"When I was in America, I took constant plane trips for the first time. I saw there, on earth, the mixed lines of Picasso, coming and going, developing and destroying themselves. Yes, I saw all that and once again I understood that a creator is always a contemporary. Before anyone else, he knows what others don't yet know. He is in the 20th century, in a century which sees the earth as we have never seen it before, which has a splendor never equaled. Picasso is from this century, he has the strange qualities of a world as we have never seen it and things destroyed as they had never been. » In an essay published in 1938, and written in French, Gertrude Stein makes a singular and very concrete study of the man and the artist Pablo Picasso. Between the writer and the painter, there was a friendship of forty years, and first of all the portrait he made of her in 1906, considered a masterpiece of the 20th century. Miss Stein was first the patron, then the writer who shared the painter's artistic quest, and helped to achieve his recognition. In her language inspired by "pictorial cubism", Gertrude Stein also composed (in 1910 & 1923) poems dedicated to Picasso, which we include here with extracts from her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas touching the Spanish master.
