What was it that defined their friendship?
A portrait! Picasso decided to paint the portrait of Gertrude Stein in 1905, soon after they met once she had arrived in France, in Paris.
That painting would require no fewer than 90 sittings! Quite enough time for lots of private conversations and to nurture their growing artistic rapport.
The two artists had found each other. For years, they influenced and supported one another in their search for new forms of artistic language. She, in literature and poetry, he in painting. Together they broke new ground, and their friendship was critical to the birth of Cubism.
Tender Buttons is a collection of prose poems published by Gertrude Stein in 1914. Despite its enigmatic title, the book is very much about real life. Its three sections, “Objects”, “Food” and “Rooms”, reflect the everyday world.
But rather than describing them, she questions the materiality of the words of our daily life: the audible or visual dimension of a “carafe” or a “box”, for example.
At the time, the book was received by a very select and specialised literary circle: it found its wider audience later, when it was acknowledged to be a Cubist work and decidedly modern!
In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso, the subject, inspired by a brothel, and the style, almost primitive, caused a scandal. It nonetheless became a prime example of Cubism in painting. The work is radical in so far as it presents new stylistics, with fragmentary shapes and distorted, geometrical bodies. Gertrude Stein, full of praise, bought Carnet 10 itself, and said about the final work: ‘A magnificent language, which no literature could express, as our words exist already. Alas!’ We shall simply have to look and admire!
