Gertrude Stein and Cubism

On Monday Professor Julian Murphet will lecture on our first literary author, Gertrude Stein. The reader contains a selection of short pieces that Stein called "portraits"; you should read them in preparation for the lecture and tutorials next week.

The reader also contains an editorial that the photographer Alfred Stieglitz wrote about Stein in his magazine Camera Work. This is a good starting point to getting a grip on Stein, who is the most radically experimental prose stylist that we will read on this course. Stieglitz basically says that Post-Impressionist painting is challenging in the same way as Stein's writing, but that whereas the P-Is achieved their effects in the medium of paint, Stein uses words: language is her paint. Below are two Cubist portraits, by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. It's hard to follow the analogy between words and paint, but you can see that like Stein, these inventors of Cubism have dislocated the idiom of traditional portraiture.

Georges Braque, "Le portugais" (1911)

Pablo Picasso, "Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler" (1910)

 These are not likenesses in the sense familiar from traditional figurative painting: rather, Cubism tries to give an effect of movement, of time, of multiple moments and perspectives jammed together into a single two-dimensional image. It's as if, rather than capturing the subject seen from a single angle at a single moment, the Cubists bring together multiple perspectives and give a sense of temporal duration: of the subject's identity over an extended period, along with  bits and pieces of their environment. Perhaps Stein's use of the continuing tense - the "-ing" verbs - in her portrait of Picasso is also designed to suggest flux and avoid a static image of her subject; or perhaps, the idea is that these infinitesimally different phrases are supposed to accumulate in the mind of the reader over the time it takes to read the piece, to produce a cumulative effect.