When Picasso Painted Gertrude Stein

[Annie Sargent]

Bonjour !

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I wanted to include this story in my VoiceMap walking tour of Montmartre. But it was too long for a walking tour. But I think it’s a really cool story that I bet you’ve never heard. I hope you enjoy it!

My story takes place at the start of the XX century, right before WWI, the war that changed everything. Between 1907 and 1914 the city of Paris was at the epicenter of a creative bubble. These were the years when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented cubism. Picasso was flamboyant and loud; Braque was timid and unsure of himself. Neither one of them was famous yet, but they were full of ideas and seemed to have the sort of friendship that would never die.

Then lived in Paris an American called Gertrude Stein, a poet and wealthy art collector. She did more than collect art. She became friends with young and vibrant artists. She was a little older than most of them and was fascinated by the mind of young creators. As a poet herself she enjoyed the work of Guillaume Appolinaire and enjoyed talking to him.

Gertrude Stein came to Paris to meet her older brother Leo. Leo was an art critic who published articles in the New Republic and was the eyes of America on everything happening on the Paris art scene. They shared a large apartment in Paris at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6e arrondissement near the Odeon.

A lot of Americans moved to Paris around the year 1900. Not just artists and authors, but doctors, industrialists, bankers. American Express opened its first branch in France in 1895. The first American Chamber of Commerce abroad opened in Paris in 1894. Major department stores in America send women buyers to Paris so they could find the best French goods to be sold in wealthy parts of the US. Mrs H.E. Seemuller made a fortune going all over France selling American machines to French farmers and industrialists. France was a good place to do business and Americans were all in.

When it comes to Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, they were both artists and wealthy art buyers. They collected paintings by young artists like Cézanne, Matisse and eventually Picasso as well as more established masters like Manet and Monet. They hung the works in their apartment which soon became the best modern art gallery in Paris!

Every Saturday night they the Steins invited authors like Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, James Joyce to visit them in their home. It was an informal yet regular gathering of artists from all over the world, a room booming with new ideas and creativity.

Saturday nights at the Stein’s became known as Jour de visite fixe (fixed day for visits). Let’s think about Matisse for example. The Steins had some of his pieces hanging in their home. Matisse could bring guests to see his work there, and he could bring anybody he chose. The circle was inclusive and ever expanding. Paris was the place where Impressionism was born, and young creative people flocked to the city seeking inspiration and recognition. It all worked like Paris was the port of creativity and modernism and the Eiffel Tower was the lighthouse.

In Paris young artists went to museums where they could discover Cézanne and Gaugin as well as Primitive Art aka Indigenous Art aka Tribal Art (I’m not sure what the most appropriate term is in English, we call them Arts Premiers in French). Picasso went to the Louvre to see primitive Iberian art, and there is little doubt that what he saw there inspired cubism.

At the Musée de l’Homme on the Trocadero he could see African masks brought there from the French colonies. So many paintings and objects were available for viewing in Paris! This was not the case in many European capitals BTW. Today you can see even more indigenous art at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, inaugurated by Jacques Chirac in 2006 not far from the Eiffel Tower. The collection is not without controversy, but for today I will concentrate on the fact that the ability to see a lot of art from all over the world and remote times is a wonderful thing and inspired young artists in the 1900s.

There was a big marketplace for art in Paris, that’s why the Steins came! There were salons where artists could submit their work and sell their pieces. The Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne, the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts and the Salon des Artistes Français were the major events.

These were major art competitions where everyone who mattered or wanted to matter showed up. OK, not everyone, there were rebels who made a big deal about not going, but most artists attended and hoped their work would be accepted.

The system was clearly flawed because half of humanity (namely females) were almost completely excluded from the salons, but this is a problem we’ve only begun to address in 2021, so it is not a surprise that the salons in 1900 were not inclusive.

Gertrude Stein went to the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre where Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I’m sure you’ve seen photos of this piece if you haven’t seen it in person. The MOMA in New York bought the painting in 1939 and that’s where it’s been ever since. The Bateau Lavoir where this masterpiece was born was a basic painter’s studio with plenty of light. There was nothing fancy about it and Montmartre hadn’t been gentrified yet. What made it special is that it was open to young artists and the space was cheap.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is the painting that showed for the first time the distorted bodies and faces of women standing naked looking mostly pink. The representation had little to do with reality and everything to do with abstraction. This was different from anything anyone had seen before.

This is not a painting you can look at with indifference. You have to wonder how these ladies got to be so mangled. Braque (who was one of Picasso’s best friends) said “This painting will make you want to spit fire. I have wondered what devil inspired Picasso to paint women this way.”

When Picasso started to seek the attention of Gertrude Stein, Fauvism was all the rage. But Fauvism did not last very long. It was big between 1905 and 1907 and voilà here came the new art movement: Cubism. Everything sped up in the early 1900s, so many new ideas and new opportunities! Gertrude wrote a lot about how fast things changed in the art world in Paris.

Gertrude Stein sat for Picasso almost 90 times before he ever painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. She was 33, matronly for her age, she loved food, and she was full of energy and ideas. But he upset her because at one point he deleted all the details he had previously painted on her face and turned her face into a solid shape of beige, not quite solid, but almost. She was one of his most generous financial supporters and it really bothered her that he made her sit so many times to end up painting her from memory. How dare he erase her face? She didn’t know he was about to push that idea much further. Erasing faces and even bodies so he could get to the essence of the scene.

When Picasso sent Gertrude Stein a note saying the painting was finished, she immediately boarded an Omnibus, the horse-drawn carriage that slowly made its way as high as possible on the hill of Montmartre. At one point the horses couldn’t do it anymore and she had to continue on foot. This happened to everyone. Even Napoleon had to get off his horse to walk up to the top of Montmartre because it was steep and many streets were unpaved.

This gave Gertrude plenty of time to rehearse what she’d tell Picasso. Quelle foutaise, she wanted to get it right. Foutaise as in hogwash, nonsense, hokum! When Picasso opened the door on the top floor under the roof, she didn’t say a word to him. She walked right past him and maneuvered her body down the narrow stairs. There, at the bottom of the stairs, was her portrait. And Gertrude was speechless. Picasso had never seen her to be speechless in all the time he had known her!

She didn’t like that her face looked like a mask, but she immediately saw that this mask was not the sort of mask that hides a person. Instead, it’s a mask that tells the truth about her. Her inquisitive nature, her frank appearance, her vital force. She could tell at once that the painting with the odd face spoke to her nature and she accepted it.

This is a photo of a young Gertrude Stein. Picasso’s painting is actually a good likeness I think I think Picasso saw the essence of a woman and he made more abstract and timeless. What do you think?

 

Personally, I’d be terrified to let someone like Picasso paint my portrait because I’d worry what I would get. He might look at me and see something I’ve never seen myself, or even worse something I would rather not see!

Thank you for your support of the podcast and if you enjoyed this, please talk about it on the Facebook group. Do you have ideas about what I could write about? Drop me a line: annie@joinusinfrance.com Merci, bonne journée !

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