Picasso Prints Gertrude Stein; Gertrude Stein Makes Sentences

Experimentation in time and the process of discovery: Picasso prints Gertrude Stein; Gertrude Stein makes sentences

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Citation Bowers, Jane P. 1994. Experimentation in time and the process of discovery: Picasso prints Gertrude Stein; Gertrude Stein makes sentences. Harvard Library Bulletin 5 (2), Summer 1994: 5-30.

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Experiment in Time and Process of Discovery: Picasso Paints Gertrude Stein; Gertrude Stein Makes Sentences

Jane P. Bowers

nterartistic comparisons of the work of Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso are a I commonplace of Stein criticism. 1 In these comparisons Stein is identified as a cubist writer whose poems are stylistic analogues to Picasso's paintings. In the typi- cal analogy, analytic cubism is said to be comparable to Stein's early writing style (1906-1911), characterized by the repetition and incremental modification of sentences made up primarily of pronouns, present participles, and grammatical con- nectors. Synthetic cubism is then seen as analogous to her later style (post-19u), characterized by fragmentation and antigrammatical linguistic juxtapositions. The most cogent argument for these stylistic analogies is offered by Wendy Steiner, who points out that "the [cubist] work of art signifies not reality, but the process of JANEP. BOWERSis Professor in perceiving and conceiving of it." Despite Steiner's awareness of the cubists' inter- the Department of English at est in process, her approach to Stein and Picasso is fundamentally object-centered, the John Jay College of Crimi- as are most other discussions of the two. That is, following a structuralist program nal Justice, The City Univer- sity of New York. of interartistic comparison, Steiner concentrates on the "way the media of the two arts function" as evidenced by the "physical artifact" (poem or painting), our "per- ception of it," and the "meanings it represents. " 2 In her comparisons of Stein and Picasso, she focuses on the artifact and on the processes of vision and conception exhibited by the artifact, but she takes very little interest in the creative process of which the artifact is a product, or what has been called by Charles Altieri and others the constructive activity of the artist. I would like to propose a comparison of Stein and Picasso that is action-centered rather than object-centered and that takes as its point of departure a pivotal, precubist moment in their respective creative histories, the year 1905-1906, the

r For works devoted exclusively to comparisons of Stein Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (Boston: Northeastern Uni- and Picasso and to considerations of Stein as a cubist versity Press, 1988), 98-II 8. For the most enlightening writer, see Michael J. Hoffman, The Development of of the books and articles that offer discussions of Stein Abstractionism in the Writings ofGertrude Stein (Philadelphia: and cubism in a broader context, see Jayne Walker, The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965); Randa Dubnick, Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from "Three Lives" to The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and "Tender Buttons" (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massa- Cubism (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1984); chusetts Press, 1984). and Stephen Scobie, "The Allure of Multiplicity: Meta- 2 Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the phor and Metonymy in Cubism and Gertrude Stein," in Relation between Modem Literature and Painting (Chicago: Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, ed. Shirley University of Chicago Press, 1982), 181, 50. 6 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN Picassoand GertrudeStein 7 year in which Picasso began his portrait of Gertrude Stein (figure l) and Gertrude Stein completed Three Lives and took up again a project she had earlier abandoned, the long narrative The Making efAmericans. The terms action-centeredand object-centeredoriginate with Goran Hermeren, who identifies two types of artistic influence, action-dominated and object-dominated. According to Hermeren, the study of interartistic influence should focus on the action of the artist rather than on the object when the artist who exerted the influence had a conception of art that was itself focused on action. Hermeren defines action-dominated artists as "revolutionaries who tried to change or at least chal- lenge the conception of art which was current at the time. " 3 Picasso and Stein were such artists, and their "revolution" began in the winter of 1905-1906. It is com- monly assumed by both art historians and literary critics that Picasso influenced Stein, not the reverse. This view privileges Picasso, of course, and posits Stein as a follower, a secondary figure, translating pictorial cubism into a language art. I would suggest that the question of who influenced whom is not a very interesting one and that, in any case, it cannot be conclusively answered. We will therefore concentrate here on the impulses the two had in common as revealed by their work during 1905 and 1906. In order to elucidate the interconnection between Stein and Picasso and the intersections of their media and their praxis, I am going to examine an experience the two shared-Picasso's painting of Stein's portrait-and to suggest that the si- multaneous actions of painting and sitting were to change their conceptions of art and of creative activity. The portrait of Gertrude Stein was a declaration of inde- pendence and an act of self-definition for both painter and sitter. The creative process that Picasso enacted and Stein witnessed was to "influence" both of them and Figure 1 (opposite). Pablo Picasso, to move them away from old models toward a new, process-oriented aesthetic. Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Gertrude Stein, I 1946.

When I tug at the single thread of Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein and loosen it from the dense weave that is the history of the art of the modern period, I am led by this unraveling to Cezanne, whose general influence on Picasso has been fre- quently documented and discussed. In particular, the portrait of Gertrude Stein has been linked to Cezanne's Portraitef Madame Cezanne with a Fan (figure 2), one of the twenty-three paintings that Ambroise Vollard loaned to the 1904 Salon D'Automne, 4 a painting that Leo and Gertrude Stein subsequently purchased. Picasso would have seen the portrait of Madame Cezanne first at the Salon D'Automne and then repeatedly at the Steins' during the winter in which Stein sat for him. John Rewald points to certain pictorial similarities between the two images: the vertical line that bisects the background, the curve of the armchair that separates figure from ground, the three-quarter angle of the pose, the placement of the hands, and the masklike face with its "penetrating" yet "absent" eyes. 5 The similarity between the two paintings lies not only in the images but also in what is recorded in the images-that is, their execution.

J Goran Hermeren, Influence in Art and Literature (Prince- University Press, 1989), 93--94. The painting is also ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 20-21. known as The Artist's Wife in an Armchair. 4 John Rewald, Cezanne and America: Dealers, Collectors, 5 Ibid., 72. Artists and Critics, 1891-1921 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton 8 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

Figure 2. Paul Cezanne, The Artist's Wife in an Armchair, 1881-1882, oil on canvas. Foundation E. G. Buehrle Collection, Zurich.

The story of Picasso's painting of the portrait of Gertrude Stein is well known. Stein sat to Picasso close to one hundred times during the winter of 1905-1906. She would cross Paris to the artist's frigid studio at Bateau Lavoir, where she would pose in a broken armchair near the stove-the sole source of heat. Picasso's mistress Fernande Olivier would sometimes read aloud to entertain her: fables from La Fontaine or the most recent installment, supplied by Stein herself, of the Katzenjammer Kids comic strip, to which Fernande and Picasso were both ad- dicted. At dusk, Stein would walk back to her apartment on rue de Fleurus. On Saturdays, Fernande and Picasso would accompany her, dining with her and her brother under the eyes of Cezanne's portrait of his wife; after dinner they would join the regular Saturday-night salon. Visitors to his studio at this time, admiring the likeness of the portrait to its sitter, would urge Picasso to stop with one representation or another; in response he would blot out the image and begin again. And so the sittings continued until one day in the spring of 1906, when Picasso painted out the head, announcing, according to Stein, "I can't see you any longer when I look." Shortly afterward, Picasso and Fernande left to spend the summer in Spain, and Stein went off to Italy with her brother. When Picasso returned from Picassoand Gertrude Stein 9

Spain, he again took up the problematic portrait and painted in the head as we see it today, without further recourse to the model. 6 As it happens, Portraitof Madame Cezanne with a Fan has a similar compositional history. Rewald tells us that the Cezanne portrait was probably started in 1878 and reworked between 1886 and 1888:

The discreet wallpaper of bluish floral sprays in the background of her portrait can be identified with lodgings Cezanne occupied in 1879-80 ... but the much less volumetric head of the sitter appears to have been painted several years later.

