Portrait of Gertrude Stein

Pablo Picasso began his Portrait of Gertrude Stein in the winter of 1905–1906, and by the time he finished it the following autumn, the painting had become something far more radical than a likeness. According to Stein herself, she sat for Picasso approximately ninety times in his cramped Montmartre studio. At some point in spring 1906, Picasso painted out the face entirely — famously declaring he could no longer see her when he looked — and left for the Spanish village of Gósol. When he returned, he repainted the face from memory, giving it the mask-like, angular quality that anticipates his breakthrough into Cubism by more than a year.\n\nThe painting measures 100 × 81.3 cm and is oil on canvas. The result is a work suspended between two artistic worlds: the body is rendered with the solid, simplified masses of Cézanne, while the face already speaks a different language — flattened, archaic, indebted to the Iberian sculptures Picasso had seen in Paris. Stein became one of Picasso's earliest and most important patrons, and when asked whether the portrait resembled her, he famously replied: It will. In her will, Stein bequeathed the painting — the only artwork she named specifically — to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it has remained ever since.