Ulla Haselstein

Learning from
Cézanne:
Stein’s Working
with and through
Picturing
One of the many anecdotes told in The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas is the story of how Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) learned about
Cézanne (1839–1906) from her brother Leo (1872–1947), who had
seen some of Cézanne’s paintings at Charles Loeser’s villa in Florence
in the summer of 1903; Loeser had been told about Cézanne’s work
by the latter’s close friend Claude Pissarro. At the turn of the century,
Cézanne was known only by a small circle of friends, critics, and
fellow artists.1 This was soon to change, however—due to a large
exhibition of Cézanne’s paintings at the Salon d’Automne of 1904,
but also because of the Steins, who bought their first Cézanne in
1904 from Vollard.2 On Saturday nights at 27, rue de Fleurus, the
Steins’ collection of contemporary art could be inspected by the
crowd of visitors,3 and Leo would extemporize on modern art,
explaining Cézanne’s aesthetics and comparing his work to that of
other artists.4 In those early days in Paris, Gertrude Stein left the
terrain of art criticism to her brother. Later, in 1904, the Steins
bought “a big Cézanne,” namely, a portrait of the artist’s wife. This
painting was a major inspiration for Stein’s writing. As she herself
put it: “[I]n looking and looking at this picture Gertrude Stein wrote
Three Lives.” 5
In an interview she gave in the last year of her life, Stein
Paul Cézanne,
La Conduite d’eau recollected her beginnings as a writer and emphasized her indebt-
(detail, see fig. 1). edness to Cézanne:

150 Ulla Haselstein

 Everything I have done has been influenced by Flaubert
and Cézanne, and this gave me a new feeling of composi-
tion. Up to that time composition had consisted of a
central idea, to which everything else was an accompani-
ment and separate but was not an end in itself, and
Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing
was as important as another thing. Each part is as impor-
tant as the whole, and that impressed me enormously,
and it impressed me so much that I began to write Three
Lives under this influence and this idea of composition,
and I was more interested in composition at that moment,
this background of a word-system, which had come to me
from this reading that I had done. [. . .]
After all, to me one human being is as important as
another human being, and you might say that the
landscape has the same values, a blade of grass has the
same value as a tree. Because the realism of the people
who did realism before was a realism of trying to make
people real. I was not interested in making the people real
but in the essence or, as a painter would call it, value.
One cannot live without the other. This was an entirely
new idea and had been done a little by the Russians but
had not been conceived as a reality until I came along,
but I got it largely from Cézanne. Flaubert was there as
a theme. He, too, had a little of the feeling about this
thing, but they none of them conceived it as an entity, no
more than any painter had done other than Cézanne.6

Stein gives Flaubert and the Russian writers their due as precur-
sors of modernist literature, but she singles out Cézanne’s idea of
composition as the true artistic watershed and celebrates him for his
egalitarianism: “one thing was as important as another thing.” Stein
may allude here to Théodore Duret’s well-known remark that for
Cézanne “a few apples and a napkin on a table assume the same
grandeur as a human head or a view by the sea.” 7 More specifically,
Stein refers to Cézanne’s technique of modeling through colors of
equal value. Destroying the effect of different levels of illusionistic
space, a flatness is created that contributes to the play with the hierarchy
of figure and ground characteristic for Cézanne’s paintings.8 In the
late works, the brushstrokes form color patches built up into a network
of repetitions and resemblances that traverses the contours of the

152 Ulla Haselstein

 represented objects. As a consequence, figure and ground merge, and
the mimetic illusion of the picture becomes incoherent, while the
brushmarks display rhythms which may or may not trace the contours
of the motif.9 The compositional and the representational order
engage in a process of exchange,10 for “[t]he general principle at work
in [Cézanne’s] art is analogy: one thing is made to look like, or
somehow be like, another, despite the differences and dissimilarities
that otherwise obtain.” 11 The taches are interrelated, and yet remain
distinct, often separated by white intervals. The “unfinishedness”
of Cézanne’s paintings is an integral element of the pictorial organiza-
tion. At the same time, the zones of white canvas show (and signify 12)
the processual character and conceptual openness of Cézanne’s pictures
and provoke an activity of the viewer that Stein, in her comments
quoted above, calls “reading.”
Cézanne famously coined the term réalisation to characterize
his artistic aim, which he once described as attempting “to see like a
newborn child.” 13 Stressing aspects of process and movement, réalisa-
tion has been widely and controversially discussed by critics, art
historians, and fellow artists. Did Cézanne’s impressionist aims inhibit
“his observing an object as a differentiated part of a whole ‘sensation’
of nature,” as Richard Shiff claimed? 14 Or were the distortions of the
paintings conceptually motivated, amounting to a “drama of pictorial
integration” that stages the “mosaic of decisions that determine [the
painting] becoming a work of art,” as William Rubin argued? 15 Did
Cézanne attempt “to paint the primordial world” as an “emerging
order” of “objects in the act of appearing,” as phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty wrote? 16 Or did Cézanne’s “relentless attentiveness to
the data of the senses” bring about “a dissolution of unity, a destabiliza-
tion of objects,” which displaces the body of the viewer “into a stream
of change, of time,” as Jonathan Crary maintained? 17 Stein’s apprecia-
tion of Cézanne’s art never wavered, but what consequences she
drew from it varied over time. In the first part of my essay, I will show
how Stein used Cézanne’s picturing as a foil for her literary experiments.
In the second part, I will analyze Stein’s portrait of Cézanne both as
a homage to the artist and a modernist paragone.
There are two artistic strategies which Stein discovered in looking
at Cézanne’s paintings. Cézanne paid close attention to the cognitive
processes involved in perception and decided to present the processes
rather than represent the results. This mode of presentation is a self-
referential mode of picturing: it makes the viewer experience the
production of a picture as the transformation of sensation into visual

