Pablo presented me and she waved me to a seat on a horsehair divan facing her. Pablo sat on a window ledge beside and slightly behind her with his back to the light, as though he wanted to survey the scene yet not be obliged to participate. A gleam in his eyes indicated that he was expecting to enjoy himself immensely. Alice Toklas sat down on the divan beside me but as far away as possible. In the center of our little circle were several low tables covered with plates of petits fours, cakes, cookies, and all kinds of luxuries one didn’t see at that period, right after the war.
I was intimidated by Gertrude Stein’s first questions, which were a little sharp and sometimes obvious. It was quite clear that she was asking herself, What’s going on between Pablo and this girl? And first in English and then in French—not very good French—she tried to get me to talk. It was worse than the oral examination for the baccalauréat.
I did my best with her questions but I was distracted by the enormous hat on Alice Toklas’s head. She was dressed in very dark gray and black, and her huge hat was black with a little gray trim. She looked as though she had dressed for a funeral, but the tailoring was obviously of the very first quality. I learned afterwards that her couturier was Pierre Balmain. I felt ill at ease with her there beside me. She looked hostile, as though she were predisposed against me. She spoke infrequently, occasionally supplying Gertrude Stein with a detail. Her voice was very low, like a man’s, and rasping, and one could hear the air passing loudly through her teeth. It made a most disagreeable sound, like the sharpening of a scythe.
As the afternoon went on, Gertrude Stein seemed more relaxed in her interrogation. She wanted to know how well I knew her work and whether I had read the American writers. Fortunately I had read quite a few. She told me she was the spiritual mother of them all: Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald. She talked especially about Dos Passos as having been greatly influenced by her; even Erskine Caldwell. She wanted me to understand the importance of her influence, even on those who had never come to sit at her feet, like Faulkner and Steinbeck. She said that without her, there would be no modern American literature as we know it.
After straightening out the literary matters, she got around to the subject of painting and she began to cross-examine me on Cubism. With all the pedantry of my twenty-three years, I replied with whatever seemed the appropriate observations on analytic Cubism, synthetic Cubism, the influence of Negro art, of Cézanne, and so on. I wasn’t trying to make a good impression on her; I simply wanted to make sure that Pablo didn’t feel disappointed in me. Finally she turned and pointed to her portrait by Pablo and said, “What do you think of my portrait?” I told her I knew her friends had thought that although in the beginning she didn’t look like that, after a while she had come to resemble it. But after all those years, it seemed to me, she had begun to move in the other direction, I said, because she didn’t resemble it any longer. Now she had come a lot closer to the idea I had of what a Tibetan monk ought to look like. She looked at me disapprovingly.
The most disturbing thing about the whole afternoon, though, was that while all this was going on, Alice Toklas was not sitting still, but bobbing up and down, moving back and forth, going out into the dining room to get more cakes, bringing them in, and passing them around. And she looked so glum at some of my answers to Gertrude Stein. Perhaps they didn’t seem respectful enough. I admired Gertrude Stein, but I could see no reason to play up to her. And so whenever I said anything displeasing to Alice Toklas, she would dart another plate of cakes at me and I would be forced to take one and bite into it. They were all very rich and gooey and with nothing to drink, talking was not easy. I suppose I should have said something about her cooking, but I just ate her cakes and went back to talking with Gertrude Stein, so I guess I made an enemy of Alice Toklas that day. But Gertrude Stein seemed, if I could judge from her hearty laughter, to find me rather entertaining, at least for the moment. At the end of the afternoon she left the room and came back with three of her books. One of them, I remember, was Wars I Have Seen. She wrote in them all, and in that one she wrote, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose—once more for Françoise Gilot.”
When we got ready to leave, Gertrude Stein said to me, “Now you can come to see me all by yourself.” And there was another dark look from Alice Toklas. I might have gone back if I hadn’t been so terrorized by Miss Stein’s little acolyte, but I was and so I promised myself never to set foot in that apartment again.
Throughout all this, Pablo had not said a word, although I could see his eyes sparkling and could read his thoughts from time to time. It was clear that he was just letting me skirt the quicksand to the best of my ability. When we got to the door on the way out, he said, quite innocently, “Well, Gertrude, you haven’t discovered any more painters lately?” She apparently sensed a trap, and said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Oh, no doubt about it, Gertrude, you’re the grandmother of American literature, but are you sure that in the domain of painting you have had quite as good judgment for the generation that succeeded us? When there were Matisse and Picasso to be discovered, things went well. You finally got around to Gris, too, but since then, it seems to me your discoveries have been somewhat less interesting.”
She looked angry but made no answer. Just to stick the needle in a little deeper, Pablo said, “You helped discover one generation and that’s fine, but to discover two or three generations is really difficult and that I don’t think you’ve done.”
There was a moment of silence and then she said, “Look, Pablo, I tell a painter what is good in a painting of his and in that way I encourage him to keep on searching in the direction of his own special gift. As a result, what is bad disappears because he forgets it. I don’t know if my critical judgment has lost its keenness or not, but I’m sure that my advice to painters has always been constructive.”
