An Avant-gardist Quartet

»At the turn of the last century, Paris was the place to be, and it is there that we can find Gertrude Stein, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso…«. Thus Blizzard opens her study focusing upon four of the most famous artists of the early twentieth century who are known for their influential innovations in literature and painting.

This interdisciplinary friendship between the three painters and the writer and art collector is well-known and the intermedial comparison of their works is not new either. Blizzard is aware of this as well and therefore decidedly delineates the scope of her study in contrast to previous ones that have attempted to examine Stein’s relationship to the visual arts. Although during the last few decades quite a few contributions on this topic have been published, Blizzard’s study closes a gap in this research. The most innovative aspects of her dissertation, which appeared in the series »Angelsächsische Sprache und Literatur«, are her particular arrangement of the abundant material reflected in her text-picture-selection and her concentration on the quartet of artists, as well as the interdisciplinary perspective that effectively results in a balance of the verbal and the visual arts which neither literary studies on Stein nor art historical ones on the three painters have endeavoured to do.

The constellation of individuals involved, as well as the repertory of texts and paintings, proves to be an exciting blend, since from the vast collection of literary portraits by Stein almost exclusively those are chosen which focus on the three painters and reflect their artworks. Blizzard does not judge the individual relationships between Stein and the painters uniformly, but tries to make distinctions. After first drawing a circle around all four, who met in Stein’s ›salon d’artistes‹ in the rue de Fleurus during the first two decades of the twentieth century, she later aims at disentangling the intricate network of their relationships, thus revealing certain imbalances concerning the reciprocity: Blizzard’s interdisciplinary group picture testifies to the indisputable influence of the visual artworks on Stein’s writing, whereas the contrary cannot be similarly asserted. Only in Picasso’s case does Blizzard daringly speak of a ›collaboration‹, and thus dedicates most of the space to the complex entanglement of his artworks with Stein’s. While the writer portrayed both Cézanne and Matisse only once, she created three very different portraits of Picasso during their long friendship that extended over three decades. In these portraits she challenges the limits of language regarding the verbal representation of an individual.

Blizzard’s ›Paragone‹ of the Arts:
Its Aim, Concept and Structure

Certainly Blizzard aims at transcending the limits of interpersonal relationships in order to establish new perspectives on the works of the four artists and on the intersection between modernist literature and painting. With the choice of her title, the author promises new insights into the self-conceptions of the portrayed and portraying artists as manifested in their works at the beginning of the 20th century.

Her study is based on the assumption that the poetical portraits of Gertrude Stein and the portrait paintings of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso display both conceptual and stylistic similarities, expressing a new understanding of the ›Self‹. Most studies on Stein’s work that focus on its relationship to figurative art concentrate exclusively on its resemblances to cubism, but this stylistic movement is not the only possible reference. Thus Blizzard inventively extends the comparison by relating Stein’s portraits to Duchamps ready-mades (p. 15 f.) as well as to Cézanne’s pre-cubist painting.

Blizzard’s study comprises three parts: a discussion of selected previously published interartistic comparisons of Stein’s works to modernist art, which serves to establish her own methodical basis, a theory of modernist portraiture that reflects on inherent conceptual and psychological implications, and a ›close reading‹ of verbal and visual portraits. The design of this main section is discernible at first glance, due to its simple, transparent titles. They indicate that Stein is the central figure, for her portraits – which are successively related to one painting at a time – are the thread linking the works of the four artists. Each text and each picture respectively serves as a context for the other. Each relationship between Stein and the three painters occupies a separate chapter that corresponds approximately to the chronology of the personal encounters and the emergence of the texts and paintings. By way of introduction, Blizzard delineates the respective historical backgrounds of the encounters between writer and painter, before confronting their artworks in an in-depth analysis.

Although not completely new, the comparison of Cézanne’s Portrait de Hortense, Matisse’s La Femme au Chapeau and Picasso’s Portrait d’Ambroise Vollard with various verbal portraits by Stein that resemble their different styles has never been undertaken this systematically. 1 In accordance with Stein, who uses the term ›portrait‹ for miscellaneous types of texts, Blizzard, too, considers a variety of verbal portraits in different forms, namely »Cézanne«, »Matisse« and »Picasso« as well as Stein’s Picasso-essay, Three Lives and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. According to Blizzard, the stylistic similarities between text and painting are particularly intensified in the comparison of a certain painting by an artist with Stein’s verbal portrait of this very artist, since the latter is designed as mirror of his art.

