Unfinished Portraits

Gertrude Stein e Picasso

Abstract

The article discusses Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905), and compares it with Gertrude Stein’s literary portraits of Picasso (1909-10, 1924). By examining how the works respond to the mot d’ordre of “to kill the nineteenth century”, we question both Picasso’s and Stein’s change of paradigm in relation to the exigencies of portrait as a genre. It also shows how, in the process, they came up with an intersubjective model as opposed to old prescriptions of objectivity deployed by portraiture’s tradition since Renaissance. The analysis of the works brings forward the parallelisms between the ‘destruction’ of perspective in cubist painting and the ‘destruction’ of syntax in Stein’s poems, as well as the search for simultaneity, and the unfixed apprehension of such notions as subject, and identity, that both artists reached in their own fields of expression. Last but not least, we briefly pass through Augusto de Campos’ Portuguese version of Gertrude Stein’s “If I Told You: A Complete Portrait of Picasso”.