After that, I saw Gertrude Stein occasionally in the Rue de Buci, doing a bit of marketing around noontime. She seemed always to be wearing the same costume, covered by a cape, that I had seen her wear the day Pablo and I called on her. She always urged me, in a friendly way, to come see her in the Rue Christine. I would say, “Oh, yes, yes,” but do nothing about it, because I found it easier to get along without her than to take her in tandem with Alice B. Toklas.
BEFORE I MET PICASSO and for some months after, my painting was figurative in an experimental way. Early in 1944 I decided that what people were referring to in the jargon as “the anecdote” was useless and I began to work in a completely nonfigurative manner. My grandmother used to come upstairs to my studio every evening to see what I had done during the day. Several months earlier I had done figurative portraits and still lifes, rather tortured in their forms, and they had shocked her. But when I began to do nonfigurative painting, she liked it immediately.
“I didn’t understand what you were doing before,” she said, “and although I don’t understand this either, I find it pleasing. I see the harmony of color and design, and since you don’t twist and torture nature, I like it better.” I told her I didn’t have the impression that it was any more pleasing than what I had been doing before. On the contrary, in my own mind the compositions I was doing now had rather dramatic intentions and they were not pleasing for me. I asked her if she found them dramatic. She said, “Not at all. I can look at those by the hour and find them restful.”
I told Pablo about that one afternoon before he settled down to painting. He laughed. “Naturally,” he said. “Nonfigurative painting is never subversive. It’s always a kind of bag into which the viewer can throw anything he wants to get rid of. You can’t impose your thought on people if there’s no relation between your painting and their visual habits. I’m not speaking of the connoisseur of painting. I mean the average person, whose visual habits are pretty conventional. He sees a tree in a certain fashion, in accordance with habits he formed in childhood. Someone who has a very cultivated vision may see a landscape of Aix as a Cézanne, a landscape of Arles as a van Go
gh. But in general, people see nature in conventional fashion and they don’t want anybody tampering with it. They are willing to be shown things that resemble nothing because those things correspond to a kind of invertebrate, unformulated interior dream. But if you take a commonplace way of seeing and try to change the slightest detail in it, everyone shouts, ‘Oh, no, it’s not possible. That’s not the portrait of my grandmother.’
“When I paint, I always try to give an image people are not expecting and, beyond that, one they reject. That’s what interests me. It’s in this sense that I mean I always try to be subversive. That is, I give a man an image of himself whose elements are collected from among the usual way of seeing things in traditional painting and then reassembled in a fashion that is unexpected and disturbing enough to make it impossible for him to escape the questions it raises.”
I told Pablo I thought nobody could have done completely non-figurative painting better than he. “I suppose so,” he said. “In those polyhedric Cubist portraits I did in tones of white and gray and ocher, beginning around 1909, there were references to natural forms, but in the early stages there were practically none. I painted them in afterwards. I call them ‘attributes.’ At that period I was doing painting for its own sake. It was really pure painting, and the composition was done as a composition. It was only toward the end of a portrait that I brought in the attributes. At a certain moment I simply put in three or four black touches and what was around those touches became a vest.
“I suppose I use that word ‘attribute’ in the way a writer might use it rather than a painter; that is, as one speaks of a sentence with a subject, verb, and attribute. The attribute is an adjective. It serves to qualify the subject. But the verb and the subject are the whole painting, really. The attributes were the few points of reference designed to bring one back to visual reality, recognizable to anyone. And they were put in, also, to hide the pure painting behind them. I’ve never believed in doing painting for ‘the happy few.’ I’ve always felt that painting must awaken something even in the man who doesn’t ordinarily look at pictures, just as in Molière there is always something to make the very intelligent person laugh and also the person who understands nothing. In Shakespeare, too. And in my work, just as in Shakespeare, there are often burlesque things and relatively vulgar things. In that way I reach everybody. It’s not that I want to prostrate myself in front of the public, but I want to provide something for every level of thinking.
“But to get back to the matter of attributes: You know my Cubist portrait of Kahnweiler?” I told him I did—in reproduction, at least. “All right,” he said. “In its original form it looked to me as though it were about to go up in smoke. But when I paint smoke, I want you to be able to drive a nail into it. So I added the attributes—a suggestion of eyes, the wave in the hair, an ear lobe, the clasped hands—and now you can. You see, at that time and in those portraits I felt that what I had to say was fairly hard to understand. It’s like Hegel. Hegel is a very interesting man but there aren’t many people who want to take the trouble to read him. He’s up there where he is for the few people who do want to give themselves that trouble and will go in search of whatever nourishment is there. If you want to give nourishment like that in painting, which is not easy to absorb for most people, who don’t have the organs to assimilate it, you need some kind of subterfuge. It’s like giving a long and difficult explanation to a child: you add certain details that he understands immediately in order to sustain his interest and buoy him up for the difficult parts. The great majority of people have no spirit of creation or invention. As Hegel says, they can know only what they already know. So how do you go about teaching them something new? By mixing what they know with what they don’t know. Then, when they see vaguely in their fog something they recognize, they think, ‘Ah, I know that.’ And then it’s just one more step to, ‘Ah, I know the whole thing.’ And their mind thrusts forward into the unknown and they begin to recognize what they didn’t know before and they increase their powers of understanding.”
