What have we learned from Gertrude Stein, she who loved not punctuation? I will not be strict here and polish a sarcophagus with my bare hands. This is only cafe discussion. Therefore, Ms. Stein, do you take sugar?
“Yes. Thank you.”
1. Of painting
“Painting in the nineteenth century was only done in France and by Frenchmen, apart from that, painting did not exist, in the twentieth century it was done in France, but by Spaniards.”
2. Of Picasso’s friends in France
“His friends in Paris were writers rather than painters, why have painters for friends when he could paint as he could paint.”
3. Of loving your creation a bit more than the creation of others
“He said that when one went to an exhibition and looked at the pictures of other painters one knows that they are bad, there is no excuse for it they are simply bad, but one’s own pictures, one knows the reasons why they are bad and so they are not hopelessly bad.”
4. Of how we as humans are the same, only the things we see change
“At present another composition is commencing, each generation has its own composition, people do not change from one generation to another but the composition that surrounds them changes.”
5. Of the splendour of the XXth century
“… the twentieth century is that, it is a time when everything cracks, where everything is destroyed, everything isolates itself, it is a more splendid thing than a period where everything follows itself. So then the twentieth century is a splendid period, not a reasonable one in the scientific sense, but splendid.”
I was formed at the sunset of a beautiful catastrophe. Stein and Picasso are beads in my string of parents.
This new century art belongs to my generation; it is ours to fabricate and mirror and be grateful to the splendour behind.
