Gertrude Stein

Eighty or ninety sittings

Picasso began the portrait in the winter of 1905–6, a few months into a new friendship. He was twenty-four. Stein was thirty-one, and she and her brother Leo had recently started buying his pictures, recognition and rent money arriving together. To pose, she crossed Paris to his studio in a converted piano factory at 13 rue Ravignan in Montmartre, the ramshackle building known as the Bateau-Lavoir.

Eighty sittings, or ninety. The number is Stein's own, and the Met treats it as part of the portrait's myth rather than a documented tally.

She did not spend those hours merely posing. She was writing Melanctha then, the longest of the Three Lives stories, and later remembered composing sentences in the chair while Picasso made and unmade her face. Whether the two experiments shaped each other is not something the evidence can settle. What is certain is stranger: two young modernists, one room, many weeks, both trying to work out what a likeness could be once copying stopped seeming like the point.

The crisis of the face

For all those sittings, the head would not come. Picasso repainted it, scraped it, and finally painted the face out altogether, telling Stein, by her account, that he could no longer see her when he looked.

The canvas sat headless while he spent the summer of 1906 in Gósol, in the Catalan Pyrenees, simplifying the figure toward sculpture and absorbing the ancient Iberian carving that had recently surfaced in Paris. When he came back he finished the face without asking her to sit again. Heavy outlines, asymmetrical eyes, planes flattened into a mask. The Met ties the head directly to the Iberian encounter and reads it as a foreshadowing of Cubism. People complained that it no longer looked like her; Picasso's reply became famous. It would.

He was right, and not by accident. He had reversed the job of portraiture. The sitter would grow into the image.

What lies beneath the surface

The Met's conservation study confirmed that the stories of erasure were not embellishment. X-radiography and autoradiography show heavy reworking of the face, though only traces of the earlier features survive, because Picasso scraped the canvas between sittings. The pigment maps are more talkative. In the brown-ochre map, a thin outline along her cheek records an earlier three-quarter profile. In the vermilion map of her lap, seven adjacent fingers mark the hand's repeated repositioning, probably shifting as the face changed above it.

Parts of the coat went down fast, broad strokes with paint dripping along the sleeves, still looking, in the Met's phrase, as fresh as the day of the first sketch. The face and hands grew muddy with revision. Two kinds of time share one surface: the speed of the first attack, and months of argument layered over it.

Likeness beyond appearance

If the finished face gave up observation, what makes this still a likeness of Gertrude Stein? Partly the body, which carries what the face withholds: weight, endurance, forward intent, a total indifference to being approved of. None of the flattery conventionally extended to female sitters appears anywhere on the canvas.

Stein never wavered about the result. It was, she wrote in 1938, "the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me." Fitting, from a writer whose own prose portraits refused physical description and built their subjects out of rhythm and repetition instead. Neither artist illustrates the other. But both had stopped treating likeness as a copy, and the painting is where those two refusals sat in one room, looking at each other.

A threshold, hung above a fireplace

The painting is divided against itself, and the division is the point. Coat, chair, and earthen palette belong to the end of the Rose Period and the weight of traditional portraiture. The head belongs to what came next, the rebuilding of the figure that ran through Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 and on into Cubism. It is not a Cubist painting. It is the evidence that Cubism arrived not as a system but as a series of problems inside individual pictures, beginning with the problem of the face.

Stein hung the finished portrait above the fireplace at 27 rue de Fleurus, the painted Stein presiding over the living one through every Saturday salon, until she and Alice B. Toklas moved to the rue Christine in 1938. Photographs paired her with it for the rest of her life, which is to say the prediction kept coming true.

She bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum at her death in 1946, the first Picasso the museum ever acquired. In February 1947, before the canvas left Paris, Toklas brought Picasso in to say goodbye to it. He stood in front of the portrait alone for some minutes.

More by Pablo Picasso

Painting · Rose PeriodBoy with a Pipe1905Painting · Analytic CubismDaniel-Henry Kahnweilerautumn 1910Painting · Return to OrderHead of a Woman1921Sculpture · CubismHead of a Woman (Fernande)1909Painting · Return to orderGrande baigneuse1921Painting · Return to OrderMother and Child1921BalletParade1917Painting · Blue PeriodThe Old Guitaristlate 1903–early 1904Painting · Return to OrderThree Women at the SpringFontainebleau, summer 1921Painting · Surrealist periodWoman in a Red Armchair1929