Rewald speculates that Cezanne returned to the canvas after an interruption and reworked the face, and he sees a "perceptible hiatus, accented ... by the sharp contour of the head, notably the line that leads from the ear to the chin. "7 Picasso probably did not know of the precise genesis of this painting, but he could not have failed to notice the way in which Madame Cezanne's head is set off from the rest of the painting, and he may have intuited the cause. In any case, Picasso would have been aware of the many stories circulating about Cezanne's methods: his lengthy struggle with each canvas to "realize" and to "organize" his sensations, his frequent abandonment of "unfinished" canvases, and his return to and obsessive repainting of some of these "abandoned" pictures. 8 Although Cezanne was living reclusively in Aix-en-Provence by the time Picasso arrived in Paris, a number of young French artists were to make the pil- grimage to his studio. They returned to Paris with anecdotes about Cezanne's working habits and with reports of his theories about art, which he was eager to share with them. 9 Emile Bernard had already written about Cezanne in 1892 and in 1904, and the other visitors to Cezanne would subsequently publish their recollections. IO By 1906, the year of his death, stories of Cezanne were "in the air" on the Left Bank. The account of the creation of one painting in particular would have been fa- miliar to Picasso: the portrait of Ambroise Vollard (figure 3), which was painted in 1899 and required more than one hundred sittings. Vollard was Cezanne's dealer and had, in fact, sold Portraitof Madame Cezanne with a Fan to the Steins. By 1905, when Picasso began his portrait of Gertrude Stein, he would have seen Cezanne's portrait of Ambroise Vollard since it was in the dealer's personal collection. Picasso's friendship with Vollard dated from 1901, and by early spring 1906 Vollard had become Picasso's dealer. He often invited the young painter and Fernande Olivier to dinner in the basement of his gallery on rue Laffitte, where he amused

6 This account of the repeated sittings for the portrait of 7 Rewald, Cezanne and America, 72. Gertrude Stein is drawn from Stein's recollections in The 8 These are words that Cezanne himself used to describe Autobiography of Alice B. Tok/as (1933; reprint, New York: his approach to his work. See Cezanne by Himself: Draw- Vintage Books, 1961), 45-57. Although Picasso himself ings, Paintings, Writings, ed. Richard Kendall (London: did not discuss the painting's genesis, details of Stein's Macdonald & Company, Ltd., 1988). account are corroborated in memoirs and letters of con- 9 John Rewald, Cezanne: A Biography (New York: Harry temporaries, and her version of the story makes its way N. Abrams, 1986), 225. into biographies of her and of Picasso. See James R. Mel- ro See for example, Maurice Denis, "Cezanne," Burlington low, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (New Magazine, January and February 1911: 207-19, 275-80, York: Praeger, 1974), 116-20; Pierre Cabanne, Pablo and Charles Camoin, "Souvenirs sur Paul Cezanne," Picasso: His Life and Times, trans. Harold J. Salemson Amour de L'Art,January 1921. (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1977), 105; 11 Fernande Olivier, Picasso and His Friends, trans. Jane Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work (New York: Miller (New York: Appleton-Century, 1964), 52; Sou- Schocken Books, 1962), 115-16, and John Richardson, venirs Intimes (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1988), 210. A Life of Picasso: 1881-1906 (New York: Random House, 1991), 403-10. IO HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN Picassoand GertrudeStein II

them with stories of his associations with painters. 11 Surely one of the stories he told was that of his sitting to Cezanne for his portrait, an event to which he was to devote a chapter of his 1914 book, Paul Cezanne. The story of the portrait's creation reveals that the portrait itself records the drama of Cezanne's struggle to complete it. Cezanne's repeated efforts to get the painting right and his willingness to destroy or to abandon what he had done if it did not meet his standards are con- veyed by the following anecdotes:

In my [Vollard's] portrait there are two little spots of canvas on the hand which are not covered. I called Cezanne's attention to them. "If the copy I'm making at the Louvre turns out well," he replied, "perhaps I will be able tomorrow to find the exact tone to cover up those spots. Don't you see, Monsieur Vollard, that ifl put something there by guesswork, I might have to paint the whole canvas over starting from that point?"

The second anecdote tells of the final abandonment of the "unfinished" portrait.

After a hundred and fifteen sittings, Cezanne abandoned my portrait to return to Aix. "The front of the shirt is not bad" -such were his last words on parting. He made me leave the clothes in which I posed at the studio, expecting, when he returned to Paris, to paint in the two white spots on the hands, and then, of course, to work over certain parts. "I hope to have made some progress by that time. You understand, Monsieur Vollard, the contour keeps slipping away from me!" But he had not counted on the moths, "the little wretches!" which devoured my clothes in short order. 12

And so the portrait was never finished, and the two spots of canvas remain. Though unpainted, they are paradoxically signs of the painter's generative activity, signs that we might imagine Picasso contemplating. 13 The legend ofVollard's portrait (and of other unfinished or reworked portraits Figure 3 (opposite). Paul Cezanne, by Cezanne) had an impact on Picasso, as his own peculiar behavior in executing Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1899, oil on canvas. Musee du Petit Palais, the portrait of Stein shows. The intensity of his engagement with this model and Paris. her portrait was uncharacteristic; in fact, at this time Picasso prided himself on being a quick study. Never before had he required so many sittings nor struggled so hard to produce an image. Is it simply a coincidence that the portrait of Stein, like that of Vollard, required close to one hundred sittings? Is it also a coincidence that Picasso abandoned the portrait of Stein, as Cezanne did so many of his portraits? Although this was routine behavior for Cezanne, for Picasso it was unprecedented. In a discussion of Three Women (1908), another picture that Picasso reworked, William Rubin writes,

They [i.e., instances of reworked paintings] are extremely rare-numerically in- finitesimal. ... Apart from deliberate sets of variations on a theme-all late in Picasso's career-most of his major pictures exist as unique images. On rare occa- sions he is impelled to paint a close variant .... How often did Picasso literally rework the same major canvas after a lapse of time and in a dijferentstyle? Aside from Three Women, only two outstanding examples, both from this period of rapid evo- lution [ 1906-1908] spring to mind. 14

" Ambroise Vollard, Paul Cezanne: His Life and Art, trans. compared Picasso's efforts to Cezanne's with Vollard's Harold L. VanDoren (New York: Nicholas L. Brown, shirt. Picasso: "Yes he was so strict as a rule, so dissatis- 1923), 126, 138. fied, but he was content with that shirt ... and I must 1 3 Years later, in a conversation with Brassai, Portrait ef confess that I am content with my blouse" (Brassai, Ambroise Vo/lard came up when Brassai complimented Picasso and Company, trans. Francis Price [Garden City, Picasso on his rendering of Dora Maar's blouse in a por- N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966], 224). trait of her painted on October 9, 1942. Picasso explained '4 William Rubin, "Pablo and Georges and Leo and Bill," that he had "sweated over that blouse," and Brassai Art in America, March-April 1979, 143-44. 12 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

