Gertrude Stein sat for Picasso, in 1905-6, and he painted her portrait. Every afternoon for three months, she and her little dog trotted over to the painter’s cramped quarters, where she posed in a large broken armchair. After ninety sittings, Picasso told her not to return. He scraped away everything he had done on her face. And later he painted her face back in from memory. The painting is viewed as foreshadowing Cubism, the style Picasso co-invented.
Maybe this is what’s happening with me, a scraping away of everything for what will come.
Picasso famously said, “Everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will,” which Stein quoted in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
Stein, by the way, was satisfied with the portrait, and influenced; she experimented with “verbal Cubism” — most notably with her book of poetry Tender Buttons, which begins with a description of a carafe:
All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
( The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
4 Comments
We are the scrapers, and the scraped. It doesn’t sound very dignified, does it? But along with contemplating the extent to which we are all being molded and shaped to fit some unknown future, it somehow helps to recognize that we are the scrapers, too, contributing as well as being sacrificed. Perhaps these scrapings are mystical evidence, noted or not, that “the difference is spreading.” The kick in the head is that difference has no value; it’s just difference.
Intriguing, but now I am not sure as I thought I was first read what you mean, about the difference, having no value. Would you be kind enough to say more?
I would interpret Picasso’s act as scraping away all the actions and prejudices of the past and reinventing his subject the way he felt she should be. Experimenting results in knowledge and also in accumulated errors. The final product had to be perfect, and he started afresh to make it so using the knowledge from his earlier experiments. Very interesting anecdote.
I’d read that line about Picasso saying that she would end up looking like the painting even if she could not see the resemblance at the time it was painted. About the words Stein wrote, you are so right. If cubism had a sound and rhythm to it, her words would certainly be it. How eye-opening.