153 Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of Cézanne

signs by a synthesizing act of the imagination. Cézanne’s paintings
suspend this act of imagination and thereby make it visible—as a lack
that keeps the correlation between visual sense data and visual
meanings open and variable. “Looking and looking” at Cézanne’s
pictures, Stein submitted to this experience of picturing again and
again. She had studied philosophy and psychology with William James
and had conducted psychological experiments at the Harvard Psychol-
ogy Lab. For her, the cognitive act of the synthesizing imagination
translated into the habitual act of integrating sense data into visual
signs respectively, which in turn relied on visual schematizations also
formed through habit. Cézanne’s artistic imagination was no different
from any other painter’s or indeed anyone else’s, but his eye-opening
insight consisted in finding a way to visually (re)present picturing
(which for Stein turns the canvas into something akin to a text in that
it requires reading). At the same time, Cézanne’s picturing could
serve as a model for her writing only in a limited way since the reader
deals with several sorts of sense data simultaneously: in order to create
meaning, visual data (consisting of letters, but also of blanks and typo-
graphical signs) must be recognized as referring to words and sentences,
as culturally coded schematizations of sound “images.” But of course
words and sentences are not sound “images.” Not all words are referen-
tial: pronouns refer to recursive processes, conjunctions create logical
connections, tropes interlink words with other words; and then there
is grammar as a normative set of schematizations which turns the tempo-
ral sequentiality of sounds into larger recognizable patterns. Looking
and looking at Cézanne’s paintings as experiments with picturing,
Stein set herself the aim of making the reader aware of the process of
imagination as a habitual process of integrating sense data through
pattern recognition. But she also came to see herself as outperforming
Cézanne’s picturing; since in writing, the suspension of the synthesiz-
ing act allows for a variety of different experiments—with sound, with
time, and with grammatical and logical order.

In the interview quoted above, Stein described Cézanne’s artistic

innovation as an egalitarian composition, a conceptualization that
reflected her own concerns in writing Three Lives (finished in 1906 and
published in 1909). In the life stories of lower-class women that make
up the volume, the protagonists are treated by the narrator as contem-
porary social types defined on the basis of class and gender, and in the

154 Ulla Haselstein

case of “Melanctha,” also race. The quoted dialogues of the characters
are studded with dialect phrases and repetitive speech patterns, and
their behavior is shown to mainly consist of unconscious habits. There
thus appears to be a profound disparity between each servant-woman’s
consciousness and the narrator’s consciousness, as the latter articulates
a panoramic knowledge of society while the servants are confined to a
very constrained social world. But the narrator’s characterization of the
protagonists as social types is undermined by a compositional use of
repetition: the repetitive speech patterns occur in both the servants’
and their mistresses’ discourse—and in the narrator’s discourse as well.
Initially, such repetitions appear as an ironical mimicking of a servant’s
way of speaking; after all, Three Lives was inspired by Flaubert’s Trois
Contes (1877) and his ironical use of free indirect discourse which
fuses the narrator’s and the characters’ voices. But in Three Lives, this
merging of voices also occurs in passages clearly marked as narrative
commentary, and the irony turns against the narrator’s authority and
unmasks it as pretentious and self-aggrandizing. As the differences
among the characters and between the characters and the narrator
become blurred, the narrator’s psychological insight appears to be built
on a lack of self-reflexivity and an unconscious complicity with social
privilege.18 Compositionally, the repetitions in Three Lives function
like the color patches in Cézanne’s paintings, for they dissolve the
hierarchy of narrative levels. As a consequence, the narration is turned
into a decentered textual field organized by a network of similarities
and nodal points of heightened intensity. There is the representational
meaning of the repetitions bound up with the concepts of character,
gender, race, and class, and there is a self-referential meaning of the
repetitions as literalizations of mimetic imitation. In addition, repeti-
tions figure rhetorically as acts of confirmation, as instructive demonstra-
tions, or as ironical gestures. And there is a performative meaning of
repetition as iteration that works against the linearity of the life story,
and its conventional form as a process of development, by exposing the
insistence of desires as intertwined with social conditions that give
them their form through habit. The lack of imaginative synthesis thus
throws several distinct strata of textual signification into relief that lend
themselves to different discursive regimes of meaning.

A different view of Cézanne’s art can be culled from an entry in one of

Stein’s notebooks from 1909: “I believe in reality as Cézanne or Caliban

155 Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of Cézanne

 believe in it. I believe in repetition. Yes. Always and always, must write
the hymn of repetition.” 19 The parallelism of the first and the second
sentence highlights two artistic credos from which Stein deduces her
conclusion. The pairing of Cézanne with Caliban indicates that in
1909 Stein read, as did Merleau-Ponty many years later, Cézanne’s
réalisation as an effort to disclose a primordial form of reality.20 The
allusion to The Tempest explains why: Prospero taught Caliban to
speak and conceptually divide up the world. Caliban’s acquisition of
language is bound up with his subjection to a master, which is why
he famously claims to have only learned to curse. But Caliban also
appears to possess a gift for poetry, as is shown when he lovingly
describes his island home as “full of noises / Sounds and sweet airs, that
give delight and hurt not. / Sometimes a thousand twangling instru-
ments / Will hum about mine ears.” 21 To speak means to use signifiers
employing a limited and differentially organized spectrum of sounds,
and to subject oneself to the performative force of language, which
shapes human perceptions by filtering them through a differentially
organized conceptual grid. Having learned to speak, Caliban cannot
return to his former state of nature, but he retains a sensitivity to the
“noises, sounds, and sweet airs” of nature.
Walter Pater famously wrote that “all art constantly aspires to the
condition of music.” 22 Stein reconfigured this symbolist idea under
the auspices of Cézanne and Caliban. This evocation of an undifferen-
tiated multitude of aural perceptions can be related to two types of
Stein’s portraiture. The first is concerned with the psychological
analysis of character and bound up with a technique she called “talking
and listening.” If Cézanne showed through picturing how a force
field of visual and tactile sensations is filtered and streamlined into
signs organizing the perception of objects, Stein showed that listening
is more than a decoding of the meaning. Since speaking means to
represent a subject for another subject, listening can be extended to
the force field of speech as both coded and uncoded sound production
in order to register a subject’s preference of certain patterns of words,
rhythms, tones of voice, and structures of emphasis. Stein’s portraits
of Matisse and Picasso (both 1912) are built on this insight.
In Tender Buttons (1914), a collection of texts which Stein charac-
terized as “portraits of things,” she employs different strategies: the
meaning of words is no longer determined by syntax and context,
because the words are arranged into contingent sequences; the phonetic
and syllabic components of the words are made productive, generating
“poetic” similarities; puns and anagrams make use of the visual

