Picasso had struggled with his subject, challenged more by his own investigations as a painter than by the impulse to capture likeness.
The portrait of his formidable sitter was halted, at least temporarily. Quite suddenly, in the spring of 1906, he painted out the head, famously saying, "I can't see you any more when I look." He was at an impasse. Over the mantle are Paul Cézanne's Madame Cézanne with a Fan, 1878/88, and Pablo Picasso's Gertrude Stein, 1905–6. He worked and reworked the canvas over many months.Ī photograph of Gertrude Stein's apartment. We know that Picasso painted quickly and intensely, albeit with difficulty. This curious calculation is likely an exaggeration. In the rich mythology surrounding this illustrious collaboration, Gertrude noted that she posed for eighty or ninety sittings.
He shook his head, said no, and carried on. So impressed with the first sketch, they urged Picasso to leave the image as it was.
On the day Picasso began the portrait, Gertrude's brother Leo appeared at the studio with several family members. During intervals of calm, the beautiful Fernande Olivier (Picasso's muse of the moment) read aloud the poems of Jean de La Fontaine. The studio was lively-visitors came and went while Gertrude chatted away with her newfound friend. She wore a brown corduroy suit and sat in a large broken armchair. Over a period of three months, in the dead of winter, he stoked his cast-iron stove and welcomed her into his humble atelier. Picasso was taken by Gertrude and asked to do her portrait even though he was not working from observation at the time. The young Picasso had just met Stein, the expatriate American collector, who had recently discovered the artist's new paintings at a gallery in Paris. This evocative description introduces us to Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, his cold, spartan studio in Montmartre, and one of the most celebrated portraits of early modernism. Picasso sat very tight in his chair and very close to his canvas and on a very small palette, which was of uniform brown-grey colour, mixed some more brown grey and the painting began.
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