Premises and Parameters
for the Intermedial Comparison

The detailed analysis of texts and pictures is preceded by theoretical considerations about modernist art and the portrait in particular. First, the author discusses extensively, and in doing so, corrects prevalent false presumptions about modernist art. Attempting to avoid common misunderstandings in advance, in »Perception and Art« she debates the question of subjectivity vs. objectivity in human perception and in artistic representation, distinguishing between realistic and abstract art. Within this framework she formulates some basic theses, such as »all art is conceptual« (p. 10) whereby she invalidates common convictions about the opposition of traditional and modernist art. Furthermore, she distances herself from the notion that the central characteristic shared by Stein’s portraits and modernist painting is the subjectivity of the representation (p. 10; p. 115). Nevertheless, she affirms the shift from object-orientation to self-orientation in both verbal and visual modernist art.

Contrary to the ›realistic‹ portrait, which aims at the illusionistic effect of reality, the modernist portrait is not meant to be a copy of the individual, but an autonomous work of art. According to Blizzard, the shift of focus from object-orientation to self-reference, which is especially precarious as the portrait is usually being defined by its object-reference, is crucial for the understanding of all the texts and paintings she discusses. Despite their self-reference they are considered as ›portraits‹, since the portrayed individual named in their title is, although not always recognisable at first sight, still present in the artwork. In view of these observations, Blizzard’s procedure in analysing texts and pictures is not to focus on the portrayed person, but on the concept of the portrait (p. 24).

It is on the basis of selected previous analyses that Blizzard establishes the parameters for her intermedial comparison. Thus she explains her method by defining the »criteria of comparison« in view of three influential studies of Stein’s work written by Marianne DeKoven, Wendy Steiner and Randa Dubnick (p. 17–22). 2 Blizzard dismisses any equation of single literary elements with single elements in the realm of painting. Wendy Steiner has already pointed out the difficulty of assigning an equivalent in painting for the word as the smallest unit of the syntactical composition, because it varies from picture to picture: Whereas the writer necessarily constructs his text by stringing together one word after another, the painter designates the smallest unit according to the style of the painting – therefore equivalents to words can be brushstrokes, lines, colors, shapes, etc. 3 For this reason, following Steiner and Dubnick Blizzard focuses on »relational analogies«, that is »the relation of the elements of the artwork among themselves, the relation of the changes made to the respective systems, and the relation of the desired function of the work to its form« (p. 22; p. 116). Ideally, in this way similarities in the respective governing principles can be revealed without overlooking the singularity of the two media.

The Modernist Portrait

In the second chapter (»Portraiture and the Self«) Blizzard focuses on the specific problems inherent in the genre of the portrait and their intensification in modernism, without distinguishing in detail between verbal and visual portraits. Thus she introduces a definition of this genre which comprises both media and which she derives from a critical examination of well-established definitions in the fine arts and literature and adjusts to the modernist portrait. Her own understanding of the term ›portrait‹ results from an expansion of narrow definitions by both the art historian Brilliant and the literary scholar Wendy Steiner. 4 Restrictions on content and form, such as the uncompromising exclusion of fictitious or rather non-identifiable figures as well as prescriptive specifications regarding the (limited) length, coherence and dominance of description over narration, are not suitable for modernist portraiture, Blizzard contends. Furthermore, the notion that the physical appearance of the portrayed person is the crucial factor in evaluating the ›likeness‹ or ›resemblance‹ of the portrait is considered outdated. Of primary importance is instead the artist’s ›idea‹ of the subject and its uniqueness, independent of its being real or ficticious (p. 31 – 33). Beyond doubt, the broadness and openness of Blizzard’s definition, which was specifically designed for her subject matter and the purpose of this study, offers a wide scope. However, it involves a lack of precision that is often obstructive in the case of genre-definitions. Therefore its relevance for other studies has yet to be tested.