156 Ulla Haselstein

dimension of writing to create uncoded forms of creating coherence.
The result is the “noise” of a chaotic agglomeration of words, alternat-
ing with moments of “harmonies of sweet airs,” when rhymes, rhythms,
or puns suggest possible paths to construct reference and coherence.
When such texts are read aloud and the reader’s body is turned into an
instrument that “hums about her ears,” the portrayed object “appears”
flitteringly until it is once again dissolved in the noise. Again, Walter
Pater may be quoted here, who came close to Cézanne’s concept of
picturing when he wrote, “‘To see the object as in itself it really is’ has
been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatsoever: and in
aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is,
is to know one’s own impression at it really is, to discriminate it, to
realise it distinctly.” 23 Held together by acoustic, rhythmic, and seman-
tic recurrences, the texts in Tender Buttons neither represent nor
categorize the things they “portray,” but present verbal equivalents of
the things in question by weaving interlocking chains of words around
the object’s name, visual gestalt, and affective content.24

Only in her lecture “Pictures,” written for her reading tour across the
United States in 1933–34, did Stein describe Cézanne’s paintings (and
his mode of picturing) in some detail. Starting with her responses to
paintings in her early youth, Stein reviews her aesthetic self-education
by going through a long list of painters and museum collections. These
snippets of memory are presented as elements of a process of retrospec-
tive self-reflection: Stein tries to understand the aesthetic principles
that inform her value judgments when “looking at oil paintings.” She
remembers that she “liked Rubens landscapes because they all moved
together,” and that she “liked Titians because they did not move at all.”
Paintings by Velasquez “bothered” her, “because they were too real
and yet they were not real enough,” while El Greco “excited” her,
because “there the oil painting neither moved nor was it still nor was
it real.” 25 Stein obviously responded in a relaxed and rather indifferent
manner to paintings whose representational strategies could be
unequivocally defined. In contrast, there were paintings that provoked
emotions in Stein ranging from slight irritation (“bothered”) to
ambivalent intensity (“excited”). She attributed these responses to the
contradictory structures or structural imbalances of the paintings in
question. It is the process of reception she is concerned with. Looking
and looking is more than just looking: it indicates a growing intensity,

157 Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of Cézanne

of being provoked to look again and again, a process of being chal-
lenged and getting involved in one’s own receptivity to the power of
the painting.
Stein formulates her judgments by applying the same small
number of conventional criteria of art criticism to each painting.
The resulting repetitions and syntactic parallelisms emphasize the
methodical nature of her comparative analysis. They also provide
the background to mark the deviations from the steady interconnect-
ing flow of remembrance and reflection when she shows how the
memories of her ambivalent responses to the paintings of Velasquez
and El Greco influence the level of affectivity of her discourse in the
present. The review culminates in Stein’s encounter with Cézanne’s
works, which is staged as an enigmatic yet ultimately pleasurable
experience (a presentation that fits Kant’s definition of the sublime as
an experience that unsettles the synthesizing power of the imagina-
tion).26 Stein first presents the reader with a train of thought set in
motion by Cézanne’s “pictures” and then switches her terminology
by addressing them as “oil paintings”:

And then slowly through all this and looking at many

many pictures I came to Cézanne and there you were, at
least there I was, not all at once but as soon as I got used
to it. The landscape looked like a landscape that is to say
what is yellow in the landscape looked yellow in the oil
painting, and what was blue in the landscape looked blue
in the oil painting, and if it did not there still was the oil
painting, the oil painting by Cézanne. The same thing
was true of the people there was no reason why it should be
but it was, the same thing was true of the chairs, the same
thing was true of the apples. The apples looked like apples
the chairs looked like chairs and it all had nothing to do
with anything because if they did not look like apples or
chairs or landscape or people they were apples and chairs
and landscape and people. They were so entirely these
things that they were not an oil painting and yet that is
just what the Cézannes were they were an oil painting.
They were so entirely an oil painting that it was all there
whether they were finished, the paintings, or whether
they were not finished. Finished or unfinished it always
was what it looked like the very essence of an oil painting
because everything was always there, really there.27

158 Ulla Haselstein

 Even after many decades, the memory of Stein’s first encounter
with Cézanne’s paintings is so powerful that it disrupts the order of her
discourse—or so she makes the reader feel, by using the colloquial
interjection “there you were.” But this disruption is immediately reinte-
grated: repeating her words, but changing the pronoun and the verb
form to the first person, she turns the interjection into a self-reference
and thus performatively highlights her resumption of reflexive self-
control. Stein’s account for the stunning quality of Cézanne’s paintings
is threefold. At first she stresses their similarity with other pictures: like
the painters before him, Cézanne uses color mimetically, which is why
his paintings resemble the objects they represent. However, with some
of his paintings, the search for such resemblances fails, and in other
paintings, the illusionistic effect is destroyed or at least much reduced
by their unfinishedness. Trompe l’œil can thus definitely be ruled
out—and yet the paintings outperform even the most exact painterly
representations by making their objects intensely present to the viewer.
Cézanne’s apples may or may not look like apples, but they are apples.
On the one hand, Stein explains Cézanne’s works in a similar
manner as the paintings by Velasquez and El Greco, namely, by nega-
tions and paradoxes: conceptual thought can only register the paintings’
refusal to conform to the established conventions of picturing. But
Stein also comes up with positive descriptions: “the apples are apples,”
and “everything was always there, really there.” With the help of verbal
gestures such as tonal emphasis and the repetition of the deictic term
“there,” Stein stresses a unique ontological effect of Cézanne’s paint-
ings, links it to their indexical structure, and ends with a paradox: by
pointing the viewer’s attention to the referential meaning in the real
world, and at the same time to the “oil paintings” as artistic produc-
tions, Cézanne exposes the painting as an overdetermined zone of
picturing which stages and prolongs the cognitive processes of visual
perception by withholding a stable image. Cézanne’s picturing created
an epiphany for Stein by making her understand that the presence
of recognizable objects in the world is the result of acts of imagination
that are continuously performed by every subject but rendered visible
and readable as such for the first time by Cézanne’s oil paintings.

