Gertrude Stein reads If I Had Told Him a Completed Portrait of Picasso
Gertrude Stein reads If I Had Told Him a Completed Portrait of PicassoFrom the time she moved to France in 1903 until her death in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1946, American writer Gertrude Stein was a central figure in the Parisian art world. An advocate of the avant garde, Stein helped shape an artistic movement that demanded a novel form of expression and a conscious break with the past
Her nonlinear prose and poetry are like paintings, frozen in what she called a “continuous present.” As Jonathan Levin writes in the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Stein’s Three Lives:
Stein clearly takes pleasure in words, almost in a way that a seven-year-old might, endlessly repeating a word, and variously inflecting it, to the point that it is effectively emptied of all meaning. Relying mostly on simple, often monosyllabic words, Stein wields language much as the modern painters she admired and collected were wielding paint, suggesting form through a radically simplified use of line and color….By combining and repeating such simple words and phrases, Stein helped reinvent the English language for the twentieth century. Much as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso helped people understand how the eye constructs its field of vision, so Stein helped readers understand how words construct a field of meaning.
Her nonlinear prose and poetry are like paintings, frozen in what she called a “continuous present.” As Jonathan Levin writes in the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Stein’s Three Lives:
Stein clearly takes pleasure in words, almost in a way that a seven-year-old might, endlessly repeating a word, and variously inflecting it, to the point that it is effectively emptied of all meaning. Relying mostly on simple, often monosyllabic words, Stein wields language much as the modern painters she admired and collected were wielding paint, suggesting form through a radically simplified use of line and color….By combining and repeating such simple words and phrases, Stein helped reinvent the English language for the twentieth century. Much as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso helped people understand how the eye constructs its field of vision, so Stein helped readers understand how words construct a field of meaning.
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