Clara Choi

Picasso Through Gertrude Stein: a Modernist Perspective

Started Apr. 10, 2024

Abstract or project description

As a modernist writer and close friend of the influential 20th-century Cubist artist Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein wrote numerous portraits, memoirs, and a monograph of Picasso. She used her personal connection with the artist as a source of insight into his life and work. Through her writing, Stein described Picasso as a kindred spirit whose Cubist approach to painting she also applied to literature. Especially in her monograph Picasso (1938) and her poetic portrait of him, If I Told Him, Stein presents Picasso as a modernist “genius” whose personality and reputation echo Napoleon Bonaparte’s. Unlike other biographers of Picasso, Stein writes his story with a modernist focus, emphasizing that Picasso’s “genius” and personality are rooted in his unprecedented visual outlook on the world around him. Stein presents the lens through which new insights into Picasso as a person are revealed from the perspective of a fellow modernist.

In my presentation, I will investigate Stein’s understanding of Picasso through an in-depth study of her monograph Picasso (1938) and her poem, If I Told Him, along with her other written works. My focus will be on how Stein used Picasso to offer a distinctly modernist definition of the concept of artistic “genius.” I will also use comparisons to other biographies on Picasso to find and analyze the distinctive highlights of Stein’s work. Stein’s writing is essential and eye-opening in scrutinizing both Pablo Picasso and the more general world to which he belonged, that of the modernist artist in the early 20th century.