In the lecture, Stein continued her analysis of Cézanne’s work with

an abridged version of her portrait of Cézanne (written in 1923).28 It is
reprinted below in its full length:

159 Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of Cézanne

 CÉZANNE
The Irish lady can say, that to-day is every day.
Caesar can say that every day is to-day and they say that
every day is as they say.
In this way we have a place to stay and he was not
met because he was settled to stay. When I said settled
I meant settled to stay. When I said settled to stay I meant
settled to stay Saturday. In this way a mouth is a mouth.
In this way if in as a mouth if in as a mouth where, if in
as a mouth where and there. Believe they have water too.
Believe they have that water too and blue when you see
blue, is all blue precious too, is all that that is precious too
is all that and they meant to absolve you. In this way
Cézanne nearly did nearly in this way Cézanne nearly did
nearly did and nearly did. And was I surprised. Was I
very surprised. Was I surprised. I was surprised and in that
patient, are you patient when you find bees. Bees in a
garden make a specialty of honey and so does honey.
Honey and prayer. Honey and there. There where the grass
can grow nearly four times yearly.

Obviously this portrait neither characterizes Cézanne as a person

nor describes his paintings. It shares some general features with
many other texts by Stein. The sentences are decontextualized, their
grammatic structure is simple and often fragmentary, and the punctua-
tion is irregular. Repetitions abound: they occur on the level of sounds,
syllables, words, combinations of words, and sentences, creating
recursive structures of self-quotation, mirror effects, series of emphatic
confirmations, rhymes, and rhythmic movements. There are also
some specific features of the text that can be readily observed at a
cursory glance. The deictic phrase “in this way” occurs five times; it is
used anaphorically and thus forms a prominent element of the text’s
internal structure. The color “blue” is mentioned three times, but
this series remains restricted to a single sentence; “blue” also marks
the only manifest reference to Cézanne’s art. The word “bees” occurs
twice, and “honey” four times. In the absence of conventional
meaning, some words suggest themselves to be grouped together into
semantic clusters: “water”—“blue”—“see” [“sea”], for example, or
“bees”—“honey”—“grass.” The words “mouth,” “say,” “honey,” and
“water” form a third cluster that intersects with the other two and
constitutes a common ground of orality, which again self-referentially

160 Ulla Haselstein

 stresses the importance of sound, and hence the linguistic materiality
of Stein’s portraiture as compared to Cézanne’s.
Then there are names and personal pronouns: “Caesar” and
“Cézanne,” “he” and “we” and “I” and “they” and “you.” Together, they
form a matrix of relations among subjects as the basic structure of the
portrait. “He” and “I” presumably refer to Cézanne as the portrayed
subject and to Stein as the portraitist, respectively. “We” is an ambigu-
ous term. It refers to the community to which the speaker (presumably
Stein) belongs, but may or may not include “the Irish lady,” “Caesar,”
and “they,” and probably excludes the subsequent “he.” Linked with
“Cézanne” by alliteration, “Caesar” means Stein herself (who would
thus occasionally assume an external vantage point toward herself
and talk about herself in the third person, as she did ten years later in
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). For Stein not only called herself
“Caesar” in her posthumously published erotic texts, but because of her
haircut and her regal demeanor, she reminded many of her friends of
a Roman emperor. In an act of rebellion against the traditional regime
of power, Caesar famously crossed the Rubicon River and inaugurated
a new era of world history; he thus provided Stein with an image for
herself as a heroic transgressor of artistic conventions (and of sexual
conventions as well, since Caesar’s alleged homosexual behavior was a
subject of gossip in antiquity). Linked with Cézanne by alliteration,
“Caesar” casts Stein in the role of the ruling figure of modernism whose
artistic achievements are prepared by her precursor Cézanne.
Playing with the similarities and differences of the sounds of the
names, the pairing of Cézanne and Caesar suggests that the portrait
will present Stein’s view on the similarities and differences between the
work of the two artists, giving Cézanne precedence and Stein promi-
nence in the history of modernism. The first paragraph has expository
character. While the “Irish lady” (probably an allusion to Joyce’s
character Molly Bloom—Ulysses had appeared in 1922) can say that
“to-day is every day,” “Caesar”/Stein can say that “every day is to-day.”
While Joyce turned a presentation of a single day in Dublin into a
timeless monument of modern writing, Stein’s Caesarean maxim was
that every day constitutes a “to-day,” another chance to throw the dice
and break the regime of tradition. The paragraph ends with the state-
ment “[t]hey say that every day is as they say,” which either confirms
Joyce’s and Stein’s conviction of the truth of their vision and under-
lines their performative potency as artists or stresses their difference
from the anonymous crowd content with knowledge of everyday life.
Cézanne is not mentioned in the first paragraph, but his name is