One of the two outstanding examples-and the first such instance-is, of course, the portrait of Gertrude Stein. Not only did Picasso abandon this painting, but he also abandoned Paris, as Cezanne did after the Vollard sittings, to return to his home country, as Cezanne returned to Aix-en-Provence. In his execution of the Stein portrait, then, Picasso was creating a legend that echoes stories of Cezanne's creative process. Stein reports Picasso as saying, "No one will see the picture, they will see the legend of the picture, the legend that the picture has created .... A picture lives by its legend, not by anything else. " 15 To Brassai, Picasso said, "The only thing that's important is the legend created by the picture." 16 The legend of the portrait of Gertrude Stein is about the constructive activity of the artist. That activity lives not only in the legend but also in the image. Picasso once compared painting to handwriting: "The way a painter paints is like his writing for graphologists. It's the whole man that is in it." 17 As a grapholo- gist, Picasso read Cezanne's technique-the signs of the painter's performance-as clues to the state of mind of the performer. He said of Cezanne,

It's not what the artist does that counts, but what he is. Cezanne would never have interested me a bit ifhe had lived and thought like Jacques Emile Blanche, even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful. What forces our interest is Cezanne's anxiety-that's Cezanne's lesson; the torments of Van Gogh-that is the actual drama of the man. The rest is a sham. 18

Cezanne's anxiety, the drama of the man-by this Picasso means the anxiety, tor- ment, and drama of the artist as creator. Like Cezanne's portraits, the portrait of Gertrude Stein expresses the drama of its creation and the "anxieties" of its creator. Thus we can tum to the picture itself and read it as a trace, and the brushstrokes and composition as marks of the expressive and constructive hand of Figure 4 (opposite).jean Auguste Domi- nique Ingres, Portrait of Louis- the artist. Fran~ois Bertin, 1832, oil on canvas. The portrait of Gertrude Stein is painted in three distinct styles that correspond Musee du L,uvre, Paris. ©Photo R.M.N. to three often-discussed influences on Picasso at this time-those of Cezanne, of Ingres, and of sculpture. 19 The painting proclaims the drama of these competing influences. Cezanne is on stage in the background (the curve of the armchair and the vertical line discussed by Rewald) and in the shirtfront (the scarf and coral brooch that were Stein's sartorial trademarks at this time). These areas of the picture echo the backgrounds and white shirts of the portraits of Cezanne's wife and ofVollard. They are painted in the style of Cezanne, with visible brushwork and patches of color giving form and with paint bleeding across figural boundaries. Picasso thus demonstrates that he can "do" Cezanne and, like him, paint a shirtfront that is "not bad," but he also somewhat effaces these pictorial allusions. The armchair that is so prominent in the portrait of Madame Cezanne has receded in Stein's portrait so that it is entirely behind the figure and dominated by her volu- minous brown robe. The robe also encroaches on the scarf, the left edge of which is a vestigial white shadow under the lapel of the robe that has been painted over it. With the chair as backdrop, the figure is brought forward, close to the picture surface. In contrast to Madame Cezanne, who sits back stiffiy in her chair,

1 5 Gertrude Stein, Picasso: The Complete Writings, ed. Ed- 1 9 See Richardson, A Life ofPicasso, 403-23; Meyer Schapiro, ward Bums (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 27. Modern Art (New York: Braziller, 1978), I I 1-118; Leo 16 Dore Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art: A Selection ofHis Views Steinberg, "Resisting Cezanne: Picasso's Three Women," (New York: Viking, 1972), 124. Art in America, November/December 1978, I 14-34; and 1 7 Ashton, Picasso on Art, 66. James Johnson Sweeney, "Picasso and Iberian Sculpture," 18 Ibid., 45. The Art Bulletin, September 1941, 191--98. Picassoand Gertrude Stein 13 14 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

seemingly held in place by its arm, Stein seems to lean into the room in which the painter sits (or in which the viewer stands), her robe spilling out of the bottom of the picture. Picasso behaved like Cezanne in his lengthy engagement in the process of painting this picture, but he was at the same time declaring his indepen- dence from Cezanne's vision. Naturally, the amount of space devoted to Stein's clothing is also a function of her size and an accurate representation of her manner of dress. One wonders if Picasso was not, in fact, drawn to this particular model because of her monumen- tality and her preference for clothes of brown corduroy or velvet. In dress and size, Stein bears some resemblance to the subject of Ingres's Portrait efLouis-Franfois Bertin (figure 4), which Picasso would have seen in 1905 when he attended the Ingres retrospective at the Louvre shortly before asking Stein to model for him. According to John Richardson, Picasso was "overwhelmed" by this exhibition; specifically, Richardson notes that the portrait of Gertrude Stein was said by Maillol to have been inspired by the Portraitof Louis-FranfoisBertin. 20 Like Ingres, Picasso renders his model seated, and like Ingres he has her support the weight of her up- per body by bracing her arms on her lap. Whereas Madame Cezanne rests her arms on the arms of the chair that clearly supports her, Stein, like M. Bertin, is her own armchair. We can also see the influence oflngres in Picasso's careful illusionistic rendering of the brown velvet cloth of Stein's garment. In painting the expanse of brown velvet in the manner of Ingres, Picasso seems to declare himself the equal of that master of classical realism at the same time that he leaves his own "signature" on the illusion in the few hurried, nonrepresentational brushstrokes on the skirt of the robe. The echoes of the Ingres portrait of M. Bertin serve as a counterpoint to the Cezannesque elements of the painting. Thus, in painting Stein's portrait, Picasso confronts two major figures of nineteenth-century French art. He shows that he is conversant with their idiom, perhaps even anxious about their mastery and influence, but he also shows that in this three-way conversation, the strongest voice belongs to a young Spaniard who is poised to lead a French revolution in art. That voice is given its fullest expression in the final act of the painting-the sculptural rendering of Stein's face-but it is incipient in Picasso's portrayal of the volume of Stein's body. In treating Stein's body sculpturally, Picasso departs significantly from both Cezanne and Ingres. We can see the difference between Cezanne and Picasso most clearly by comparing the bodices of the figures' dresses. Madame Cezanne's bodice appears less as a part of her dress covering her breast than as a flat rectangle of dark paint covering the canvas. Like paint, it bleeds over onto the sleeve of the dress at some points; at others the sleeve bleeds onto the bodice. This technique conveys different points of visual perspective in the same image; it also paradoxically emphasizes the two-dimensional, painted quality of the bodice. By contrast, Stein's bodice follows the curve of her breasts. It disappears into the dark interior of her robe, which hangs loosely from her bosom, suggesting its roundedness, as does the end of the scarf, which hangs from the bodice as from a shelf, dipping down into the lap behind the sleeve. This suggestion of roundness, amplitude, and volume is reinforced by the outline and brushstrokes of the robe, which embrace the figure like a series of parentheses.

