(piano music)
- [Man] We're in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
looking at Pablo Picasso's
portrait of Gertrude Stein.
- [Woman] Standing in this gallery
filled with paintings from the early 20th century
this really fits in,
but the problem with that is that we don't recognize,
necessarily, how revolutionary this painting seemed
in 1906 when Picasso completed it.
- [Man] There's a famous anecdote
that goes with this painting.
Stein was an important collector.
She was a poet and a writer.
She asked Picasso to paint her portrait.
According to Stein,
she visited Picasso's studio 90 times.
- [Woman] And at the end of months of sitting
he actually scraped away
what he had done of her face
and came back to it later
so although he spent 90 sittings
the itself was not painted with Stein in front of him,
but the story that you alluded to
is that when people saw this portrait
they said this looks nothing like her
and Picasso is said to have responded
that everybody thinks she is not at all
like her portrait, but nevermind
in the end she will manage to look just like it.
- [Man] Which is about the primacy of the portrait.
The idea that the portrait will live on.
- [Woman] And a portrait by the great artist
Pablo Picasso of Gertrude Stein,
this is the way that we remember her.
- [Man] Which calls into question,
what is the function of a portrait.
Is it likeness?
This particular portrait may look more like
an ancient Iberian sculpture,
one of the archaic figures that Picasso was then studying,
than Gertrude Stein's own facial features.
- [Woman] Which is an odd thing
because a portrait for hundreds of years
was about likeness
and this is not about how she looked,
but it is very much a portrait of her presence.
- [Man] And what a powerful presence.
She's got this great sense of gravity
that mask-like face seems to come towards us.
- [Woman] She leans forward.
Her body's in the shape of a pyramid
so you do have all that weight
at the bottom of the canvas.
- [Man] We know that Picasso was looking
at several other earlier portraits
notably Ingres's portrait of Monsieur Bertin
at the Louve
as well as two other portraits that Stein owned,
one by Cezanne of his wife
and one by Matisse of his wife.
- [Woman] And clearly,
Picasso has borrowed from all three
of those paintings.
There are aspects of them that inform
his painting of Gertrude Stein.
But this is really radically different,
especially that mask-like face,
the disjunction between the eyes,
the flatness of the plain of her face.
These are things that don't look right.
- [Man] But the sitter
felt that this was the truest portrait
that had ever been made of her.
- [Woman] In fact she wrote,
for me it is I
and it is the only reproduction of me
which is always I.
And so although this isn't about a likeness
she felt that this portrait really represented her.
- [Man] Stein also was certain
that she did in words what Picasso would do in paint
and Stein was looking at words as if
they were a kind of material
that could be constructed and reconstructed
as one places the strokes on a canvas.
- [Woman] Speaking of strokes of a canvas,
we've really seen evidence of the artist's work here.
There are places where the paint is applied very thickly,
for example, in her fingers,
even though they seem very abstracted and unfinished.
There are also places, for example,
around the shawl that has a clasp around her neck,
there's areas of paint that are very thin
where we can almost see the canvas underneath.
- [Man] There's a tension here
between Picasso's love of illusionism
and his interest in beginning to undo that illusion.
- [Woman] The conventions of illusions
that had to come down in European art
beginning in the Renaissance just didn't speak
to the late 19th and earlier 20th century
and so this searching for a new visual language
both in African art
and in ancient art or preclassical art,
where figures are represented very abstractly.
This finding in abstraction,
a force and power and alternative language.
- [Man] Look at the way that he's finding
the angles of the forms of her face
almost as if it's kind of architecture.
- [Woman] The right side of her face
seems to be at a sharp angle
to the front of her face
because of how stark that shadow is
on the right side.
- [Man] The left side of her face
is further away from us.
Her face is turned
even though we have as much access
to the left eye as we do to the right.
- [Woman] And the eyes are also very much abstracted.
They're not given a lot of expressiveness.
- [Man] It's as if the eyes are behind that mask.
- [Woman] Portraits often have things in them
that help us to identify
the interests and personality of the sitter
if we think about Manet's portrait of Zola,
for example, we have his library,
images of art that he was interested in
in the background,
but here in the background is sketchy.
It's even hard to make out
the left side of that chair.
And so it is a painting
that refuses to give us the information
that portraits, generally, are supposed to give.