161 Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of Cézanne

 present in several acoustic allusions—in the alliteration with
“Caesar,” and in echo of the first syllable in the reiterated verb form
“say”: there are echoes of Cézanne in what Joyce and Stein say.
Given this reading of the first paragraph, it may be expected that
the second paragraph will address and elaborate the argument
inscribed in the first paragraph, namely, that Cézanne’s work influ-
enced contemporary avant-garde writing. This would require Stein
either to describe and discuss some of his work (which is evidently not
the case) or to transpose (the structure of) Cézanne’s work into her
writing as a kind of quotation or allusion. The portrait would then refer
to Cézanne’s work but be a work of Stein’s; while presenting Cézanne’s
mode of picturing, it would also articulate Stein’s difference from it.
The deictic phrase “in this way” occurs five times in the text and may
be understood self-referentially, that is, as a strong hint addressed to
the reader to regard the composition of the portrait as the key to the
problem of defining contemporary writing both as a consequence of
Cézanne’s work and as a move beyond its limits. Many sentences
are incomplete or constructed by a montage of decontextualized words,
but the gaps can be filled by the reader—tentatively to be sure—by
moving forward or backward in the text in the attempt to find connec-
tions or clues by closely observing semantic, syntactic, and, most
importantly, acoustic similarities. Dorrit Cohn once stated that all
interior monologues “conform to two principal tendencies: syntactical
abbreviation and lexical opaqueness,” 29 and Stein’s portrait displays
both characteristics.
“In this way we have a place to stay and he was not met because
he was settled to stay.” A chain of rhymes links the sentence to the first
paragraph (“day”—“say” [“Cé”]—“way”—“stay”), which suggests
that the pronoun “we” refers to the group of contemporary avant-garde
writers who conceive of every day in a new way. This reference would
then signal a shift of perspective from an external to an internal angle,
and Stein would now be speaking as a member of the group in
question. The text oscillates between distance and proximity, between
objectivity and self-reflection based on Stein’s personal involvement
in the matter. The group of “we” is situated in the present and thus
juxtaposed to “him,” who is referred to in the past tense. This contrast-
ing reading is supported by the verb “to settle,” which means to occupy
a permanent dwelling place, while “to have a place to stay” signifies
some temporary lodging. In sum: “we” are alive and still on the move,
while Cézanne cannot be met because he belongs to the past. He had
died in 1906, and at the time of the creation of the portrait, his claim

162 Ulla Haselstein

 to fame had indeed been settled, and he had been assigned an out-
standing but fixed place in the history of art.
These statements are reiterated in the following sentences.
Engaging in an interior monologue which amounts to a dialogue with
the reader, the speaker recursively reiterates her previous remark and
quotes it to both confirm and revise it: “When I said settled I meant
settled to stay. When I said settled to stay I meant settled to stay Satur-
day.” The supplement in the third repetition of the phrase “settled to
stay” comes as a surprise and retroactively transforms the semantic
architecture of the sentence. “He was settled to stay Saturday” no longer
signifies Cézanne’s immobility, but rather the opposite by indicating
a short rest. Stein’s weekly soirées on the rue de Fleurus (where she
and Alice B. Toklas and her artist friends had a place to stay) took place
on Saturdays. Cézanne, a recluse, who had withdrawn from Paris to
his hometown, Aix-en-Provence, and whom Stein never met, is thus
posthumously integrated into the circle of artists around Stein. It is in
their work that he lives on.
The next sentence seems cryptic at first: “In this way a mouth is
a mouth. In this way if in as a mouth if in as a mouth where, if in as a
mouth where and there.” Again, repetitions and variations are used and
establish a recursive structure by which a statement is confirmed and
at the same time thoroughly revised. “Mouth” can be readily decoded
as a metonym for language and speech. The two sentences performa-
tively elaborate and metatextually theorize the point Stein had just
made by adding the word “Saturday” to a sentence that is otherwise
repeated identically (and had been previously defined as complete by
punctuation). Verbal statements are never identical but change their
meaning subtly or radically with each occurrence; all it takes is shifting
the emphasis, replacing or adding or leaving out a word, framing a
sentence by a conditional conjunction (“if”), or changing the context
of a word (“where and there”).30 But “mouth” can also be used as a
metaphor or a catachresis (e.g., “the mouth of a river”), and this latter
term may cataphorically refer to the noun “water” in the next sentence:
“Believe they have water too.” It is unclear whom the imperative
“believe” addresses. Is it the reader? Or is Stein talking to herself in an
unsignaled interior monologue in which the first-person pronoun is
elided? Perhaps “they” (contemporary writers such as Joyce and
herself) “have water too” because they are, like Cézanne, engaged in
a new mode of (re)presentation.
The enigmatic phrase “they have water too” is repeated as the
beginning of the next sentence and engenders another performative

163 Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of Cézanne

 instance of self-reflection and revision. As the sentence continues, “water”
is semantically connected with “blue” while “too” is reiterated several
times and rhymes with “blue” and with “you,” a (once again ambiguous)
pronoun. “Believe they have that water too and blue when you see blue,
is all blue precious too, is all that that is precious too is all that and they
meant to absolve you.” This is a sentence made up of many internal
rhymes and intersecting rhythms. Its meaning hinges on the segmenta-
tion the reader chooses. But in any event, the color blue is at the center,
a decision of Stein’s that is highly motivated in a portrait of Cézanne since
blue is the dominant color of many of his paintings, and many viewers
have commented on this fact. While Cézanne himself linked his use of
blue to his effort “to give the feeling of air,” 31 most viewers have ascribed
symbolic or atmospheric value to it.32 But to Stein such interpretations
(by an anonymous crowd of “they”) rather appeared as attempts to
“absolve” Cézanne (presumably from the sin of deviating from the norm
of mimesis). “Believe they have that water too and blue when you see
blue” is a complex construction indeed, though its beginning once again
stages the point that was made by the previous sentence. The repetition
is almost identical; but the deictic demonstrative pronoun “that” has
replaced the definite article, the phrase “and blue” has been added, and
the subclause “when you see blue” follows as an afterthought and spells
out the conditions for the truth claim of the main clause. If the pronoun
“they” again refers to “to-day’s” writers, the sentence addresses their
capability to (re)present the visible world as Cézanne could. They have
“that water too” and they have “blue when you see blue”—but of course
they cannot represent blue water visually as a painter can by using color;
they have to use the words “blue” and “water.” The remainder of the
sentence, “is all blue precious too, is all that that is precious too is all that,”
ponders the question of the putative symbolic value of the color blue in
Cézanne’s paintings, with the repetitions/the mirroring/the chiastic
permutations performatively indicating both the intensity and inconclu-
siveness of Stein’s ruminations, and the nature of the problem she is
struggling with: mimesis, imitation, representation as reduplication, the
founding concept of Western aesthetic theory. This reading is supported
by Stein’s “Pictures” lecture quoted above, which Stein used as a frame
for her portrait of Cézanne. There “blue” is discussed as the point of
convergence between visual perception and conventional visual
representation, and as the point of divergence between conventional
representation and Cézanne’s picturing: “what was blue in the landscape
looked blue in the oil painting, and if it did not there still was the oil
painting, the oil painting by Cézanne.”

