Gertrude Stein on Picasso

Very Fine copy in fine unclipped dust jacket with very small amount of edge ear on left outer edge, original price intact, no markings, tight binding, WW Norton, NYC, 1970 [monographs]

For more than a generation, Gertrude Stein’s Paris home at 27 rue de Fleurus was the center of a glittering coterie of artists and writers, one of whom was Pablo Picasso. In this intimate and revealing memoir, Stein tells us much about the great man (and herself) and offers many insights into the life and art of the 20th century’s greatest painter.

Mixing biological fact with artistic and aesthetic comments, she limns a unique portrait of Picasso as a founder of Cubism, an intimate of Appollinaire, Max Jacob, Braque, Derain, and others, and a genius driven by a ceaseless quest to convey his vision of the 20th century. We learn, for example, of the importance of his native Spain in shaping Picasso’s approach to art; of the influence of calligraphy and African sculpture; of his profound struggle to remain true to his own vision; of the overriding need to empty himself of the forms and ideas that welled up within him.Stein’s close relationship with Picasso furnishes her with a unique vantage point in composing this perceptive and provocative reminiscence. It will delight any admirer of Picasso or Gertrude Stein; it is indispensable to an understanding of modern art.

“I am always struck with the landscapes of Courbet, because he did not have to change the color to give the vision of nature as every one sees it. But Picasso was not like that, when he ate a tomato the tomato was not everybody’s tomato, not at all and his effort was not to express in his way the things seen as every one sees them, but to express the thing as he was seeing it. Van Gogh at even his most fantastic moment, even when he cut off his ear, was convinced that an ear is an ear as every one could see it, the need for that ear might be something else but the ear was the same ear everybody could see. But with Picasso, Spaniard that he is, it was entirely different.

Well, Don Quixote was a Spaniard, he did not imagine things, he saw things, and it was not a dream, it was not lunacy, he really saw them.
Well Picasso is a Spaniard.
I was very much struck at this period, when cubism was a little more developed…..”
—Gertrude Stein

$ 85.00