20 Richardson, A Life of Picasso,421, 514 n. I. Picassoand GertrudeStein 15

The way in which Picasso allows Stein's drapery to express the roundness of her body is in marked contrast to Ingres's handling of M. Bertin's bulk. In the Ingres portrait, the clothing suppresses and contains the body. In a sense, the painting of the cloth seems to flatten the body against the canvas, imprisoning it in the two- dimensional world of paint. M. Bertin's pose, moreover, is full-frontal; neither the sides nor the rear of the figure is represented, whereas, as noted earlier, Stein leans into the front of the canvas, her body canted toward her right, giving us a view of her left side. If we imagine her coming off the chair (or the canvas), as she seems about to do, we would expect her to tum and go off to her left, revealing even more of her side and then her back. In other words, Picasso represents Stein pre- paring to enter the third dimension; the portrait is a painting reaching toward sculpture's domain. Picasso's interest in sculpture was piqued by the installation at the Louvre in 1905 and 1906 oflberian stone bas-reliefs from Osuna that had been excavated between 1902 and 1904. In a 1939 interview with Christian Zervos in which he discusses the sources of Les Demoisellesd 'Avignon ( 1907), Picasso points to the Iberian sculpture at the Louvre as an inspiration during the period immediately preceding Les Demoiselles.21 The influence oflberian sculpture was already finding expression in Gertrude Stein's portrait when Picasso used drapery and pose to suggest that the painted figure exists in three-dimensional space. This interest in the sculpture of his native land was nurtured by Picasso's trip to Spain in the summer of 1906. The last word in the drama of Gertrude Stein's portrait is in Spanish, and it is recorded in the powerful focal point of the finished painting-the face, in which the firm line of the mouth, the prominent nose, and especially the eyes with their half-moon lids strongly suggest comparable stylized features of Iberian sculpture. One of the themes of Stein's 193 8 essay on Picasso is the artist's periodic need to return to Spain-"to his real character, his Spanish character"-in order to resist the "seduction" of things French, which always threatened to lead him away from his "real vision" and to "divert" him "from the way of painting which was his. " 22 In a sense, this is also a theme of Picasso's portrait of Stein: the seductive influence of French art, the resistance to that seduction, and the reassertion of the artist's identification with the art of his own culture. Like Cezanne, Picasso finished his portrait of Stein by painting an impersonal mask for a face. He calls attention to this coda by inscribing a line of suturelike crosses at the neck, as though the head were sewn onto the body, and by leaving evidence of his erasure of previous images like an aura above the head. But this Spanish mask hardly signals allegiance to Cezanne. Quite the contrary, it speaks of a new kind of painting on the horizon, and it declares Picasso master of this new art. The mask of Madame Cezanne appears to be painted over her face; it resembles the kind of smaller-than-life, flat, painted mask attached to a stick that one might hold in front of one's face at a masquerade ball. In contrast, Gertrude Stein's life- size mask suggests three-dimensionality; it appears to have replaced the actual head, as though the model had been decapitated and a sculpted head attached to the woman's shoulders. Oddly, however, the head suits the body, as though the body's sculptural solidity had anticipated just this sort of head. Picasso's brushwork on the face is almost transparent and thus unlike Cezanne's, which calls attention to the

21 Quoted in Sweeney, "Picasso and Iberian Sculpture", 22 Stein, Picasso, 30, 47. 190. 16 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

mask as a painted surface. Picasso deviates from Cezanne in applying his paint in such a way as to create the illusion of three-dimensionality. The portrait of Gertrude Stein marks a turning point in Picasso's art: it is one of the earliest canvases in which one can see the artist beginning to search for a way to represent three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional medium. It is also the first picture in which he depicted the generation of the image through the successive performances of the artist. The conception of painting as a sign of creative thought and constructive activity was to inform Picasso's art for the rest of his career. As he himself has said,

I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search inces- santly and there is a logical sequence in all this research. That is why I number them. It's an experiment in time. 23

By 1905, when Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo saw Picasso's work for the first time in the gallery of Clovis Sagot, they were already serious collectors of impressionist and post-impressionist art. Cezanne and Renoir dominated the Leo and Gertrude Stein collection in 1905, but brother and sister had just discovered Matisse, whose friendship they were cultivating and whose Bonheur de vivre was soon to hang on their dining-room wall directly above the Portrait of Madame Cezanne with a Fan. When Picasso arrived on the scene, he thus found his master Cezanne and his rival Matisse already installed in places of honor. Fernande Olivier recalls Picasso's painful encounters with Matisse at the Steins' Saturday evenings:

The hosts moved amicably from group to group, but their real interest was in their two great men: Matisse and Picasso. Matisse was at the height of his powers then, an inspired advocate of his own way of painting, which he defended determinedly against Picasso's mufiled on- slaughts. Matisse could always talk lucidly and with intelligence and he had an absolute determination to convince his hearers. Picasso rarely took such trouble. He was always pretty sardonic, and I believe he rather despised anybody who was not prepared to understand him. During these evenings, which were by no means disagreeable, Picasso would remain morose and dejected for the greater part of the time. He was bored by ev- eryone, people were always trying to make him explain his position, which he found difficult to do, especially in French; and anyway he couldn't explain what he felt needed no explanation. He would come away exasperated and furious. 24

From his post as tongue-tied outsider, Picasso must have looked about for an ally of more substance than Fernande. He found this ally in Gertrude Stein. It was Leo, however, not Gertrude, who purchased their first Picasso, Harlequin's Family with Ape, in 1905. Shortly afterward, Leo having overcome Gertrude's initial veto, the two agreed to purchase a second painting, Young Girl with Basket ef Flowers. According to Gertrude Stein's account in The Autobiography efAlice B. Toklas, she "did not like the picture, she found something rather appalling in the draw- ing of the legs and feet, something that repelled and shocked her." 25 Stein's first en- counter with the painter himself was no less shocking than her first exposure to his

2 3 Ashton, Picassoon Art, 72. 2 s Stein, Alice B. Tok/as, 43. 24 Olivier, Picassoand His Friends, 139. Picassoand GertrudeStein 17 work, but she recollects that her response to the man was more immediately posi- tive than her response to the painting had been. Soon after the purchase of Young Girl with Basket of Flowers,the Steins invited Picasso and Fernande to dinner.

He was thin dark, alive with big pools of eyes and a violent but not rough way. He was sitting next to Gertrude Stein at dinner and she took up a piece of bread. This, said Picasso, snatching it back with violence, this piece ofbread is mine. She laughed and he looked sheepish. That was the beginning of their intimacy. That evening Gertrude Stein's brother took out portfolio after portfolio of japanese prints to show Picasso, Gertrude Stein's brother was fond of japanese prints. Picasso solemnly and obediently looked at print after print and listened to the descriptions. He said under his breath to Gertrude Stein, he is very nice, your brother, but like all americans, ... he shows youjapanese prints. Moij'aime pas ca, no I don't care for it. As I (Alice Toklas] say Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso immediately understood each other. 26

Like his painting, Picasso's behavior at table is appalling, even violent. Never- theless, Gertrude Stein is amused; his violence is no bar to intimacy. They finish the evening by understanding each other without having had to explain anything, a wordless comprehension that would have pleased Picasso. Stein's rendering of this evening suggests that their understanding was considerably enhanced by Picasso's whispered response to Leo's aesthetic pronouncements. Just as Picasso rejected the Japanese prints, so he chose Gertrude over Leo as his subject at this pivotal moment in his development. This choice was no doubt motivated by many factors-the previously discussed resemblance of Gertrude Stein to M. Louis-Franc;:ois Bertin, for example. Picasso's desire to have Gertrude as a model may have stemmed as well from what Richardson describes as "his taste for full-bodied women" and his interest in androgynous figures. 27 From a practical point of view, Picasso's act of biting a hand that was feeding him (Leo's) either testifies to an affinity for this woman strong enough to override considerations of self-interest or demonstrates his prescience in recognizing that it was the sister, not the brother, who would have the understanding and the pocketbook for the very radical experiments he was about to undertake. The rivalry between Matisse and Picasso mirrors a similar clash between Leo and Gertrude that would eventually lead them to separate. The force of Gertrude Stein's later persona (prefigured in Picasso's portrait of her) often obscures the fact that she was an almost silent presence in the Steins' social life at this time. Leo Stein, on the other hand, was a monologuist whose mission it was to explain the new art to their friends and visitors. While Leo lectured, Gertrude listened, nodded, and smiled. Recalling his 1909 visit to the Steins', during which Leo held forth for an hour and a half in the presence of a "dark, bulksome woman" whose name he had not caught, Alfred Stieglitz later said that he had never seen anyone sit still and attentive for so long without uttering a word as had Gertrude Stein that day. 28 In 1905 Leo was thirty-three and Gertrude thirty-one years old. Although they had three other siblings, family circumstances had forged a particularly close bond between Leo and Gertrude. Being the elder and a male, Leo dominated Gertrude; as she saw it, he led and she followed. In any case, the two went everywhere together: to Cambridge, where they were undergraduates at Harvard and Radcliffe, to Johns Hopkins, where they shared a house while Gertrude attended medical

