> exit from the pictorial crisis
Obviously, for an artist faced with the challenge of embodying creatively the second lustrum of the twentieth century, such a remote village in the middle of the Catalan Pyrenees was not, at first sight, the most suitable place to seek a solution to the pictorial crisis which led him to paint Gertrude Stein’s portrait. But Gósol soon became a fruitful place for Picasso because for the first time in his life, he was immersed in a lifestyle based on the courage of truth, in an economy of subsistence, surrounded by a harsh mountain environment.
This “courage of truth” (borrowing Foucault’s terms)[1] was an everyday life that transmuted what he bore within, that which had been blocked by some kind of unprecedented languor. This languor, which struck him just before he first left for Barcelona (where he announced his arrival on Monday after May 16th i.e. May 21st)[2] and then in Gósol (probably on Friday May 25th),[3] was, in my view the main reason why the Portrait of Gertrude Stein was left unfinished in a corner in his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Paris.[4] It was simply that this skilled portrait painter could not return to the Rose period (the so-called “Harlequin Period” or “Italian Period” in Stein’s story), an epoch to which the Portrait of Gertrude Stein, which revolutionized the whole genre of portrait-painting, meant a violent break.
Nevertheless, Picasso had no clue which direction to follow. He was uncertain and, for the first time, he experienced deep doubts about his painting procedures. In fact, it could be said that his artistic mood was very close to Cézanne’s, and that he made up his mind to experiment in depth with all of Cézanne’s hesitations and worries.[5]
Hence, I propose to date the influence of Cézanne on Picasso earlier than most scholars and biographers, including Richardson, Daix, or Cowling,[6] who date Picasso’s first clear turn towards Cézanne from Cézanne’s exhibition at the Salon d’Automne of 1906, which opened two months and ten days after the journey back from Gósol, and only a few weeks before the death of the master. However, as I understand it, when Picasso asked Stein to pose for him at the start of 1906 (nearly five months before he went to Gósol), he was already trying to feel all the Cézannian tensions in giving up the subject, striving to go into the motif, precisely Cézanne’s main creative maxim aller sur le motif (“to go into the motif”). In other words, Picasso was trying to paint not for representation, but for presentation.[7] I assume that this is the main reason for such an extraordinary event as Picasso asking to Gertrude Stein to pose for an enormous number of sessions.[8]
Thus, as I understand it, the extraordinary thing is not Gertrude Stein posing, but rather Picasso asking her, the amount of sessions needed and the failure. The similarities with Cézanne’s procedures are astonishing. As Merleau-Ponty points out at the beginning of his text “Le doute de Cézanne”, about the master of Aix:
“He needed a hundred working sessions for a still life, a hundred and fifty posing sessions for a portrait.” [9]
It was with this obsession of “going into the motif” that Picasso experimented with the first set of Cézanne’s doubts and abandoned the portrait of the lady, leaving her faceless. The reason was, as he supposedly said, that he no longer saw Stein when he looked at her: “I do not see you anymore when I look at you”. [10]
[1] Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vérité: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II: Cours au Collège de France (1983-1984). (Gallimard: Paris, 2009).
[2] As can be read in a letter by Picasso to Casanovas from May 16th (Wednesday): “We will arrive on Monday afternoon at Barcelona. I’ll let you know so that we can see each other. A punch in the nose from your friend Picasso” (“El lunes por la tarde llegaremos á Barcelona te aviso para que podamos vernos, Un bon cop de puny al nas de tu amigo Picasso”; Portell i Camps, Les cartes, letter 29)
[3] Ver Portell i Camps, Les cartes, letter 30
[4] See Richardson, A life of Picasso, Vol. I, 433–54; Pierre Cabanne, Le Siècle de Picasso, Vol. I, La Jeunesse, le cubisme, le théâtre, l’amour, 1881–1937 (Paris: Denoël, 1973), 180–5 and Elisabeth Cowling, “Le drame de l’homme. Le Cézannisme de Picasso en 1906–1907,” in Odile Billoret-Bourdy and Michel Guérin (Eds.) catalogue Picasso Cezanne. Quelle filiation ? (Aix–en–Provence: Musée Granet, 2009), 43–54, see specifically 45.
[5] Picasso said to Christian Zervos in 1935: “Ce qui nous intéresse, c’est l’inquiétude de Cézanne, c’est l’enseignement de Cézanne” (“What interests us is Cézanne’s worries, Cézanne’s teachings”) Cahiers d’Art, special issue: 173–78, quoted in Bernadac and Michaël (Eds.), Picasso, 36.
[6] See Richardson, A life of Picasso, Vol. II, 47–57; Pierre Daix, Le nouveau Dictionnaire Picasso (Paris: Ed. Robert Laffont, 2012), 176–80.
[7] The mentioned critics do recognize Cézanne’s influence on the resolution of Stein’s portrait and especially the influence on Picasso of Madame Cézanne with Fan (acquired by the Steins in 1904). However, they barely put emphasis on the role of the Gosolonian period. This is also the position of Madelaine, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, 9–11; of Tinterow and Stein (Ed.), Picasso, 109–10, as well as Cowling, “Le drame de l’homme ”, 43–54. Pierre Cabanne is who most evidently alludes to Cézanne when discussing Picasso’s creative referents in Gósol, although he does not develop this idea. See: Cabanne, Le Siècle, Vol. I, 180–5.
[8] See Stein, Picasso, 510. See also The Autobiography, 713.
[9] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens (Paris: Gallimard, 1996 [1966]), 13–33 (this text is in p. 13). “Le doute de Cézanne” was published for the first time in 1945 in Fontaine, 47, t. VIII: 80–100.
[10] Stein, The Autobiography, 713; in French: “Je ne vous vois plus, quand je vous regarde”. It should be noted that French was the only common language between Picasso and Gertrude Stein. On these words, see Marie–Laure Bernadac and Androula Michaël (Eds.), Picasso. Propos sur l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 170–2, see specifically page 172, and Antonina Vallentin, Picasso (Paris: Albin Michel, 1957). See also Richardson, A life of Picasso, Vol. I: 410; Lucy Belloli, “The evolution of Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein,” Burlington Magazine 141 (1999): 12–18, and Tinterow and Stein (Ed.), Picasso, 114–5.
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Summary