Picasso by Gertrude Stein

Usually, I only include books in this diary that I have read completely. I feel I owe a book that, even if it means forcing myself to finish something I’m not enjoying as I did with Under the Volcano. But I didn’t feel I owed that to this slight book. I quit at about page twenty. At that point it had already infuriated me so that I put it down, but had enough emotion about it that I want to write about it anyway. The problem is not Stein’s writing style: the prose here is simple but more or less straightforward. The problem is her gross misunderstanding of Picasso and his art, or rather art in general, and her arrogance. How’s this for an opening sentence?

“Painting in the nineteenth century was only done in France and by Frenchman, apart from that, painting did not exist, in the twentieth century it was done in France but by Spaniards.”

Or here’s a bit of nonsense from page 3:

“His friends in Paris were writers rather than painters, why have painters for friends when he could paint as he could paint. It was obvious that he did not need to have painters in his daily life and this was true for all of his life.”

Emphasizing Picasso’s connections to writer connections serves to amplify Stein’s position in his life, which is clearly her intent. But his formation obviously included numerous important artists: Gris? Braque? Toulouse-Lautrec? Matisse? Although Stein is undoubtedly important to Picasso’s early success (Picasso’s famous portrait of Stein is from 1906, just after his “Rose” period), she fails to give any credit to her equally important brother Leo, or even mention him.

Originally published in 1938 (but perhaps written earlier as Stein collected a lot of unpublished manuscripts that only found an audience after she had published the successful Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933) the book comes exactly during the time when Samuel Steward was visiting Stein in the books that became his Parisian Lives, and the Stein/Toklas murder mysteries Murder is Murder is Murder and The Caravaggio Shawl. Having read those novels last summer, I’ve stumbled into a bit of a Gertrude Stein phase. I just finished reading Steven Watson’s Prepare for Saints about the creation and first production of the Thomson/Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts, after talking about it at a dinner party. Being in that phase, I picked this book to read next off of my bookshelf at home as I was looking for something to read while I waited for a book I’ve put on reserve at the library to come in. I had bought Picasso at a used bookstore years ago perhaps thinking that in one volume it looked to combine both my interest in modern literature and modern art. Unfortunately, it satisfied neither.

I did read Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and her Three Lives, years ago, and liked them both. More recently I glanced at a library copy of her Making of Americans and decided that it would not be worth the effort. In Steward’s affectionate novels, Stein comes across as sweet though rather a simpleton. In Watson non-fiction, Stein is petty, ungenerous, and full of herself. Her portrait of Picasso sadly, confirms Watson’s portrait of her.