26 Ibid, 46. 28 Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New 2 7 Richardson, A Ufe efPicasso, 408. York: Random House, 1960), IIO-I2. 18 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

school, and finally to Paris, where they settled in 1903. Although a contemporary was to describe them as the "happiest couple on the Left Bank," 29 that happiness was being severely tested by the fact that Gertrude was beginning to find her voice-both as a "disagreeable" sister, for so Leo was later to describe her, and as a writer of fiction. By 1904, Stein had written one novel (Q.E.D.) and begun two others. The completed novel, the story of a lesbian love triangle, languished in a cupboard at rue de Fleurus, where it would stay for the next thirty years; Stein had abandoned the other two novels, Fernhurstand The Making efAmericans, without completing them and had stopped writing. In 1905, the year she met Picasso, she began writing again, but the number of false starts she made as a writer demonstrates a certain lack of confidence in her own abilities. This self-doubt can be explained in part by her brother's response to her fiction. Leo Stein had tried his hand at a number of vocations (painter and connoisseur most recently), but he seemed constitutionally unable to stick with anything, a result, he said, of his "terrific neurosis." Leo, blocked in his own creative efforts, seemed to find his sister's intolerable. In a 1905 letter to a friend, Gertrude reports having shown her writing to Leo: I am afraid I can never write the great American novel. ... Leo he said there wasn't no art in [Robert Morss] Lovett's book and then he was bad and wouldn't tell me that there was in mine so I went to bed very missable but I don't care .... Dey [her stories] is very very simple and very vulgar and I don't think they will interest the great American public. I am very sad Mamie.Jo

On this particular evening, Leo seems to have favored silence over outright criticism, but his later written comments about his sister's work give us some understanding of why her brother's response to her writing might have caused her to be Figure 5 (opposite). Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Leo Stein, 1906, gouache "very sad." In a I 9 I 3 letter to the same friend to whom Gertrude had earlier writ- on cardboard.The Cone Collection ten, he explained how he and Gertrude had come to be estranged: formed by Dr. ClaribelCone and Miss Etta Cone, The BaltimoreMuseum of It was of course a serious thing for her that I can't abide her stuff and think it abomi- Art. nable .... To this has been added my utter refusal to accept the later phases of Picasso with whose tendency Gertrude has so closely allied hersel£ They both seem to me entirely on the wrong track. Picasso ... wants to be the creator of a great and original form .... Her artistic capacity is, I think, extremely small. I have just been looking over the Melanctha thing again. Gertrude's mind is about as little nimble as a mind can be .... Well, Gertrude also wants to create a great and original form .... Both he and Gertrude are using their intellects, which they ain't got to do what would need the finest critical tact, which they ain't got neither, and they are in my belief turning out the most Godalmighty rubbish that is to be found.JI

Leo clearly saw and deplored the connection between Picasso's painting and his sister's writing. His estimation of Stein's work (and of cubism) never changed. He wrote parodies of her writing that he sent to friends and showed to her. He called her stupid in any number ofletters to their friends, letters in which he denigrated her work, describing it variously as nonsense, tommyrot, bosh, rubbish, an abomi- nation, and foolishness.

29 Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorianin the Modern World(New JI Leo Stein.Journey into the Self, ed. Edmund Fuller (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 131. York: Crown Publishers, 1950), 52-53. Jo Quoted in Mellow, Charmed Circle, 77. Robert Morss Lovett was an American writer who had been a contemporary of Leo at Harvard. Picassoand GertrudeStein 19 20 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN Picassoand GertrudeStein 21

When Picasso invited Gertrude Stein to model for him, when he proceeded to express in the act of painting her portrait his own intense struggle after a distinctive form, and when he presented her with the finished portrait as a gift, he was declaring his allegiance to the quiet sister over the more talkative brother. We can imagine how welcome such an ally must have been to Stein. She cemented her alliance with Picasso by favoring his work over Matisse's, by consistently purchasing his work long after her brother had lost interest, by encouraging others to support him, and by designating Picasso, not Matisse, as one of the three geniuses of the twentieth century (the other two being Alfred North Whitehead and Stein herself). Portrait

III

In Stein's accounts of her sitting for her portrait two themes emerge: the solidarity of artist and model in the face of criticisms leveled at "their" portrait, and the si- multaneity of their creative breakthroughs at this time. According to Stein, no one was pleased with the portrait because it was not a good likeness. As for the two principals, "he and she were content. " 32 "He gave me the picture and 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." 33 Apparently it would also always be she for him.

32 Stein, Alice B. Tok/as, 57. 33 Stein, Picasso, 34. 22 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

No alteration in her appearance, neither aging nor a changing hairstyle, could upset the correspondence between the woman and her image so far as the painter was concerned. To illustrate this point, Stein tells the following anecdote:

Only a few years ago when Gertrude Stein had had her hair cut short, she had always up to that time worn it as a crown on top ofher head as Picasso has painted it, when she had had her hair cut, a day or so later she happened to come into a room and Picasso was several rooms away. She had a hat on but he caught sight of her through two doorways and approaching her quickly called out, Gertrude, what is it, what is it. What is what, Pablo, she said. Let me see, he said. She let him see. And my portrait, said he sternly. Then his face softening he added, mais, quand meme tout yest, all the same it is all there. 34

According to Stein, in the view of both artist and model, the painting captures the timeless essence of the woman, which others are too obtuse to see. Stein accepts her portrait, as she accepts all of Picasso's work, because she understands it ("I was alone at this time in understanding him"), and she understands it because she is pursuing a similar course in her own metier ("I was expressing the same thing in literature"). 35 I have said that the portrait of Gertrude Stein records the legend of its creation; similarly, in The Autobiography efAlice B. Toklas, in her narrative of the multiple sittings for the portrait, Stein inscribes a second and par- allel narrative, the legend of her own development as a writer. Before embarking on the tale of the portrait, Stein tells ofbeginning Three Lives, the collection of three novellas that was to be her first published fiction. She identifies two influences on this work-Flaubert and Cezanne-that predate her friendship with Picasso. She explains that she had begun "as an exercise in literature to translate Flaubert's Trois Contes." This was an exercise suggested to her by her brother. "Then," she adds, "she [Stein] had this Cezanne [the very portrait of Madame Cezanne that was to figure so prominently in subsequent events] and she looked at it and under its stimulus she wrote Three Lives." Enter Picasso. The sittings begin. "During these long poses, and these long walks Gertrude Stein medi- tated and made sentences. She was then in the middle of her negro story Melanctha Herbert"-the third and most experimental of the novellas collected in Three Lives. The sittings continue. "The long still hours followed by a long dark walk intensi- fied the concentration with which she was creating her sentences." The winter goes on; Stein finishes Three Lives. It is then typed by her friend Etta Cone, who has come "to the rescue" of the author who cannot type; at the same time, Cone comes to the rescue of the painter who cannot make ends meet: "Whenever the Picasso finances got beyond everybody," Gertrude Stein would take Etta Cone to his studio and would make her "buy a hundred francs' worth of drawings." 36 Spring arrives; the sittings come to their abrupt end. In reporting what had been accom- plished that winter, Stein again yokes herself to Picasso:

