Picasso

A book written in French

Stein wrote Picasso in French for a Paris publisher, Librairie Floury, at 14 rue de l'Université. The book appeared in 1938 in an illustrated series called Anciens et modernes, meaning old and modern. Edward Burns, who edited Stein's writings on Picasso, notes that writing in French was a real departure for her.

The English text is Alice B. Toklas's work. Batsford approached Stein about an English edition during 1938, and the job of translating fell to Toklas. She followed the French manuscript but adapted it freely. Her first draft offered Stein several English choices here and there, and Stein picked among them.

Readers of the English edition are therefore reading two people. The sentences have Stein's repetitions and missing commas, but they passed through Toklas first. The Library of Congress holds the English edition as a London book of 1939, and Dover's 1984 reprint gives 1938 for the Batsford original.

The camouflaged truck on the boulevard Raspail

The book's camouflage story is set at the start of the First World War. Stein was with Picasso on the boulevard Raspail at night when a camouflaged army truck went by. They had heard of camouflage but had never seen it. Picasso stared at it and cried out: "yes it is we who made it, that is cubism."

Stein builds a larger claim on the story. Older wars, she says, were arranged around one man in the centre with other men around him. The war of 1914 to 1918 had no beginning and no end, and one corner of it mattered as much as another. In her account, the war had the same shape as a cubist picture.

The same idea runs through the whole book. Stein describes the twentieth century as a time when everything cracks, everything is destroyed and everything isolates itself. She says Picasso was the only painter who saw that century with his own eyes. She puts the rule in one sentence: "A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation."

Stein in her own book

Stein is never far from the centre of Picasso. She dates the end of the rose period by her own portrait, which he worked on through the winter of 1905 to 1906. She writes that she was and still is satisfied with it: "for me, it is I." The painting, Gertrude Stein, is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

She also makes a large claim about herself. At one stage, she says, she alone understood him. She gives two possible reasons: that she was expressing the same thing in literature, and that she was an American.

The book has lighter moments too. Stein tells how a painter asked Alice B. Toklas to lend her name so some pictures could hang at a Paris salon. The pictures were accepted. Stein showed Picasso the catalogue and told him that Toklas had never painted and yet had a picture in the salon. Picasso, she writes, went red.

Museums have taken up the same pairing. In 2023 the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris staged Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso: Inventing Language, with the support of the Musée national Picasso-Paris. The exhibition set Stein's word portraits beside his cubist ones.

On the banned list in 1943

The French edition had a second life under the German occupation. On 10 May 1943 the occupying authorities issued the third Liste Otto of books that could not be sold in France. Stein appears on it among Jewish authors writing in French, as "Miss Gertrude Stein", with Floury named as her publisher.

A writer on the list could not have books sold, and libraries had to remove them. Stein and Toklas were then living near Belley, in the Ain, and had moved to Culoz that February.