164 Ulla Haselstein

 The overall strategy of Stein’s portrait of Cézanne reminds one
of Cézanne’s taches with their double function of referentiality and
self-referentiality. But it is also becoming evident that the text possesses
more possibilities to realize such a structure than a painting does. In
the next sentence of the portrait (once again introduced by the deictic
term “in this way”) Cézanne is finally mentioned. “In this way
Cézanne nearly did nearly in this way Cézanne nearly did nearly did
and nearly did.” Because of the elliptic structure of the sentence, it
is unclear what it was that Cézanne did, but because of its grammatical
structure, it is clear that Stein emphasizes both Cézanne’s passionate
effort and his closeness to certain results he, however, did not achieve.
As before, repetitions, mirrorings, and permutations abound and
revolve around the crucial word that is lacking. With the series of
repetitions, Stein may wish to highlight Cézanne’s long struggle with
motifs, such as the Mont Sainte-Victoire, and/or his consistency in
committing himself to his aesthetic project of réalisation. At the same
time, the series of repetitions also stages Stein’s own signature device
as a writer. But what was it that Cézanne “nearly did”? And is what he
nearly did something that Stein in contrast did do? Presumably it is the
step into modernism, which she claimed to have accomplished in
Three Lives because of her encounter with Cézanne’s paintings, when
she grasped Cézanne’s strategy of leaving parts of the canvas unfin-
ished in order to highlight the painting’s materiality and at the same
time make the viewer aware of her imaginative investment in the
painting by her effort of filling in the blanks.
In the next sentences, Stein stages the overwhelming experience
of looking and looking at his work by repeating a phrase that straddles
the border between a statement and an incredulous question by dislodg-
ing the personal pronoun “I” from its usual position in the sentence:
“And was I surprised. Was I very surprised. Was I surprised.” Only with
the fourth attempt is she able to break away from the series and return
to the regular grammatical form of the statement: “I was surprised.”
But she does not explain why she was surprised; she leaves that to be
deduced from the mode of her coming to terms with that experience.
The changing intensities and grammatical forms of this unsettling
surprise correspond to the previous statement: “Cézanne nearly did.”
The symmetry suggests that the text works backward to indicate the
process of recollection and notes the mode of handling the surprise
before mentioning the surprise itself. But the sentence that brings the
normalization of Stein’s state of exception is longer than I just quoted it.
It runs, “I was surprised and in that patient, are you patient when you

165 Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of Cézanne

 find bees.” Stein calls her own statement—that she was surprised and
patient—retroactively into doubt when she adds the rhetorical question.
Cézanne’s paintings obviously piqued her, provoked her to imitate
him and outperform him to do what he only came close to doing.
The final sentences of the portrait are dedicated to a demonstra-
tion of Stein’s achievement by engaging in a playful painting with
words. This is the limit case of the concept of picturing, for Stein does
not produce a picture at all. Instead she refers to paintings by Cézanne
as objects of her desire and admiration, and the reason for desire and
admiration is their staging of picturing. In these final sentences,
many words are semantically interconnected, and there are repetitions
and rhymes, but the meaning is at first entirely opaque: “Bees in a
garden make a specialty of honey and so does honey. Honey and
prayer. Honey and there. There where the grass can grow nearly four
times yearly.” But the group “bees”—“garden”—“honey”—“grass”
suggests an idyllic landscape, perhaps in the South of France, where
it is warm and where grass grows four times a year: the landscape
that Cézanne painted numerous times. As Stein tells the story in
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, at their very first visit to Cézanne’s
gallerist, Vollard, in the fall of 1904, Gertrude and Leo Stein wanted
to buy such a landscape, but Vollard was reluctant and only showed
them some small studies. But the Steins insisted:

They said what they wanted was one of those marvelously

yellow sunny Aix landscapes of which Loeser had several
examples. Once more Vollard went off and this time he
1
came back with a wonderful small green landscape. It was
Paul Cézanne,
La Conduite d’eau
lovely, it covered all the canvas, it did not cost much, and
(The spring house), they bought it.” 33
ca. 1879. Oil on
canvas, 23 5/8 × 19 11/16 in.
The Steins wanted oil paintings; Vollard showed them studies.
(60 × 50 cm).
The Barnes Foundation, They wanted a yellow painting; he gave them a green one—which
Philadelphia, BF129. turned out to be a good thing after all, as it was satisfactory to the as
yet untutored taste of the Steins (it pleased the eye and did not appear
unfinished), and to their limited budget as well. The self-ironical
narrative tone highlights the Steins’ naïveté before Cézanne taught
them to “look.”
The Cézanne portrait’s final sentences probably refer to this
scene, that is, to the painting the Steins bought, to the kind of painting
they would have liked to buy, and to the kind of study Vollard initially
offered them. Figure 1 shows La Conduite d’eau (ca. 1879), which

