If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso

Gertrude Stein is one of most influential figures in the development of Modernist art, and the relationship between Stein and the visual artists she championed goes both ways. Though Stein never put brush to canvas, poems like “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso” attempt to transform the page into a spatial art devoid of the logic and narrative that a reader uses to make sense of a work. In her turn away from linear narrative and toward a non-hierarchical method of poetry, Stein mirrors her subject Pablo Picasso’s earlier turn away from linear perspective and toward flat surfaces. Stein’s non-hierarchical use of words and constant focus on the present allows each word to exist both as its pure meaning and as a part of the work’s greater portrait. This reflects the Cubist technique of using pure geometric shapes that come together to generate the painting’s subject. “If I Told Him,” like the experimental works that inspired it, revels in the attempt at an “exact resemblance” (Line 13) while proving such representative depictions impossible.

Stein’s abandonment of linear narrative has many consequences. The Cubists were attacked by early critics for their incomprehensible works, and Stein’s chosen form opens her poetry to similar misinterpretation.