Pablo Picasso's 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein and Willem de Kooning's 1944 painting Woman, are both fascinating in themselves and at least somewhat anomalous in terms of each artist's canon of work, especially in terms of their depictions of women and the human form. The essay examines these two work, after providing a very brief overview of the artists' background.
Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was prolific both in terms of absolute numbers of works - having created more than 20,000 pieces - and in terms of creativity, as an innovator of styles and techniques, as a master of various media, and as one of the most prolific artists in history.
Picasso's genius manifested itself early: at the age of 10 he made his first paintings, and at 15 he performed brilliantly on the entrance examinations to Barcelona's School of Fine Arts. His large academic canvas Science and Charity (1897, Museo Picasso, Barcelona), depicting a doctor, a nun, and a child at a sick woman's bedside, won a gold medal.
Between 1900 and 1902, Picasso made three trips to Paris, finally settling there in 1904. He found the city's bohemian street life fascinating, and his pictures of people in dance halls and cafTs show how he assimilated the postimpressionism of the French painter Paul Gauguin and the symbolist painters called the Nabis. Expressing human misery, the paintings portray blind figures, beggars, alcoholics, and prostitutes, their somewhat elongated bodies reminiscent of works by the Spanish artist El Greco.
Dating from his first decade in Paris are friendships with the poet Max Jacob, the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, the art dealers Ambroise Vollard and Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, and the American expatriate writers Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, who were his first important patrons; Picasso did portraits of them all.
During the period in which Picasso painted his portrait of Gertrude Stein - the summer of 1906 - Picasso had been staying in Gosol,...