It had been a fruitful winter. In the long struggle with the portrait of Gertrude Stein, Picasso passed from the Harlequin ... period to the intensive struggle which was to end in cubism. Gertrude Stein had written the story of Melanctha ... the second story of Three Lives which was the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature. 37

34 Stein, Alice B. Tok/as, 57. 36 Stein, Alice B. Tok/as, 34, 49, 50, 52. Jl Stein, Picasso, 42. 37 Ibid., 54. Picassoand GertrudeStein 23

Their analogous creative efforts continue through the summer: "It was during this summer that Gertrude Stein began her great book, The Making of Ameri- cans," the sentences of which "were to change the literary ideas of a great many people." 38 In fact, Stein did not begin The Making of Americansthat summer; rather, she returned to the manuscript she had earlier abandoned, just as Picasso was to return to the abandoned portrait of her. Again Stein interweaves an account of her writing with the story of the portrait:

Gertrude Stein was working tremendously over the beginning of The Making of Americans and came back to Paris under the spell of the thing she was doing. It was at this time that working every night she often was caught by the dawn coming while she was working. She came back to Paris fairly full of excitement. In the first place she came back to her finished portrait. The day he returned from Spain Picasso sat down and out efhis headpainted the head in without having seen Gertrude Stein again. 39 [Emphasis added]

The boundaries between the two heads and the two legends dissolve in Stein's syntax. Stein is "fairly full of excitement" because she has been writing, but also- and "in the first place"-because Picasso has been painting, and her portrait is complete.

The works that Stein links to Picasso's portrait of her, Three Lives and The Making efAmericans, enact and document her shift from one mode of writing to another. Stein identified two primary modes of composition: writing "what you intended to write" and writing "what you are writing." To write according to one's intention is to have a plan for the writing (probably one modeled on other preexisting plans, or "what has always been intended, by anyone, to be written"); 40 this kind of writing requires that the writer set limits and goals so that the author's intention can be realized and the reader's expectations met. To write what you are writing without intention, on the other hand, is to make writing into a process of discovery; in fact, Stein once advised a young writer to "think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting." 41 Such writing requires nothing except that the writer continue writing. It is open-ended (not finished and not finishable, as Stein said of one of Picasso's paintings), and its meaning is indeterminate. When Stein began Three Lives and The Making efAmericans, she intended to represent characters, to report events in their lives, and to re-create a remembered reality. She intended to effect a correspondence between her words and extralinguistic objects, qualities, and actions. We know of these intentions through the notebooks in which she planned these works. 42 In the process of fulfilling her intention, however, she discovered that language could do other things besides name, describe, and report. It could, for instance, embody rhythms-the rhythm of personality, of conversation, of human action and interaction, even the rhythm

38 Ibid .• 56-57. 4 1 John Hyde Preston, "A Conversation," The Atlantic 39 Ibid., 57. Monthly, August 1935, 187.

• 0 Gertrude Stein, Four in America (1947; reprint, Freeport, • 2 Stein's notebooks are available to scholars in the Yale N. Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 122-24. Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 24 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

of composition itself, with its interruptions, its visions, and its re-visions. If freed from intention and expectation (and eventually from grammatical and rhetorical constraints), language could also play, and the artist whose medium was language could play with words or could examine and ponder them as objects in a composition. At this extreme, literature would no longer be about an extralinguistic situ- ation; it would be about the materials and processes of its own construction. In Stein's work, then, the objective world becomes less and less important, and the object that is the work of art and the process by which it is created become para- mount. This change began in 1905 as Stein sat for her portrait. We can trace it by comparing the novellas in Three Lives in the order of their composition, the first written before the sittings began and the second and third composed during the winter in which Stein sat to Picasso. "The Good Anna," the first story of the trio, shows the influence of Flaubert, particularly of the first story in Trois contes,"Un coeur simple," whose central character, Felicite, is a simple, uneducated, and devoted servant. Like Flaubert, Stein writes about an uneducated, working-class woman whereas she had before drawn characters of her own class and background in Q.E.D., Fernhurst, and the early fragment of The Making ef Americans. Among the other echoes of "Un coeur simple" in "The Good Anna," the most interesting is the parrot that Anna, like Felicite, has as a pet. Whereas in Flaubert's story the parrot is a memorable emblem of the servant's pathetic loneliness and isolation, a remarkable device that evokes sympathy for Felicite at the same time that its ironic presentation tempers the very sympathy it evokes, in Stein's story the parrot is reduced to a minor detail. It is a gift to Anna that she ignores, gives away, and promptly forgets about. Thus Stein demotes Flaubert's invention and rejects the literariness of his portentous parrot. In so doing, she points to Flaubert's precedence but, at the same time, dismisses his influence, much as Picasso refers to and exorcizes himself of Cezanne's influence in the portrait of Gertrude Stein. The parrot in "The Good Anna" is merely a sign, however, of a much more substantial divergence from the Flaubertian model. "Un coeur simple" is as much about a place as it is about a person. Set in Flaubert's native province, where he spent his summer holidays as a boy, the story is touched by a nostalgia for times past, albeit moderated by a dispassionate narration and frequent irony. Flaubert's interest in place is apparent in the carefully detailed settings and in the representa- tions of the community of people Flaubert remembered as having inhabited these places. "Un coeur simple" thus opens with references to farms that actually be- longed to the Flauberts and offers the reader a long description of the house of Felicite's mistress before describing Felicite herself The house is given to us in detail, the decor so specific that we know the style of the furniture, the pattern of the wallpaper, and the artist responsible for the etchings on the wall. These objective details resonate; they are emblematic in the sense that they are meant to convey information about characters and about narrative point of view. In fact, one could say that the portrait of Felicite evolves out of such textual details. Stein also sets her stories in a place she has inhabited-the Bridgepoint of Three Lives is Baltimore-but aside from some references to the South and to warm weather, the stories could be taking place anywhere in the United States, so little interest has Stein in conveying a sense of place. Stein does offer some descriptions, such as this one of the house in which Anna works: Picassoand GertrudeStein 25

It was a funny little house, one of a whole row of all the same kind that made a close pile like a row of dominoes that a child knocks over, for they were built along a street which at this point came down a steep hill. They were funny little houses, two stories high, with red brick fronts and long white steps. 43

