Picasso

Bol

Gertrude Stein's Picasso is less a conventional biography than a compressed modernist meditation on the painter's emergence, method, and historical necessity. In recursive, declarative prose, Stein follows Picasso from Spain to Paris, through the shocks of Cézanne, African sculpture, and Cubism, presenting innovation as a problem of seeing rather than technique. Belonging to the intimate literature of the Paris avant-garde, the book's syntax mirrors rupture, repetition, and re-formation. Stein was uniquely placed to write this portrait. An American expatriate, collector, and presiding force of the rue de Fleurus salon, she knew Picasso when both were remaking twentieth-century art. Her experiments in language-portraits, repetitions, refusals of inherited narrative-developed beside his dismantling of perspective; the book records one revolutionary mind recognizing another from within the same creative climate. Readers seeking only chronology should supplement it, but anyone interested in modernism's inner energies should read Picasso. It offers a rare contemporaneous witness, at once critical and affectionate, to the making of a new visual order. Stein's brief volume rewards those willing to hear criticism as art, and biography as an act of perception.

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Pages: 32, Paperback, Sharp Ink