for Picasso’s portrait of her, writing the stories that would become
Three Lives
, and continuing with her long novel
The Making of Americans
. Later, keen to advertise her relationship with Picasso, in
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
she blithely put words in his mouth, words which tried to exert a monopolizing hold on the genius of modern painting, at a time when their friendship was on the wane. She has him refer to her as his ‘only friend’,
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and in the space of one sentence claims that Picasso’s portrait of her is the origin of Cubism, and her own short story ‘Melanctha’ is the first modern short story.
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Overbearing self-aggrandizement (partly a rhetorical device) was something Stein became famous for, but how else should she respond to the fact that when she arrived in Paris there was an artistic revolution in process, and she was at its very centre? There was no permanent gallery where people could see Matisse and Picasso at this time, other than the Steins’ living room; her brother, Leo was ‘the leading patron of the most radical regeneration in painting since the Renaissance’.
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Gertrude and Leo Stein were, at a critical time, Picasso’s main patrons; as his first collectors, they subsidized his work by paying him a regular stipend. Gertrude in particular was his unflagging promoter; she advanced his cause among wealthy friends and acquaintances — anyone who would listen — and moreover persuaded them to buy his work. Meanwhile Stein’s other brother Michael and his wife were responsible for the first works of Matisse and Picasso crossing the Atlantic; they brought modern art to America, and in 1906 it was the Steins who first introduced Matisse and Picasso to one another. Gertrude Stein was present at most of Leo’s major purchases and continued buying without Leo when, with the advent of Cubism, Leo dismissed Picasso, calling both his work and Gertrude’s an ‘abomination’. At one time or another she sponsored Picasso, Matisse, Juan Gris (her second-best friend, according to the autobiography), Georges Braque and Francis Picabia. The prolific rival collector, the Russian millionaire Sergei Shchukin, whose formidable private collection in Moscow would later be confiscated and taken to the Hermitage, would come and discuss purchases with Gertrude Stein. (When he saw Picasso’s epochal
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
at the rue de Fleurus, as Gertrude gleefully reported it: ‘he said almost in tears, what a loss for French art.’
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In contrast to Leo, who fell into fits of mocking laughter in front of it.)

The Steins’ Saturday nights were indispensable for Picasso. He was depending on Leo and Gertrude’s money — to live, and to rent a second studio in which to work — but the cachet of appearing on their walls alongside Matisse, Gauguin, Cézanne, Renoir and Manet was invaluable. It was undoubtedly a self-serving relationship for each; Picasso attracted people to Stein, but Stein helped make Picasso famous. In reality the point of intersection for Stein and Picasso came when they were young, and as they got older they grew apart (though they remained friends until her death). However, their shared youth was an extraordinary time, and theirs was an extraordinarily deep friendship which grew from an immediate recognition of affinity. The artistic alliance that Stein keenly played up was no piece of fakery.

Quite apart from finding in her his protectress, there is no doubt that the portrait Picasso painted of Stein was remarkably important to his development. Far from over-egging this in the autobiography, Gertrude Stein tells the story of Picasso’s
Portrait
of Gertrude Stein
with languid wit, and a Twainian, deliberately simple-sounding: ‘they do not either of them know how it came about. Anyway it did.’
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By the time she wrote
The Autobiography
(1932) Stein was very good at creating an image of her own cultural significance by stressing her importance to male artists and writers. It became a pattern in her career, and it worked; it is now a commonplace to link Stein’s writing with Picasso’s painting, though his work is less immediately associated with hers: with the woman, yes — with the writer, hardly at all. Picasso confessed that he never understood Stein’s work. Their mutual influence was at the level of personal rapport and exchange of ideas. There is a question about how detailed their aesthetic dialogues can have been, considering that when they met their only common language was a limited French in which neither of them were yet great or even adept conversationalists. But over 80 or 90 sittings, after three months of staring at each other, a mutual fascination and allegiance grew. In Picasso Stein had met a friend with whom she could trade analogies to her craft.
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Picasso, she felt, was an equal, and importantly for her he was a male one. And Stein was making her own portrait while Picasso was painting his. As she later wrote: ‘She had come to like posing, the long still hours followed by a long dark walk intensified the concentration with which she was creating her sentences.’
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During the sittings, Stein was composing ‘Melanctha’, and Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s lover, as Gertrude became her confidante, gave more than a little of herself, her languid sensuality and proud demeanour, to that character.

Every afternoon Stein made her way up to Picasso’s studio in the Bateau-Lavoir, and on Saturdays he and Fernande might accompany her back to the rue de Fleurus for dinner and conversation, and so the Stein salons prospered; when Picasso entered the Steins’ circle he brought his friends, and so enlarged and changed it. Those he brought along included the crowd of writers and artists who already got together at the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse, including the poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire. More and more visitors began to come, to see the people as well as the paintings. The Saturday evening meetings would start at 9 o’clock and go on until the early hours.

The self-confidence, the impudence of the American siblings in setting themselves up as the authority on the new art movement in Paris can hardly be overstated. Their cosmopolitanism and a certain outcast status worked in their favour — the pair were disdained by genteel acquaintances, and banned from the Café Royal
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for not wearing proper shoes (even though their sandals were made by Isadora Duncan’s brother). Their salon became a meeting place for artists and writers of different nationalities and backgrounds, where niceness and propriety could be left at the door; this was no snobby institution. For one thing, although they were seen as ‘the Stein corporation’ for their mercantile prowess, the Steins could not afford to be snobby. And as Gertrude wryly put it in later years: ‘I don’t mind meeting anyone once.’