The New Understanding of the Subject:
Entity instead of Identity

According to Blizzard, the modernist portrait cannot be comprehended without an understanding of the newly emerging concept of the »20th century Self« (see title). In order to highlight the innovations, she briefly outlines the historical development of the portrait, mainly in painting, which she closely ties to the changes in the understanding of the Self. Since the total complexity certainly cannot be rendered on a few pages, she presents an oversimplified synopsis, whose benefit is disputable, because the generalisations involved provoke possible counter-examples.

To explain the new view of the subject Blizzard differentiates between the two concepts of identity and entity (p. 35 ff.): Modernist portraitists abandon the belief in a static identity that captures various relatively stable aspects of the subject such as character traits, qualities, physical appearance and social status, in favour of a dynamic entity of the subject which is in accordance with the complexity of the human individual influenced by its temporal change. This shift can be traced in Stein’s portraits (p. 36; p. 117). Whereas identity is based on likeness that is determined by comparing the original and its ›copy‹ in one-to-one references, entity requires the artwork in its totality to reveal the essential nature of the individual. Thus the artwork is seen not as a copy, but as an equivalent of the person portrayed.

As other Stein scholars have done before her, Blizzard points out the impact of the newest contemporary psychological research on the style of Stein’s portraits. It was especially William James’ notion of the stream of consciousness, describing the functioning of human consciousness 5 and constituting the dynamic counter concept to a static model, that influenced Stein’s experiments: »Matisse« and »Picasso« consist of endless homogenous sentences, whose flow is rarely interrupted by punctuation. Referring to this phenomenon, Blizzard speaks of »a new kind of portraiture in flux«, such as can also be observed in Cézanne’s Portrait de Hortense (1882), which intentionally appears unfinished and thus visually evokes human changeability. While writing Three Lives Stein always had her eyes on this painting, which she had purchased, and it was a source of inspiration as she relates herself in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Therefore Blizzard analyses Stein’s verbal techniques of ›portraying‹ human consciousness mainly in regard to this text. The painting proves to be »an excellent key or guide for the understanding of the stylistic link« between Cézanne and Stein (p. 46).

Compositional Analogies in Painting and Text

A common feature of Stein’s verbal portraits and all portrait paintings by Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso discussed here is the shift of focus from the representation of the individual to the demonstration of the artist’s perception of the person. The suppression of the real physical appearance in favour of the view of the portraitist is most obvious in the pictures. In both media, beholder and reader learn as much about the portraitist’s concept, realised in the composition, as about the person portrayed. Stein herself confirms: »Cézanne gave me a new feeling for composition«. 6 Thus she replaces the traditional literary techniques of description and narration with a modernist ›composition‹ consisting of destructive fragmentation and creative rearrangement. It was on the basis of these same principles that cubism in painting was developing.

Stein already observed in Cézanne’s technique that he emphasised all the details of the artwork equally, thereby distracting the gaze of the beholder from the center of the picture, and in the portrait from the face. This mode of presentation draws the attention away from the individual portrayed to the artwork itself. Stein’s »Cézanne«, in which the semantic and grammatical structure impedes the generation of coherence, rests on the same concept of decentralization (p. 48 f.). According to Blizzard, this text is therefore a portrait of Cézanne’s art. His technique is not being described or explained, but imitated. This implies that Stein portrays Cézanne by portraying his art (p. 50 f.). Blizzard praises this portrait because in her eyes »it achieves a uniquely intimate view of the artist Paul Cézanne« (p. 53).

However, one could object that Stein uses the same techniques in other portraits as well, regardless of the individual she is portraying. She may have deduced the techniques from her study of early modernist paintings by Cézanne and others, but she did not, as Blizzard suggests, employ those techniques exclusively for portraits of them. This misconception can result from not taking an interest in an overview of the many portraits Stein has written and thus ignoring their overall stylistic development. Stein’s »Cézanne« (1923), created four decades after Cézanne’s Portrait de Hortense, could just as well be compared to pre-cubist and cubist paintings by other artists, like Picasso for example. The correlation elaborated by Blizzard is creative, but not the only one possible.

Facing the Details

Similarly to Stein’s »Cézanne«, »Matisse«, in Blizzard’s view, reveals the artist’s personality in an imitation of his art. The most striking features of this text are its indissoluble semantic contradictions in its evaluation of Matisse. A psychological tension can likewise be detected in his celebrated portrait La Femme au Chapeau (1905), which Stein had also purchased. Blizzard contextualizes Stein’s portrait and reads it as a meta-text with regard to Matisse’s artistic innovations. Thus she describes the critical if not deprecative reception of the painting at the Salon d’Automne 1905 and the public controversy (p. 59 f.) which is audible in the polyphony of the portrait.

