Paradox

Gertrude Stein, 1905–6

Pablo Picasso

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Picasso said of his portrait of Gertrude Stein, “Everybody thinks that the portrait is not like her, but never mind, in the end she will look like the portrait.”. He began the portrait in 1905. She posed for this portrait ninety times. One day as described by Gertrude he said "I can't see you anymore when I look", he said irritably, and so the picture was left like that. He completed the head after a trip to Spain in fall 1906. His reduction of the figure to simple masses and the face to a mask with heavy lidded eyes reflects his recent encounter with African, Roman, and Iberian sculpture and foreshadows his adoption of Cubism. He painted the head, which differs in style from the body and hands, without the sitter, testimony to the fact that it was his personal vision, rather than empirical reality, that guided his work. When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will."
When you look at her photographs, I see that the portrait carries her mood, and being that the painting foretells of his up and coming cubist style, it is enough to say it is her.