Just as this description keeps us outside the house, so too does it keep us outside the story. Stein's descriptions (when she provides them) do not generate meaning as Flaubert's do. In Three Lives, Stein exhibits less and less interest in such narrative strategies as the presentation of resonant detail to convey information about character, point of view, or meaning, and more and more interest in speech, which begins to replace description and report as the primary mode of "storytelling." This foregrounding of speech increases as Stein works her way through "The Gentle Lena," the second story of the trio, and is carried to an extreme in "Melanctha," the last story. In "Melanctha" the talk of the characters practically obliterates the narrative. "Melanctha" is not about Melanctha Herbert in the same way that "The Good Anna" is about Anna Federner or that "The Gentle Lena" is about Lena Mainz. The lives of the latter two women are narrated as a sequence of events revealed to the reader at fairly regular intervals. The narrative ofMelanctha's life, on the other hand, is a narrow frame around the edges of the composition, and there are long stretches of prose during which a reader may completely lose sight of the story line. Fully two thirds of"Melanctha" is made up of the seemingly endless conversations between the lovers, Melanctha and Jeff, the central characters of the story. During these conversations, they learn to give themselves over to the process of making meaning and to the uncertainty that that process entails, and they learn this through a long and painful struggle with language. In Stein's earlier fiction, Q.E.D., Fernhurst, and the fragment of The Making cf Americans, the characters and the narrator are articulate people who, when faced with the unruliness of the passions, use language to analyze behavior, formulate experience, and reach conclusions on which to base future action. Much as Jeff and Melanctha would like to accomplish the same feat in "Melanctha," they cannot. They are swamped by the strength of their emotions, the inadequacy of their language, and the inconclusiveness of their experience. In writing "Melanctha," Stein made no attempt to rise above the messiness of her characters' experience. Instead, she allowed the writing to be as inconclusive and disorienting as the experience it records. "Melanctha" is a model of Stein's own activity as a writer. It must also be a model of our activity as readers. We cannot reduce the process of Jeff and Melanctha's relationship to a single meaning or even to a simple resolution. Our understanding of it must evolve from an immersion in its process, and our understanding will always be provisional. 44 This extreme emphasis on process did not come from Stein's study of Flaubert, the model of narrative prose urged on her by Leo. 45 It came, arguably, from her

43 Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909; reprint, London: Pen- present themselves as the products of an associative pro- guin Books, 1979), 9- cess that is transparently available in the very texture of 44 For a more detailed discussion of Stein's processual nar- the narrative .... The internal processes of production ration in Three Lives see Jane Palarini Bowers, Gertrude constitute in large measure the action of the text" (13). Stein {London: Macmillan; New York: St.Martin's, "Melanctha" and, to a lesser extent, "The Good Anna" 1993), 34-62. and "The Gentle Lena" could be described as "self-gen- 4l In Re-forming the Narrative (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer- erating" texts. Although Flaubert's "Un coeur simple" sity Press, 1987), David Hayman points to Flaubert, and may have suggested such a narrative strategy to Stein, in specifically to his portrait of Felicite in "Un coeur "Melanctha," written during the time she sat to Picasso simple," as an important precursor of the kind of novel for her portrait, she pursued this strategy to an extreme he calls self-generating: that is, novels which "enact, or that could hardly be imagined by anyone reading . . . embody, their production." He writes, "Such texts Flaubert's story . 26 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

experience as a witness of Picasso's creative performance and as a participant in the act of portraiture. At Picasso's studio, Stein saw that daily, for ninety days, Picasso stared at the same object (herself) and painted again and again the same image (her portrait). Yet every day this image changed. Her vision of her portrait would have been like a palimpsest, her mind's eye retaining previous images that Picasso had erased. Gertrude Stein saw Picasso's portrait of her recording the process ofits own creation. Its meaning for both artist and model was in this process, not just in the final image or in its resemblance to or representation of the model. Stein's changing aesthetic is also recorded in The Making of Americans,the novel she had begun and abandoned in 1903. According to Leon Katz, who has worked extensively with Stein's early manuscripts and notebooks, Stein began in 1906 to make notes toward revising the old material. 46 It is not known how many chapters she had originally written, since she destroyed part of the early manuscript, but she preserved its first five chapters. These were to serve as the starting point of the new version of the novel, which was eventually to run to 92 5 pages and to take five years to write. When we compare the extant text of the original to the revised version that occupies the first thirty-four pages of the completed novel, we can see exactly how drastically Stein's purposes and procedures had changed between 1903 and 1906. The original Making of Americansis a domestic novel about the marriage of the eldest daughter of the Dehning family. Despite the narrator's protestations that what he means to write "is not a simple novel with a plot and conversations," 47 and despite his suggestion that what he writes may not please us, the narrative style does not depart significantly from the conventions of nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Characters and scenes are conventionally described, and conversations conventionally recorded. The narrative structure is orderly, the narration concise. Each of the five chapters is carefully focused on a single narrative goal: we are first introduced to the Dehning parents, then to the children, focusing on Julia, the eldest daughter and the heroine of this part of the novel; we then hear of the meet- ing and romance between Julia Dehning and Henry Hersland and of the Dehnings' initial disapproval and eventual acceptance of the match, culminating in the wed- ding of the two; we end with the foreshadowing of the unhappy consequences of the marriage. Stein retains all of this material in the revised version. She also reproduces ver- batim passages from the old manuscript. For example, the realistic descriptions of the Dehning country and city houses, first written in 1903, reappear in 1906 with only a few insignificant, one-word alterations. 48 The same is true of the descriptions of Mr. and Mrs. Dehning and of their conversations with each other and with their children. These remnants of the old manuscript are arresting in their new context because they are so remarkably different from the writing that sur- rounds them. As Stein copies parts of the old manuscript, she keeps her mind open to new possibilities, and copying leads to creation, but creation of a very different sort than one would normally expect in a revision. She does not seek to adapt or expand the old; rather, she seeks to move away from it. Creation of the new comes through

46 Leon Katz, introduction, Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Otlier 48 The relevant passages are in Fernhurst, pages 138-39 and Early Writings, by Gertrude Stein (New York: Liveright, 161, and in The Making efAmericans (1925; reprint, West 1971), xxxviii. Glover, Vt.: Something Else Press, 1966}, pages 12, 28. 47 Stein, Fernhurst, 144. Picassoand Gertrude Stein 27 digression from the old. She inscribes new digressions in the midst of transcribing old narrative. For instance, in the old manuscript, Julia's brother George is introduced as follows:

The boy George named under the Anglo Saxon influence bid fair to do credit to his christening. He was a fair athletic chap, cheery as his father, full of excellent intentions and elaborated purposes and though these generally were lost on their way to fulfillment you must remember he was at this time scarcely fourteen that period which has been so well called in boys the senseless age, and so do not make too much of any present weakness. For us as well as for Mrs. Dehning the important matter in the family history at this moment is the marriage of Julia the eldest daughter. 49

Thus the narrator draws us back into the narrative, focusing our attention on the center,Julia, after only the briefest side trip for a quick character sketch of a younger family member. In the new novel, George makes his appearance as follows:

After Julia came the boy George and he was not named after his grandfather. And so it was right that in his name he should not sound as ifhe were the son ofhis father, so at least his mother decided for him, and the father, he laughed and let her do the way she liked it. And so the boy was named George and the other was there but hidden as an initial to be only used for signing. The boy George bade fair to do credit to his christening. George Dehning now about fourteen was strong in sport and washing. He was not foreign in his washing. Oh, no, he was really an american. It's a great question this question of washing. 50

With this, the narrator is off and running on a long and amusing digression on washing. Unlike the short characterization of George in the earlier manuscript, this digression is not curtailed in the interests of maintaining our focus on the "important matter" in the history. In fact, the attention given to the digression suggests that there is no hierarchy of importance in this new narrative. Furthermore, the digression serves no apparent narrative purpose. We hear about washing because of some associative process of the narrator that we can only dimly guess at. Perhaps he is reminded of washing because the name of the character suggests another George-George Washing[ton]. Or perhaps he associates cleanliness with the German-American middle class to which George Dehning belongs. As a result of the digression, we are no longer following the story; rather, we are following the thought process of the narrator. This activity, normally relegated to the background of a narrative (and most often repressed entirely), is foregrounded, called to our attention, and the narrative is thereby reformed. Associative digression becomes the new structuring principle of The Making of Americans. Eventually the nonauthorial narrator disappears altogether. This is perhaps the most significant change from the early manuscript version of The Making of Ameri- cans to the new version. In the new Making efAmericans, we have no need of a narrator since the story of the "Americans" is not presented as anterior to the story of the making of the text. Their story evolves from the writer's attempts to know it and to tell it; the family's progress and the writer's process are told as though they are synchronous, and The Making of Americans becomes a history of both at the same time. Stein's new version of The Making efAmericans is often about the process ofits own construction. Who better to tell that story than the writer herself?

