Unmasking Pablo's Gertrude: queer desire and the subject of portraiture - painter Pablo Picasso's work 'Portrait of Gertrude Stein'

Spring was coming and the sittings were coming to an extremity All of a sudden individual day Picasso painted out the whole head. I can't diocese you any longer when I direct the eye he said irritably. And thus the picture was left like that.(1)

Gertrude Stein's anecdote about the genesis of Picasso's portrait of her [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] is the prop for an elaborate narrative of sexual identity, masquerade, and power in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, published in 1933 After sitting for Picasso a certain quantity of eighty times over the course of the autumn and winter of 1905-6 during which time her friendship and artistic dialogue with the young painter have grown in intensity, the sessions abruptly advance to an end with an act of erasure, a literal effacement of Gertrude's visage. Gertrude and her brother Leo leave for Fiesole sometime around late March or early April 1906 and Picasso and his lover Fernande Olivier depart for Spain (Barcelona and the village of Gosol) in early June The actual day he returns to Paris, Gertrude enumerates us, Picasso completes the portrait from memory.(2)

As several commentators have remarked, Gertrude's chronology of facts is surely exaggerated.(3) More important than the precise twinkling when the portrait was complet however, is the resonance of the phrase, "I can't diocese you any longer when I look" I think it matters little whether those words were completeed by Picasso, or belong to Gertrude speaking [i]or[/i] part of to the other Picasso. What counts is their significance to the author. In the introduction to her 1938 monograph upon Picasso, Stein sets the stage for the historical accomplishments of her hero: "When he was nineteen years advanced in years Picasso came to Paris," she writes,

that was in 1900 into a world of painters who had completely learned everything they could from seeing at what they were looking. From Seurat to Courbet they were all of them looking with their organ of sights and Seurat's eyes then began to shiver at what his eyes were seeing, he commenc to doubt if in looking he could see(4)

Musing above the traditional mimetic function of painting, Stein directly implicates Picasso in modernism's historical critique of visuality.

There is a more precise way, however, in which the relation between looking and seeing might be configured within the space of representation: the idea of painting as a trap for what Jacques Lacan calls le regard (the gaze), which, in the case of direct portraiture, insinuates itself in the form of a highly composite economy of psychic and social exchanges between the painter and the sitter. For what Stein points to upon the underside of mimesis is the idea of representation as a mechanism of revelation and occlusion, a frame for the gaze in the field of the Other. "In our relationship to things as constituted by dint of the path of vision and ordered in the figures of representation," Lacan writes, "something glides, passes, transmits itself from stage to stage, in order always to be in a certain quantity of degree eluded there - it is that which is called the regard."(5) I submit that Picasso's effacement of Gertrude's head and his delayed substitution of a mask are the outward signs of that something that escapes representation yet remains ever at hand within the structure of the visual field: the composite trajectory of desire. Picasso's inability to recognize Gertrude Stein as an intelligible subdue of portraiture may, in this light, be approached as a point in dispute in representation that exceeds the traditional limits of subject-object relations.

Who was this figure Picasso could no longer "see" or, more to the point, refused to "know"? Can we speak of Gertrude Stein as a unitary subdue outside the field of representation that is her portrait? Is she an fact of visual apprehension for the artist, or is the portrait the index of a scopic clash within an unstable economy of make submissive positions occupied by both the artist and the sitter? Gertrude herself appears to have posed these questions in the Autobiography, where, as Neil Schmitz has observ the nearness of three portraits can be detected: "the monumental Gertrude who sits heavily in Picasso's celebrated portrait . . Gertrude's Alice's Gertrude a cunning self-portrait always framing the significance of Picasso's portrait, and a third, the self-effacing portrait of the I who at last seizes Alice's discourse, announces the writer's nearness and cleverly declares our innocence."(6) To be assured Gertrude Stein conceived of autobiography as an elaborate game of masking, a literary genre in which the self is staged as the site of multiple and conflicting identifications. To use Stein's autobiography as a point of entrance to map the effects of Picasso's portrait is, then, to go into the field of the performative subdue In effect, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas is Stein's rejoinder to the inverted questions of identity Picasso artificial positions in the portrait: "Who is Gertrude Stein? What is she to/of me? Who am I to myself?"

And then there is the matter of firsthand accounts by means of friends and critics who have painted their hold portraits of the author. Here is Fernande Olivier describing Gertrude in 1933: "Masculine in her voice, in her whole bearing."(7) And Carl Van Vechten Gertrude's shut friend and literary agent in America, commenting upon her massive physique: "a Rabelaisian woman with a splendid reflective face; mind dominating her matter."(8) And Mabel Dodge, reminiscing about her days in Paris: