Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein

by Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein is best known for the quote, "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." She was an early 20th century writer whose work mirrored the experimentalism of the Cubist art movement. "A Long Gay Book" (the novella that opens this volume -- a novella so substantial that it could well fill a volume by itself) is written in the stream-of-consciousness style that Stein helped to make famous.

Genres: Art, Fiction, Classics, American, Poetry

257 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2006

About the author

Gertrude Stein was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874-1914, and the second with Alice B. Toklas, from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946. Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein cultivated significant tertiary relationships with well-known members of the avant garde artistic and literary world of her time.

Reviews

[Patrick Gibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every once in a while you need a little Gertrude Stein. Why? Here's why:

“It is a very strange feeling when one is loving a clock that is to every one of your class of living an ugly and a foolish one and one really likes such a thing and likes it very much and liking it is a serious thing, or one likes a colored handkerchief that is very gay and every one of your kind of living thinks it a very ugly or a foolish thing and thinks you like it because it is a funny thing to like it and you like it with a serious feeling, or you like eating something that is a dirty thing and no one can really like that thing or you write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for every one must think you a silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you have a queer feeling and you are not very certain and you go on writing. Then someone says yes to it, to something you are liking, or doing or making and then never again can you have completely such a feeling of being afraid and ashamed that you had then when you were writing or liking the thing and not any one had said yes about the thing.”

[Beth Bonness · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a fondness for Gertrude Stein and for Picasso; finding this book allowed me to enjoy boy, a bit voyeuristically if I'm honest. Imagining a time when people you admire shared airspace together is compelling.

According to Stein:
Picasso's drawings were not of things saying but of things expressed, in short they were words for him and drawings always was his only way of talking and he talks a great deal.

Picasso was always in need of emptying himself, of completely empty himself it’s necessary that he should be greatly stimulated so that he could be active enough to empty himself completely.

People really do not change from one generation to another, as far back as we know history people are about the same as they were, they have the same needs, the same desires, the same virtues and the same qualities, the same defects, indeed nothing changes from one generation to another except the things seen and the things seen make that generation, that is to say nothing changes and people from one generation to another except the way of seeing and being seen, the streets change, the way of being driven in the streets change, the buildings change, the comforts of the houses change, but the people from one generation to another do not change.

Picasso tried to express the consciousness of things not as one knows them but as they are when one sees them without remembering having looked at them. For example, a child seeing their mother’s face when all they can really see is one of her very large eyes from their perspective.

Picasso could put objects together and make a photograph of them, by the force of his vision it was not necessary that he paint the picture. To have brought the objects together already change them to other things, not to another picture but to something else, things as Picasso saw them.

Spaniards and Americans are not like Europeans, that is they do not need religion or mysticism not to believe in reality as all the world knows it, not even when they see it. In fact reality for them is not real and that is why there are skyscrapers in American literature & Spanish painting and literature.