Exhibition Notes: Gertrude Stein vs Picasso

[Visited 15 January 2024]

Since I been here I’ve been living with images of Gertrude Stein taped to my wall, mainly as decoration, but perhaps a bit of a patron(ess) saint or (tor)mentor perhaps. There is Robert Rauschenberg’s  Centennial Certificate featuring Picasso’s  portrait of Stein in graphic collage and Deborah Kass’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Women#2 which features multiples of a stern Stein, plus a score of John Cage’s 3 Songs, Twenty Years after Gertrude Stein.* 

I am in possession of these images because I bought the little €6 Euro newspaper style catalogue of the exhibition Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso: Inventing Language that was on at the Musée du Luxembourg. (The format made me nostalgic for RealTime.) This is another exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death (every time I write that it seems strange — to celebrate his death) and is using some of the collection from the Musée Picasso. This exhibition focuses on the fortuitous meeting and subsequent friendship of perhaps the two most famous expatriates in mid 20th century Paris, Stein and Picasso. But, in a similar move to the Sophie Calle exhibition at the Musée Picasso, it  gives more weight and time to Stein, with Picasso’s work being more of a spring board. The contention is that both Stein and Picasso were exploring similar strategies — Picasso in paint and Stein in words — and they had similar impacts of the artists around them and into the future. I’m intrigued thinking about Stein’s writing as cubist… perhaps so in the sense of word to the power of 3 perhaps — a  sentence cubed, worked through all its permutations. 

After drawing parallels between their early works, and their influence on others, the exhibition continues to explore how Stein was significantly influential on the avant-garde of New York, particularly in areas of music, dance and theatre — offering the example of John Cage, choreographers Lucinda Childs and Yvonne Rainer, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and music theatre maker Heiner Goebbles. It’s interesting to think through Stein’s work in this way, tracing all manner of experimentations beyond the text, back to her freeing influence. To think of Stein’s words as pattern, rhythm, structure and form in any medium.  

On entering the space we were fittingly greeted  by a recording of Stein reading her piece IF I TOLD HIM: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (available on UbuWeb):

And I remembered I had used that recording, sneakily in my Duet for Gertrude and Glass — playing the recording through a full, then gradually emptying wine glass.  Remembering how her words seem to be want to be heard rather than read. So I’ll leave that here as a conclusion of sorts.

 

Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso: Inventing Language 
Musée du Luxembourg. 
13 September 2023 to 28 January 2024
exhibition organised with the exceptional support of the Musée National Picasso-Paris
https://museeduluxembourg.fr/en/agenda/evenement/gertrude-stein-et-pablo-picasso

* There are also 3 beautiful photo collages my partner brought me when he visited.