In this case, the contextualisation proves to be a helpful key to the understanding of the text. Blizzard knowledgeably interprets one of the key words in »Matisse«, namely »[he was always] struggling«, by adding: »out of the 19th century artistic tradition« (p. 59). Using this method, the author comes to the conclusion that Stein’s portraits are not completely opaque at all, but interpretable, if contextualized historically and biographically. At the same time, her interpretation does not negate the self-reflective surface and therefore suggests a »comprehending without seeing through the text« (p. 61). Unfortunately, Blizzard refers to the speaker of the text as a »narrator« and states that »the portrait is narrated throughout« (p. 57), which does not do justice to Stein’s innovative portraiture, the more so as it was generally agreed among scholars that Stein abandons narrative conventions and experiments with new techniques aiming at an immediate presentation of the individual. 7 Such terminological inaccuracies are not insignificant, as they are designed to describe Stein’s highly exceptional portraiture.

Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso:
Reconstructing their Interartistic Dialogue

According to Blizzard, it was the art of Picasso that exerted the greatest influence on Stein’s work. Her three Picasso-portraits, which allow us to trace her overall stylistic development, testify that he was indeed a ›subject‹ for her over more than three decades. But for Picasso’s interest in Stein there is also visible evidence: his famous portrait of her that announces the evolution of cubism. Just like Stein’s portraits, it plays with the conventions of illusionistic mimetic reproduction, partly affirming and partly subverting it.

An entirely new and creative approach is taken in Blizzard’s comparison of Stein’s Three Lives, a prose triptych consisting of the portraits of three women, and Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, one of the most sensational paintings of the early twentieth century. Both artworks were produced in the same year, 1907. Usually this early text is cited to exemplify Stein’s renunciation of a conventional personal description and at the same time of narration. Blizzard’s comparison to the painting sheds a different light on it. She analyses the speech of the figures in one of the three portraits, »The Gentle Lena«, reading it as their stream of consciousness which reveals their way of thinking and thus their character. Therefore she drafts a chart that draws attention to multiple repetitions on both semantic and linguistic levels which Stein herself explains as mimetic imitation of human speech (p. 74). In this self-revelation of the figures Blizzard sees a common feature of both text and painting. On the assumption that all the women presented here and there with their revolutionary gestures reject the traditional objectification of women in art, she detects plausible analogies regarding the underlying concept of the subject, thereby pointing out parallels in the compositions of the two artworks, which an untrained beholder would not discover at first glance (p. 78 – p. 81). Due to their common date of origin, the analogies mentioned here cannot be explained, as in the cases of »Matisse« and »Picasso«, by Stein’s imitation of the painting. Instead, they seem to be simultaneous phenomena in both media.

Visual and Verbal Cubism

Based on the thesis that each of the portraits of the artists reveals the artistic personality of the person portrayed, Blizzard compares Stein’s first Picasso-portrait »Picasso« (1909) and her second one, »If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso« (1923), to Picasso’s paintings »Portrait d’Ambroise Vollard« (1910) and »Still Life with Calling Card« (1914). Using these works, she explains the conceptual and stylistic affinities between Stein’s texts and cubism, the first picture serving her as an example for analytic, the second one for synthetic cubism. 8

Stein’s »Picasso« does not strive for completeness in the representation of the individual in terms of an enumeration of all its qualities. Instead, the portrait, whose direct references are drastically reduced, is marked by its tireless repetition of few key words: »This one was working« (p. 43 f.). This structure resembles the repetitive composition of geometric shapes in Picasso’s »Portrait d’Ambroise Vollard« (1910). Here, the face is not presented as a whole, but fragmented into its components, – hence ›analytic‹ cubism –, in order to select only a few shapes and rearrange them anew. Stein’s second portrait of Picasso exhibits both in its grammatical structure and in its vocabulary much more diversity and contains a multitude of motifs. Due to the resultant discontinuity, this portrait as such is much less comprehensible than the first one.