49 Stein, Fernhurst, 145-46. 5° Stein, Making of Americans, I 5. 28 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

Just as Picasso had painted Gertrude Stein's portrait, so Gertrude Stein created verbal portraits of Picasso. One of these, called simply "Picasso" and written in 1909, exemplifies the style of telling that evolved during the writing of Three Lives and in the reworking of The Making efAmericans, a style that proceeded from the same impulse that drove Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein: the impulse to represent in the portrait the drama of its conception and creation. This is how "Picasso" begins:

One whom some were certainly following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were certainly following was one who was charming. One whom some were following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were following was one who was certainly completely charming. Some were certainly following and were certain that the one they were then following was one working and was one bringing out of himself then something. Some were certainly following and were certain that the one they were then following was one bringing out of himself then something that was coming to be a heavy thing, a solid thing and a complete thingY

In a lecture she gave in 1934 on the subject of portraiture, Stein described the method she used in creating the portraits contemporaneous with "Picasso": In the beginning ... I continued to do what I was doing in the Making of Ameri- cans, I was doing what the cinema was doing, I was making a continuous succes- sion of the statement of what that person was until I had not many things but one thing .... Each time that I said the somebody whose portrait I was writing was something that something was just that much different from what I had just said that somebody was and little by little in this way a whole portrait came into being, a portrait that was not description. 52

From our reading of the Picasso portrait (even of the short excerpt here) and of Stein's later comments on this style of portraiture, we can see that the portraits of this period are marked by a high degree of repetitiveness. As Stein observes, however, nothing that lives ever really repeats itsel£ With every repetition there is a change in emphasis: "No matter how often you tell the same story if there is anything alive in the telling the emphasis is different. " 53 These apparent repetitions, albeit with variations in emphasis from occurrence to occurrence, Stein calls "in- sistence." According to Stein, then, the portraits of this period express the essence of the person portrayed through a series of subtly varied, insistent statements. The following statements are insisted on in "Picasso": (1) some people were following some other person who was charming, who was working, who would always be working, who was needing to be working, who was not ever completely working, and who was bringing something out of himself; (2) this thing was heavy, solid, complete, charming, lovely, perplexing, disconcerting, simple, clear, complicated, interesting, disturbing, repellant, and pretty; (3) this thing had a charming, solid, struggling, clear, and real meaning. In one sense, these are certainly observations about Picasso and his work. The connection between the subject, Picasso, named in the title, and the language construction that follows that title is attenuated, however, by the vagueness of the observations made and by the ambiguous pronoun reference throughout the piece. Are the observations really about

51 Stein, Picasso,95. s2 Gertrude Stein, Lecturesin America(1935; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 176--77. Picassoand GertrudeStein 29

Picasso? Only if the "one" referred to in the portrait is Picasso. Can we conclude that the "thing" coming out of "him" is art coming out of Picasso? Only if we are certain that the thing referred to is a work of art. We jump eagerly and naturally to these conclusions, but in fact the portrait is effectively cut loose from its title and its subject. Remove the title, and we cannot be certain that this piece of writing is about Picasso or his art. Without clear reference, it is completely self-contained, its truths emerging from the texture of the prose, not from any concrete reference to a world outside the portrait. There is a tension between the prose in this portrait and our desire for resolution and closure. The thing coming out of the subject is described in a series of contradictions: it is simple and complicated, perplexing and clear, charming and disconcerting, lovely and disturbing, repellant and pretty. It has a clear meaning, but its meaning is never made clear to us. The predominance of participial forms insists on the unfinished quality of the portrait. The statements are always evolv- ing; information is always in process. "Meaning" is itself a participle, always being made. For all that the portrait insists on the solidity and clarity of meaning, meaning is always struggling toward those qualities but never finally achieving them. Looking again at the pronouns, we see that not only do they attenuate the connection between Picasso and the observations presented in the portrait, a potential loss for the reader, but they also can have multiple reference, a potential gain. The indefinite pronouns one and some of the first sentence may refer to Picasso and his followers. They may also refer to Picasso alone-to two sides of him. This is a reading suggested by the notebook entry in which Stein planned the portrait:

Do one about Pablo his emotional leap and courage .... Pablo ... walks in the light and a little ahead efhimselflike Raphael, therefore his things often lack a base. Do him. One whom some were certainly following was one who was completely charming. 54 [Emphasis added)

If Picasso is "a little ahead of himself," leaping courageously and then working to catch up to himself, he can indeed be the one who was charming plus one of those who were following the one who was charming. As we move further into the portrait, it seems that "one" can also refer to the portraitist: "This one was having something coming out of this one." The one who is "having" something coming out of another one can be the writer of the portrait, who "has it" that something is coming out of the one portrayed. Because of the ambiguous pronoun reference, boundaries between portraitist and subject blur. "This one was one whom some were following. This one was one who was working"-two actions, two actors? or two actions, one actor? "He was working he was not ever completely working": a paradox pertaining to one person, or two statements about two people? 55 "Picasso" can be a portrait of Picasso at the same time that it is a portrait of others who are working to bring something meaningful out of themselves, the portraitist included.56

53 Ibid., 167. perhaps" (Picasso, 109). As Catharine Stimpson has writ- 54 Stein, Picasso, 109-10. ten, early in her life Stein separated "herself from her sex 55 Stein, Picasso, 96, 98. in order to assail and herself enter a male world too strong 56 The presence of the masculine pronoun does not invali- for most women"-a world of the mind, not of the body, date a reading of the portrait that includes the portraitist a world where, ideally, there are no sexual differences as one of the workers. At this point in her life, Stein was ("The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein," Critical In- male-identified. In her notebook she wrote, "Pablo & quiry, Spring 1977, 497). Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius. Moi aussi 30 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

The distinction between the portrait that is coming out of Stein and the thing coming out of the one who is working (Picasso or others) also blurs. "Something had been coming out of him, certainly it had been coming out of him, certainly it was something, certainly it had been coming out of him and it had meaning. " 57 Picasso's work comes out of him, but so does this portrait. The interchangeability of painter and portraitist and of painting and writing focuses our attention on the writer's own involvement with her subject and the ways in which their endeavors are the same. Both are working, both are following and being followed, both are having a thing coming out of them, both are making meaning. This portrait pre- sents two artists at work: the painter and the writer. Neither is in this portrait as an expressive presence, but both are here as "makers." Stein's portrait of Picasso suggests that the value of art is in the creative process, which reveals what Charles Altieri calls the "structuring power of the artist," his or her power to make things that have meaning. 58 The adjective that describes the artist-charmin~also describes the thing the artist makes and the meaning it has. The artifact's charm lies in the artist's process of charming us, ofleading us into the creative magic of art. Artist, artifact, and meaning come together in the working, the making of art. The artist creating is displayed by the thing made. Its meaning lies in the energy of its creation.

57 Stein, Picasso,95---96. Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 58 Charles Altieri, PainterlyAbstraction in ModernistAmerican 14.