The Luxembourg Museum in Paris hosts the exhibition “Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso. The invention of language.” Review

The Luxembourg Museum in Paris hosts the exhibition “Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso. The invention of language.” Contrary to the title, it is dedicated not only to the relationship between the outstanding American writer and the most famous painter of the twentieth century, but also to their influence on descendants. Tells Alexey Mokrousov.

“America is my country and Paris is my city.” This phrase of Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) at the beginning of the last century could be repeated by many, replacing the country with their native one and leaving Paris as a “city of light”, “capital of the world” and other set of definitions standard for the turn of the century.

Stein arrived here in 1903, a year before Picasso. She entered the history of art not only as a transformer of language, syntax, sonorism and vocabulary, having inspired more than one generation of artists of different genres with her radicalism, but also as the first collector of the Spanish genius. Her flair for the new was excellent, her influence on the search for Picasso himself was enormous: in the end, it was he who created the best portrait of Stein, which she did not part with until her death and which she bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum – the painting turned out to be the first canvas by Picasso in the museum’s collection; Stein herself received it as a gift.

The eight small halls of the Luxembourg Museum in Paris are not the easiest space for exhibitions with such a complex subject. The first rooms, entitled “The Parisian Moment,” are devoted to the underlying history of relationships, which at first largely depended on Stein’s tastes, and she was distinguished by her ability to choose. Together with her brothers Leo and Michael, she collected an impressive collection: Cezanne and Monet, Renoir and Gauguin, Bonnard and Mason. At the time of purchase, all this was inexpensive, but already in the 1930s the Steins could not afford much; however, they always easily parted with what they were tired of – this is how the “Girl on a Ball” that previously belonged to them appeared in Moscow, bought in 1913 through a Parisian gallery owner Ivan Morozov.

Paintings in the apartment on the Rue de Fleurus, not far from the Musee du Luxembourg – its famous interiors were recreated by Woody Allen in the film Midnight in Paris – hung from floor to ceiling: Post-Impressionists, then Picasso and Matisse (together with Leo, Gertrude owned more than a hundred their works), then the Cubists. From Stein’s room, where she worked at night, Cezanne’s portrait of Madame Cezanne with a fan, bought from Vollard, never disappeared. Largely thanks to Cezanne, the writer thought about the problem of composition, which she considered the most important for modern art. But for the evolution of Picasso, Cézanne, with his interest in seriality as a technique and the structural nature of things, turned out to be a major milestone. Cezanne’s still life opens the halls dedicated to Cubist portraits and “portraits of things”: here are Braque, and Juan Gris, of whom the Steins had many, and, of course, Picasso himself.

When the collection was divided, Matisse went to his brother, Gertrude kept Picasso, and she wrote a book about him, which became a textbook for understanding the artist. She also owns one of the most important aphorisms in the history of new art: “A writer should write with his eyes, and an artist should draw with his ears.” However, Stein allowed exceptions to the rule. She herself “wrote with her ears”; her relationship with music was intimate, as is reminiscent of Picasso’s four guitar objects, and the second part of the exhibition is about the post-war understanding of her legacy.

There are also works by Virgil Thomson (1896–1989), an American composer who studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and communicated a lot with Stein. Upon his return to America, Thomson became an influential music critic whose inner circle included, among others, Leonard Bernstein. In France, Thomson wrote several essays based on Stein’s texts, and also commissioned an opera libretto from the writer: the premiere of “Four Saints in Three Acts” took place in 1934 as part of the Picasso exhibition within the walls of the Wordsworth Atheneum museum in Hartworth, America, and later the opera was successfully performed on Broadway. By this time, the relationship between Picasso and Stein had cooled, although they became neighbors in Paris. The writer evolved to the right, did not take, for example, a clear position in relation to Franco, which was important for Picasso, greeted with enthusiasm Pétain’s rise to power and even translated the marshal’s address to the nation for the American reader. All this, according to contemporaries, gave rise to a number of harsh assessments of Stein by Picasso after the war. Nevertheless, she continued to publicly admire him. Shortly before her death, in 1945, Stein emphasized the parallelism of their common searches: “Pablo creates abstract portraits in painting. I try to create my abstract portraits using my own means, words.”

When in Paris in the 1920s many people dreamed of writing ballets in order to interest Diaghilev in them, Stein and her entourage did not seem particularly interested in dancing. Nevertheless, the dance overtook the writer posthumously. The exhibition’s “American Moment” section engages with postwar art’s reappraisal of Stein’s role—beginning with sound and movement, with video footage of ballets by Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. There are also excerpts from Heiner Goebbels’ musical play Hashirigaki, based on Stein’s novel The Making of Americans; once upon a time “Hashirigaki” was brought to Russia. Next come the works of the masters of “anti-art” and counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s, Bruce Nauman and Jasper Johns, Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol, who included Stein’s portrait in the series of silk-screen prints “Ten Jews of the 20th Century” and created her portrait on canvas.

The recordings of John Cage’s “Three Songs” based on the poems of Gertrude Stein, performed by Natalya Pshenichnikova and Alexei Lyubimov, which are playing at the exhibition, bring particular joy to the Russian ear. The Russian subtext in the history of the relationship between the American writer and the Catalan artist seemed inevitable, but who knew how it would turn out. And no one expected that Stein’s protégé Virgil Thomson would sound in Moscow: on January 25, in the Chamber Hall of the Moscow Philharmonic, David Griffith’s silent film “Broken Shoots” will be shown with live music performed by the GAM ensemble – from Ives and Gershwin to Copland and Thomson. Almost like Paris in the 1920s.