166 Ulla Haselstein

167 Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of Cézanne
 the Steins bought, and figure 2 shows a watercolor of Mont Sainte-
Victoire from circa 1902–1906 as an example of a “yellow” study Vollard
might have offered them. I include them here as illustrations that
highlight the difference between Cézanne’s picturing and the lessons
Stein drew from it. For “grass” is semantically, metonymically, and
perceptually connected to the word “green,” while “bees” and
“honey” are connected to the word “yellow” (the portrait may have
referred to this scene right from the beginning, since the latent
word “green” connects the final sentence to the first where the “Irish
lady” figures prominently). The memory of the first purchase of a
painting by Cézanne thus serves as an internal frame to the portrait.
With the next two short fragmentary sentences—“Honey and prayer.
Honey and there”—Stein alludes to Cézanne’s collection of sense
impressions of nature, which he condensed in the honey (colors)
of his landscapes (“there”) in order to express his religious reverence
of nature. But since only a text, not a painting, may be said to be taken
into the mouth and tasted (when read aloud), “honey” may also
refer to Stein’s portrait as a sweet concoction made from a collection
of her thoughts about Cézanne’s paintings.
And then there is the color of sound: “there where the grass can
grow nearly four times yearly” contains the words “grass” and “grow,”
whose visualization as “green” is supported by their changing vocals.
The rhyme “nearly”—“yearly” realizes the acoustic materiality of
the words in a harmonious repetition, “sweet airs,” to quote Caliban
(and indeed, the latent word “ear” is realized in both “nearly” and
“yearly”). And with this latter strategy as a cue, the reader can continue
to play with words and colors and discover anagrams in the last
sentence, for the letters that make up the words “grass,” “grow,”
“nearly,” and “yearly” can be rearranged to form the words “green”
and “yellow”—but also “orange” and “grey.”

Literary portraits must work around the problem that they lack the
perceptual concreteness of portrait paintings. Some authors stress
physiognomic details as clues to the interiority of the portrayed person
(relying on physiognomic theories such as Lavater’s or on conventional
semiotics of the face). More often, literary portraits are organized
anecdotally: on the basis of a personal encounter of the portraitist with
the portrayed person, the portraitist recollects impressions of the
other’s face, posture, and demeanor, then moves on to observations

168 Ulla Haselstein

2 of the other’s behavior and speech, and integrates such evidence into
Paul Cézanne,
a general judgment of character or perhaps treats these things as clues
Mont Sainte-Victoire,
ca. 1902–1906. to the invisible interiority of the portrayed person. The subjective
Watercolor and pencil factor is crucial for any literary portrait, as it testifies to the impact of
on paper, 16 3/4 × 21 3/8 in. the portrayed person’s presence on another subject and the way this
(42.5 × 54.2 cm).
presence is given meaning. What is thus at stake in a literary portrait
The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. is the encounter itself—which is communicated to others by one of
Fractional gift of the two persons involved who reveals his or her prejudices, perceptual
Mr. and Mrs. David acumen, impressionability, naïve admiration, or hostility in the
Rockefeller (the donors
retaining a life interest
process. The literary portrait thus prevents the reader from making the
in the remainder). conventional shortcut from text to referential reality. Instead, the
reader is aware of witnessing one person representing the impression
and impact of another person. The subject matter of a literary portrait
is not the portrayed subject but an intersubjective relation between
the portrayed subject and the portraitist; but since it is the portraitist
who attempts to read the character of the other person, the primary
subject of a literary portrait is indeed the portraitist (who may, however,
prefer to efface herself).

169 Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of Cézanne

 Stein never met Cézanne. Her portrait concentrates on
Cézanne’s paintings and her responses to them. The portrait refers to
Cézanne’s paintings as Stein first saw them and as she later learned
to see them, and it is mindful of Cézanne’s aesthetic principles (as she
constructed them), while at the same time presenting Stein’s own
aesthetic principles, which she developed as a consequence of her
“looking and looking” at Cézanne’s paintings. The portrait is thus a
homage to Cézanne—but also a profession of Stein’s artistic self-confi-
dence. It is constructed to render her surprise at the initial encounter
with Cézanne’s paintings, to present her understanding of this surprise,
to demonstrate the consequences of this understanding for her own
work, and to emphasize the difference of the artistic media. The reader
is to tentatively fill the lacunae—to register the figural aspects of words,
to make rhymes and rhythmical patterns audible, to observe repeti-
tions, and to discover anagrams for words signifying different colors—
in order to realize Stein’s indebtedness to Cézanne’s picturing, but
also so as to recognize her moving beyond the limit of picturing as an
artistic goal for literature.

170 Ulla Haselstein

1 Cf. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice 9 Yve-Alain Bois characterized Cézanne’s brush-
B. Toklas (1933; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), 35. strokes as a “musical form of notation.” “Cézanne: Words
and Deeds,” October 84 (1998), 31–43 (quote on p. 39).
2 In later years, Gertrude and Leo Stein gave
different accounts about who made the first purchase 10 Richard Shiff, “Cézanne’s Physicality: The
and when it was made. See note 34 below. One of Politics of Touch,” in The Language of Art History, ed.
Stein's early Portraits, "Monsieur Vollard et Cézanne" Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge
(1912) commemorates the purchase; Cf. Stein, The University Press, 1991), 129–82 (esp. 152ff.). Shiff
Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, 35. The portrait is also discusses the implicit political allegory of “collab-
reprinted in Stein, Portraits and Prayers (New York: oration, reciprocity and social bonding” of Cézanne’s
Random House, 1934) 37–39. paintings but concludes that the “literalness of
Cézanne’s art” resists “the distancing act of interpre-
3 For the collection, cf. Janet Bishop, Cécile tation” (168–69).
Debray, and Rebecca Rabinow, eds., The Steins Collect
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). 11 Ibid., 142.

4 Cf. Leo Stein’s letter to Mabel Dodge, quoted 12 Cf. Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of
in James R. Mellon, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Impressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
Company (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 63–64. 1984), 123.