Thus Blizzard describes its textual structure without being able to focus on the portrayed person (p. 95 ff.). Comparing this text to Picasso’s »Still Life with Calling Card« (1914) she draws attention to interesting parallels which have never been discussed before. Similar to Stein, Picasso integrates various new materials into his late cubist pictures so that they become collages. In this particular case he uses the ›Calling Card‹ of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas which functions under the terms of a portrait as a reference to its owners (p. 98). Following Dubnick’s study on the stylistic development within Stein’s oeuvre, Blizzard transfers Picasso’s step from analytic to synthetic cubism to Stein’s portraits. 9 Thus, she roughly delineates a development within Stein’s portraiture that is legitimated by the interdisciplinary perspective, but whose gaps have to be filled by further literary study.

The Problem of Mimesis

Blizzard argues that in »Picasso« – just as in »Cézanne« and »Matisse«– Stein »does not want to tell the reader about Picasso«, but rather attempts to present »his essential nature by non-mimetic means« (p. 82). One can however object to this for two reasons: first, the portrait does tell something about Picasso, for example that he defines himself mainly through his work. Secondly, Picasso’s obsessive working is being presented mimetically by the continuous repetition of the statement that he is always working. Blizzard conceives of Stein’s portraits in principle as non-mimetic, saying »illusionistic mimetic reproduction is avoided at all costs« (p. 50). At the same time, she claims that the portraits of the artists (»Cézanne«, »Matisse« und »Picasso«) are imitating the art of the portrayed individuals and thus do not describe, but imitate their artistic personality. This thesis is contradictory to the one quoted above. Blizzard’s study lacks a definition of ›mimetic‹ representation which would be of primary importance here. Obviously, adopting a narrow understanding of mimesis, she defines it as ›visual/visible resemblance‹, because she resumes: »The portrait may not look like him [Picasso], but it acts as he does; it re-enacts his activity« (p. 85).

Last but not least

In her final discussion Blizzard analyses Stein’s third Picasso-portrait »Picasso« (1938), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) as portraits – however without comparing them to visual artworks. The reason for this might be their avoidance of radical stylistic experiments and their return to comparatively ›conventional‹ descriptive representation. The former text, a hybrid of biographical essay and art criticism, which is accorded a detailed discussion here for the first time, Blizzard creatively terms a »highly stylized biographical portrait« (p. 100). The conceptually inventive fictitious Autobiography is considered mainly as an extensive self-portrait of Stein, not, as is also possible, as a collection of many single portraits. In this tricky self-portrait completely different problems arise than in the other portraits, and thus the comparison proves difficult.

Conclusion

Paying equal attention to both media, Blizzard accomplishes an elaborate and detailed comparison of text and painting – which her precursors in this area had only outlined. She offers a concise study whose corpus of portraits turn out to be a felicitous ensemble, and closes a gap in literary research. In fact, she sometimes takes the embedding of her study in previous research on the subject almost too literally when directly quoting often and excessively from secondary texts, where an informative and critical paraphrase would have been more effective. Long quotes from biographies and art historical literature tend to reduce the readability of the text. In contrast, her accurate embedding of Stein’s portraiture in its social, cultural and artistic context proves to be a good strategy because it renders the artworks discussed more vivid and accessible.

Thanks to its step-by-step presentation of the texts and paintings this study qualifies very well as an introduction to both Stein’s portraits and those in modernist pictorial art, as the author succeeds in plausibly explaining complex artistic developments. In her analyses of pictures, and even more in her reflections on the characteristics of modernist art, she demonstrates a subtle comprehension of the field.

Most of the theoretical considerations Blizzard derives from painting and transfers them to literature without comment. Sometimes she writes about verbal and visual portraits as if there were no differentiation necessary and as if they shared one common tradition (p. 66). This corresponds to her understanding of the portrait as »a truly intermedial form of art« (p. 115) – unfortunately she does not offer a definition of her concept of intermediality. It would have been desirable if she had occasionally also pointed out differences regarding the two media, which Gertrude Stein herself repeatedly discussed in her writings. It is noteworthy that Blizzard avoids applying any of the recent theories of inter-mediality: Certainly, this would allow for a more precise distinction between various types of trans-media exchange – provided that one avoids the risk of over-systematisation.