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

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

As Stein’s enthusiasm for portraits grew, the manuscripts piled up. She enlisted the help of the same friends who had tried to interest publishers in Three Lives, and kept a small black notebook tracking the editors and magazines to which each text had been sent. After each rejection, she wrote “returned” next to the title. In early 1912, May Knoblauch—who had regained Stein’s trust by negotiating the deal with the Grafton Press for Three Lives—took Stein’s portraits of Picasso and Matisse to the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, whose 291 gallery on Fifth Avenue had held the first exhibition of Matisse’s paintings in America. Stieglitz offered to publish the pieces in a special number of his magazine Camera Work, accompanied by images of paintings from the Steins’ collection. The portraits, read together, contrast the pair as two titans of modern art, Matisse “struggling”—the portrait’s central word—to convince himself of the value of his art, buffeted by conflicting reactions from his audiences; Picasso the emerging leader “whom some were certainly following,” a man of charm and vision but possibly flighty: “He was,” she writes, “not ever completely working.” “You will be very careful, will you not,” wrote Stein to Stieglitz, “that no punctuation is introduced into the things in printing. It is very necessary as I have put in all of it that I want and any that is introduced will make everything wrong.” Stieglitz promised, and in his preface to the publication, he declared that in Stein’s work “the Post-Impressionist spirit is found expressing itself in literary form.”