Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder’s Reviews > Picasso: Enriched edition. An Experimental Modernist Portrait of Cubist Innovation in the Parisian Avant-Garde > Status Update

there commenced to be felt in the large pictures and it culminated in one of these large pictures La Danse, the fact that naturalism for Picasso was dead, that he was no longer seeing as all the world thought they saw.

Very much later when he had had a great deal of success he said one day, you know, your family, everybody, if you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.

So Picasso commenced and little by little there came the picture Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon and when there was that it was too awful. I remember, Tschoukine who had so much admired the painting of Picasso was at my house and he said almost in tears, what a loss for French art.

One day a rich collector came to my house and he looked at the portrait and he wanted to know how much I had paid for it. Nothing I said to him, nothing he cried out, nothing I answered, naturally he gave it to me. Some days after I told this to Picasso, he smiled, he doesn’t understand, he said, that at that time the difference between a sale and a gift was negligible.

Painting in the nineteenth century was only done in France and by Frenchmen, apart from that, painting did not exist, in the twentieth century it was done in France but by Spaniards.
In the nineteenth century painters discovered the need of always having a model in front of them, in the twentieth century they discovered that they must never look at a model.

Stylistically, Stein’s hallmarks are unmistakable: repetition that intensifies rather than redundantly restates, variation that tests the limits of a phrase, and syntax that brings foregrounded attention to the smallest units of language.