"Shutters Shut and Open": Making Sense of Gertrude Stein's Second Portrait of Picasso

Now that one can listen to Gertrude Stein reading "If I Told Him / A Completed Portrait of Picasso" (1923) in an audio recording available online, it seems especially odd that we should have no adequate critical interpretation of this remarkable verbal portrait.¹ Certainly the difficulty of the portrait method presents a formidable obstacle. "If I Told Him" is Stein's second portrait of the artist and one of a series of second portraits she wrote in a style that relies heavily on monosyllabic words, particularly shifters and modifiers, whose exacting operations result in an anti-mimetic, monochromatic surface. Indeed, one critic proposes that "If I Told Him" can serve as an example of what her detractors deem "solipsistic" and nonsensical in a Stein text.² Another obstacle to critical understanding of the portrait stems from its apparent subject and its claims for portraiture. Understandably, critics are tempted to read the portrait of Picasso for biographical clues and to emphasize referential elements of the portrait in order to address its textual opacity. Readings based on a biographical interpretation select elements accordingly, often omitting much of the text and, as I will explain, reading past the method of the portrait and undermining its experiment. For as many critics note, Stein's portraits deliberately contest conventions of representation based on resemblance. By resemblance is meant the expectation that the portrait be a likeness of the subject, reproducing his or her appearance in physical and characteristic attributes in keeping with realist conventions. But not only does Stein's text refuse to conform to an expectation that portraiture is the art of resemblance, it has also proven highly resistant to interpretation as an experimental text that "makes sense" in the compositional terms of its unfolding verbal surface.

I propose that we can resolve the critical dilemma elicited by the portrait in its dueling claims for portraiture and compositional experiment by recognizing Stein's radical epistemology. For Stein, the portrait is an experiment in representation that turns on an investigation of knowledge claims. In my view, the experimental work of the early twenties that led to this series of second portraits coincides with an important epistemological shift for Stein, one that motivates the textual strategies she deploys in "If I Told Him," among other texts of the period. Far from unreadable, "If I Told Him" can serve as an instructive text because it presents critical epistemological questions she then engaged and the resultant challenges for writing, including how to make "knowing" a compositional effect rather than a report or recollection. I argue that an understanding of Stein's epistemology during this period can help us as readers and critics to adopt a more radical critical practice. Once we recognize that reference or denotation in the text accords with a radical empiricist and not a representational theory of knowledge, then we cannot continue to reinstate the rationalist premises of conventional representation. We need a new and more dynamic model for reading the compositional expression of the portrait. It is precisely because the referential pull of details is so strong in a portrait of Picasso that the text becomes a good test case of a critical approach informed by an understanding of Stein's epistemology.

At the end of the summer of 1923, Stein visited Picasso and his family in Antibes on the French Riviera, reaffirming their friendship after a period of cooling.³ Picasso's mother was also visiting and Stein met her for the first time.⁴ From there Stein visited the painter and sculptor Juan Gris, who was in Nice managing stage design, and this, too, was a visit after some estrangement. Stein was in the company of painters and friends of long standing once again. During her stay in Nice Stein resumed writing portraits after a brief hiatus in this genre and there she wrote second portraits of Carl Van Vechten, Alice Toklas, and Picasso.⁵ Obviously, the biographical record alone does not explain the distinctive new style of portraiture that emerges in these second portraits. Yet, despite its apparent critique of resemblance...