That sounded very reasonable to me, I told him. “Of course it’s reasonable,” he said. “It’s purest Hegel.”
I told him these applications of Hegel were very impressive. How much of him had he read?
“None,” he said. “I told you there weren’t many people who wanted to take the trouble to go that far. And I don’t either. I picked up my information on the subject from Kahnweiler. But I keep getting away from my attributes. What you have to understand is that if the attributes—or, in a more general sense, the objects—were the main point of my painting, I would choose them with great care. For example, in a painting by Matisse the object plays a major role. It isn’t any old object that is chosen to receive the honor of becoming an object in a painting by Matisse. They’re all things that are most unusual in themselves. The objects that go into my paintings are not that at all. They’re common objects from anywhere: a pitcher, a mug of beer, a pipe, a package of tobacco, a bowl, a kitchen chair with a cane seat, a plain common table—the object at its most ordinary. I don’t go out of my way to find a rare object that nobody ever heard of, like one of Matisse’s Venetian chairs in the form of an oyster, and then transform it. That wouldn’t make sense. I want to tell something by means of the most common object: for example, a casserole, any old casserole, the one everybody knows. For me it is a vessel in the metaphorical sense, just like Christ’s use of parables. He had an idea; he formulated it in parables so that it would be acceptable to the greatest number. That’s the way I use objects. I will never paint a Louis XV chair, for example. It’s a reserved object, an object for certain people but not for everybody. I make reference to objects that belong to everybody; at least they belong to them in theory. In any case, they’re what I wrap up my thought in. They’re my parables.”
I told Pablo he was making progress in the order of sanctity: first Hegel, then Christ. Who next? He thought about that for a moment. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Perhaps Aristotle. Someone, at least, who might be able to get painting back on the rails again.” Where had it gone off, I asked him.
“That’s a long story,” he said, “but you’re a good listener, so I’ll tell you. You have to go all the way back to the Greeks and the Egyptians. Today we are in the unfortunate position of having no order or canon whereby all artistic production is submitted to rules. They—the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians—did. Their canon was inescapable because beauty, so-called, was, by definition, contained in those rules. But as soon as art had lost all link with tradition, and the kind of liberation that came in with Impressionism permitted every painter to do what he wanted to do, painting was finished. When they decided it was the painter’s sensations and emotions that mattered, and every man could recreate painting as he understood it from any basis whatever, then there was no more painting; there were only individuals. Sculpture died the same death.
“Beginning with van Gogh, however great we may be, we are all, in a measure, autodidacts—you might almost say primitive painters. Painters no longer live within a tradition and so each one of us must recreate an entire language. Every painter of our times is fully authorized to recreate that language from A to Z. No criterion can be applied to him a priori, since we don’t believe in rigid standards any longer. In a certain sense, that’s a liberation but at the same time it’s an enormous limitation, because when the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order, and when you’re no longer able to attach yourself to an order, basically that’s very bad.”
I brought up the question of Cubism. Wasn’t that a kind of order, I asked him. He shrugged. “It was really the manifestation of a vague desire on the part of those of us who participated in it to get back to some kind of order, yes. We were trying to move in a direction opposite to Impressionism. That was the reason we abandoned color, emotion, sensation, and everything that had been introduced into painting by the Impressionist
s, to search again for an architectonic basis in the composition, trying to make an order of it. People didn’t understand very well at the time why very often we didn’t sign our canvases. Most of those that are signed we signed years later. It was because we felt the temptation, the hope, of an anonymous art, not in its expression but in its point of departure. We were trying to set up a new order and it had to express itself through different individuals. Nobody needed to know that it was so-and-so who had done this or that painting. But individualism was already too strong and that resulted in a failure, because after a few years all Cubists who were any good at all were no longer Cubists. Those who remained Cubists were those who weren’t really true painters. Braque was saying the other day, ‘Cubism is a word invented by the critics, but we were never Cubists.’ That isn’t exactly so. We were, at one time, Cubists, but as we drew away from that period we found that, more than just Cubists, we were individuals dedicated to ourselves. As soon as we saw that the collective adventure was a lost cause, each one of us had to find an individual adventure. And the individual adventure always goes back to the one which is the archetype of our times: that is, van Gogh’s—an essentially solitary and tragic adventure. That’s why I said a few minutes ago that we were all autodidacts. That’s literally true, I think, but I realized even when Cubism was breaking up that we were saved from complete isolation as individuals by the fact that however different we might have the appearance of being, we were all Modern-Style artists. There were so many wild, delirious curves in those subway entrances and in all the other Modern-Style manifestations, that I, even though I limited myself almost exclusively to straight lines, was participating in my fashion in the Modern-Style movement. Because even if you are against a movement, you’re still part of it. The pro and the con are, after all, two aspects of the same movement. In that way those of us who attempted to escape from Modern-Style became more Modern-Style than anybody else. You can’t escape your own period. Whether you take sides for or against, you’re always inside it.”
Life with Picasso Page 8