the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt one)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein recalled posing for hours in a broken armchair while Picasso sat opposite her on a small kitchen chair, his forehead inches from his easel, brown and grey swirled on his palette. While he painted, she “meditated and made sentences” in her mind. As the months passed, she watched Picasso’s mounting frustration as he redid and scrubbed out her features, before reaching total impasse, painting out the entire head in anger, and vanishing to Spain. The next time they met, six months later, he silently presented Stein with the completed portrait. In the interval, Picasso’s style had transformed. The original, naturalistic features were gone, and the face now resembled a sculptured mask, its features starkly outlined. She looks ageless, androgynous, out of time—and utterly assured in herself. When Stein protested that it didn’t look at all like her—if anything, it bore a closer resemblance to the artist himself—he calmly replied, “It will.”

When, in later life, Gertrude Stein was asked how her portrait came to be painted by the relatively unknown, twenty-four-year-old Pablo Picasso, she simply claimed that neither of them could remember. But—as was clear to visitors to her home, where she held court from a chair placed directly beneath her likeness—the painting became central to her sense of identity: “For me,” she wrote in 1938, “it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me.” The aura of mystery around the sittings—which Stein, implausibly, numbered at eighty or ninety—turned the portrait, from its conception, into a myth. For Stein, it provided an origin story which would come to define her image, linking herself and Picasso indelibly as the two supreme geniuses of the twentieth century, in literature and in art. While Picasso was deep in the “long struggle” of her portrait—inventing Cubism in the process—Stein was immersed in writing Three Lives, a trio of stories which she considered “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.” There was, of course, another reason to foreground the connection. By the time Stein wrote the Autobiography, in 1932, Picasso’s work was growing fast in stature, while hers languished in comparative obscurity. By representing their beginnings as intertwined, Stein was making a plea for their futures, too, to be equal.