In the early years, Blaise Cendrars, Robert Delaunay, Matisse’s friend André Derain, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti could all be seen at the Steins’; people such as Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell, Ford Madox Ford, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and George Moore ‘turned up’ from across the Channel. Marsden Hartley, Elie Nadelman, Alfred Maurer, Walter Pach and Maurice Sterne were among a permanent contingent of American artists. Guillaume Apollinaire was one of the main stars, a sort of master of ceremonies. He wrote a short tribute to the Stein
frères
(another of their nicknames), an elegant, whimsical doff of his cap to the siblings, whom he thought of erroneously as ‘millionaires’: ‘Their bare feet shod in sandals Delphic / They raise to heaven their brows scientific’.
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Their fame was fast growing, and these were self-consciously portentous times. Stein witnessed the celebrated performance of Igor Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring
, where Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography caused riotous uproar (there she met Carl Van Vechten, the music critic for the
New York Times
who would become a lifelong friend); she lived among the crowd where Futurism, Orphism, Vorticism, Dadaism and modernism’s many otherisms were to be born. A time of egoism and manifestos, and the context in which Stein eventually felt herself able to make her own grand, self-mythologizing, artistic statements.

Of course these meetings took place because of the paintings; the Steins would otherwise not have been at the centre of such an in-crowd. But once the Saturday evenings began, the personalities of the host and hostess became as much a draw as the art. Both were impossible to ignore. Leo with his nervous energy and his constant theorizing, Gertrude with her serene intelligence, a great listener, practically silent in these early days, apart from her well-known laugh (so hearty it was compared to ‘a beefsteak’
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). Alfred Stieglitz said he had never known anyone sit so long without talking. Her quietness may have been down to the fact that she was still learning French. Later she would fire unnerving questions at the guests. Vying with such a profusion of talented and vociferous men was a crucial part of her self-determination; it was no shrinking violet who would make her mark.

Stein’s new, star-studded life as an accidental, if natural-born, Paris salonière contrasted sharply with her private life as a writer; here in the atelier on the rue de Fleurus the writing habits of a lifetime began, and her writing life, as her apartment filled with people, was necessarily solitary. An important condition of Stein’s writing life in France was that it left her linguistically isolated. She relished the fact that the language surrounding her was not English; while the daily business of life might be conducted in French, she would not write in French until very late in her career, in 1938, her book
Picasso
being her first sustained effort to do so. It was an accident, not a planned manoeuvre, that she ended up in a place that gave her what she saw as this linguistic freedom, ‘all alone with my English and myself’, as she wrote in
The Autobiography
.
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Most of the people around her could not read what she wrote, but anyway at first they did not even know that she wrote.

She loved the perverse privacy of this double life, that nobody intruded on or made demands of her as a writer. She wrote through the night and went to bed at dawn. Hidden away upstairs she began writing in pencil in French children’s schoolbooks of the kind she would use for the rest of her life. Here there was freedom from her teachers’ sanctions about her style that had made her revise her work, and her famous refusal to edit began during the writing of
The Making of Americans
as she nurtured the belief, and later clung to it desperately, that the more she put into it the better, or truer, it would somehow be, willing it to become her magnum opus. Solitude, and deliberate artistic loneliness, imbue that book, and became its self-reflecting subject.

By 1906 Picasso had nearly completed his portrait of Stein, but he was dissatisfied with it and finding it hard to finish, so, as Stein put it, he ‘painted out the whole head’.
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Stein went off to Fiesole for the summer (where there was another colony of American writers and artists surrounding Bernard Berenson, the art critic). And then, after all that time spent gazing at her impressive and inscrutable face, Picasso completed her head without her. John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, calls Stein’s head ‘this little area of repaint that won Gertrude recognition as one of the most familiar twentieth-century icons’.
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It is not her face. It is Picasso’s idea of her face, made of his impressions of her as much as what she looked like: a mask, and one of her many masks.

When friends complained that Stein did not resemble the great, prismatic face and the huge androgynous body, the heaped flesh and folds of girth, Picasso’s shrugged shoulder of an answer was simple: ‘she will’.
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Characteristically unperturbed by the fact that he had painted her portrait by removing her head, or decapitating her, Stein said of the portrait that it was more herself than she was, in a typically tricksy comment on identity. ‘It is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me’, she wrote in
Picasso
.
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Hers is a happy re-appropriation of her own image, because Picasso had created an image of her that would become famous on the other side of the Atlantic in her native country before she herself did. She loved it, and was often photographed with it. It became the first of the icons of her celebrity and as such it was priceless. He gave it to her, free of charge.

Stein is at her most Sphinx-like in this portrait, in which Picasso used a ‘very small palette’ of unbecoming brown and grey.
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Picasso’s Stein seems to be listening and confiding at the same time, or perhaps about to impart some insightful gem. It was the pose in which she might have sat with Picasso and discussed their future careers, their fantasies of triumphant future burglaries in which the intruder would make off with his pictures and her writing instead of money or silver. The art critic Roger Fry published the portrait in
The Burlington Magazine
, next to a portrait by Raphael, suggesting that both were of equal importance. What came after it was ‘the heroic age of Cubism’ (Max Jacob’s phrase), on which Stein continued to dine out for the rest of her life.

This portrait would stay on Stein’s walls for 40 years (surviving the German occupation during the Second World War), until she died. Then Alice Toklas was its guardian, until it was sent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the first of Picasso’s works to be acquired by that institution. Alice wrote about the day it was removed for shipping. Picasso came round and they mourned together over the loss of Gertrude and their youth. ‘Neither you nor I will ever see it again’, said Picasso.
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