5 Cf. Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 39. 13 Jules Borély, “Cézanne at Aix,” in Conversations
Stein’s admiration for Cézanne has often been com- with Cézanne, ed. Michael Doran, trans. Julie
mented on; cf., e.g., Jayne L. Walker, The Making of a Lawrence Cochran (Berkeley: University of California
Modernist (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 19–24 (Cézanne quoted on p. 23).
Press, 1984); or Tamar Darb, “To Kill the Nineteenth
Century: Sex and Spectatorship with Gertrude and 14 Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, 213.
Pablo,” in Picasso’s “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon,” ed.
Christopher Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University 15 Cf. William Rubin, “Cézannisme and the
Press, 2001), 55–76. Beginning of Cubism,” in Cézanne: The Late Work, ed.
William Rubin (New York: The Museum of Modern
6 Robert Bartlett Haas, “A Transatlantic Interview,” Art, 1977), 151–202 (quoted material on p. 189).
in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude
Stein (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), 11–35 16 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt”
(quote on pp. 15–16). Stein characterized Picasso’s [1945], in Symbolic Anthropology, ed. Janet L. Dolgin,
cubist painting in exactly the same terms as Cézanne’s David S. Kemnitzer, David M. Schneider (New York:
painting, namely, as a composition in which “each thing Columbia University Press, 1977), 91–105 (quoted
was as important as any other thing.” Gertrude Stein, material on pp. 95–96).
Picasso (1938; New York: Dover, 1984, 12). In a recently
published collection of essays on Cézanne’s reception 17 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception:
in the arts and sciences, Stein is not mentioned: cf. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge,
Torsten Hoffmann, ed., Lehrer ohne Lehre: Zur MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 298.
Rezeption Paul Cézannes in Künsten, Wissenschaften
und Kultur, 1906–2006 (Munich: Fink, 2008). 18 Cf. my analysis of “The Good Anna” in
“A New Kind of Realism: Flaubert and Stein,”
7 Théodore Duret quoted in Richard Shiff, Comparative Literature 61, 4 (2009): 388–99.
“Sensation, Movement, Cézanne,” in Classic Cézanne,
ed. Terence Maloon (Sydney: Art Gallery of New 19 Unpublished notebook, Yale Collection of
South Wales, 1998), 22. American Literature (YCAL).

8 I would like to thank Monika Wagner 20 Cézanne had called himself a primitive, and
(Hamburg), Martin Wagner (Hamburg), and Karin contemporary critics such as Gustave Geffroy, Maurice
Gludovatz (Berlin) for their advice on Cézanne. Denis, and Georges Lecomte defended Cézanne’s

171 Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of Cézanne

primitivism on the grounds of the intensity of his Richard Shiff. “Cézanne’s Blur, Approximating
sensations, or, conversely, on the grounds of the Cézanne,” in Framing France: The Representation of
naïveté of his conceptualization. As a deviation from Landscape in France, 1870–1914, ed. Richard Thomson
academic conventions, Cézanne’s primitivism made (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998),
sense to both the impressionists and the symbolists. Cf. 59–80 (quote on p. 67).
Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, 168–73.
31 Cf. Cézanne to Emile Bernard, Apr. 15, 1904, in
21 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 3.2.147–50. Letters, ed. John Rewald (New York: Hacker Art Books,
1976), 301.
22 Cf. Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,”
The Renaissance (1910; Chicago: Academy, 1977), 32 The German Symbolist poet Rilke was
130–54 (quote on p. 135). The essay was originally particularly eloquent about Cézanne’s use of blue:
published in 1877. cf. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe über Cézanne (1952;
Frankfurt: M: Insel, 1983), 27, 36, 40, 43, 48. William
23 Pater, preface to The Renaissance, xvii–xxv Rubin calls it “the antinaturalist overall blueness,”
(quote on p. xviii). which he links to “the stimmung quality of Symbolist
paintings.” “Cézannisme,” 162.
24 Cf. my analysis in “Tender Buttons: Stein et ses
portraits des choses (1914),” in Carrefour Stieglitz, ed. 33 Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 36.
Jay Bochner and Jean Pierre Montier (Rennes: Presses Leo Stein remembered the purchase of the painting
universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 339–48. differently: he claimed to have bought the painting
by himself (at the suggestion of Bernard Berenson),
25 Stein, “Pictures,” in Lectures in America before he saw Charles Loeser’s collection in the
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 57–90 (quoted material summer of 1904; cf. Leo Stein, Appreciation: Painting,
on pp. 72–73). Poetry, and Prose (1947; Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1996), 155. The different accounts
26 Cf. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “The Sublime and have produced considerable confusion concerning
the Avantgarde,” in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey the date of the purchase and the identity of the
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (1988; Cambridge: painting itself. In his introduction to Leo Stein's
Polity Press, 1991), 89–107. Journey Into the Self, Van Wyck Brooks puts the year
of Leo Stein’s first Cézanne purchase at 1902 (New
27 Stein, “Pictures,” 76–77. Stein regarded York: Crown Publishers, 1950) xi. Jayne L. Walker gives
abstract painting as “pornographic”; cf. Stein, the date as 1904: The Making of a Modernist, 2.
Everybody’s Autobiography (1937; New York: In her biography Sister Brother. Gertrude and Leo Stein
Vintage, 1973), 127. (New York: Putnam’s, 1996) Brenda Wineapple
reconciles the siblings’ diverging accounts by having
28 In the lecture, Stein dropped the first half of the Leo buy Landscape with Spring House in the spring
second paragraph of the portrait so that it begins with of 1903, and Leo and Gertrude buy The Conduit in
the sentence “In this way Cézanne nearly did.” With the fall of 1903 (cf. 210–11). But the two titles refer to
this cut, the portrait focuses on Stein’s first encounter the same painting.
with Cézanne and thus serves as a companion piece to
the lecture.

29 Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative

Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 94.

30 This argument has an equivalent in Cézanne’s

paintings, which he constantly reworked by adding
more dabs of color. Cézanne’s techniques “must have
seemed incomplete by their very nature, because the
suggestion is that more can always be added,” writes

172 Ulla Haselstein