Gertude Stein and the Art of Cubism

The Cubist painter renounced the work of artists who drew only what society wanted to view as art. Instead of painting for the appraisers of conventional art, Cubist painters assembled shapes and movement from different angles to create a completely innovative artistic perspective. Like the Cubist artist, Gertrude Stein, a modernist writer of the 20th century, rejected the expectations of a society that required writing to model the speech of the English language just as it required art to model the visions and still life images of everyday situations and experiences. Stein’s writing is often compared to the visual art of modernist painting, such as Duchamp’s work from the 1913 Armory Show, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, in which he uses Cubist techniques.

Duchamp and Stein rely heavily on illusion to move audiences from the constraints of conventional art to a modernist mindset of viewing art for what it is instead of a representation of something else. These two artists accomplish this idea through the speed and rhythm contained in each work, unlikely associations made between the elements of each piece, and the creation of multiplicity and simultaneity within each work.

Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No.2 maintains a constant speed through the illusion of movement. Duchamp used the technique of overlaying phases of the movement of a figure descending a staircase to create angles that do not present a still-life frame of a figure posed in one specific movement, but instead create a scene of constant movement that is not halted within the frame of the painting. Similarly, in Stein’s “Tender Buttons,” she creates a rhythm within the text by overlapping disconnected words and thoughts into separate sections. This technique maintains a stable pace for the reader, although it never moves out of the present moment. Stein’s writing does not contain a past or a future; it maintains a tone and speed that do not move out of the present time. In the section entitled “A Waist,” Stein uses anaphora and begins each of three separate, disconnected thought patterns in the same manner:

A star glide, a single franctic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness.

Object that is in wood. Hold the pine, hold the dark, hold in the rush,

make the bottom.

A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no

reason to say that there was a time.

A woolen object gilded. A country climb is the best disgrace, a couple of

practices an of them in order is so left (1171).

A pattern is maintained within this section that creates the rhythm between the separated thought patterns, but at the same time does not permit the reader to move out of the present, thus forcing the reader to continue moving through the section.

The disconnected thought patterns within Stein’s work are created mainly by the construction of unlikely associations between the words within each phrase, and also between the sections and their corresponding headings. Duchamp’s painting also uses unlikely associations between what is seen initially when glancing at his work, and what the disjointed shapes and angles are meant to represent according to the title of the painting. Stein and Duchamp both place labels on their pieces that initially implant an idea of what the viewer may be intended to see, such as the association between a nude anatomy and Duchamp’s abstract lines and planes and the association between one of Stein’s headings, such as “A Fire,” and the following phrases that lack any conventional association with the heading:

What was the use of a whole time to send and not send if there was to be the kind

of thing that made that come in. A letter was nicely sent (1171).

Stein’s passage lacks any obvious connection to a fire. However, readers may draw conclusions independently and associate the passage and the individual words within the passage to the idea of a fire either literally or figuratively. Stein’s intention, as with Duchamp’s, was to guide audiences to a level of independent thinking which would ultimately lead to the viewing of art as an autonomous interpretation, rather than a conventionally constructed representation of a familiar idea.

Finally, the work of each artist stands alone, provoking the interpretation of the individual through the incorporation of multiplicity and simultaneity. Duchamp includes a multitude of angles and shapes, in various overlapping forms, to create an illusion of an idea formed by each of the painting’s audiences. Those who view the painting are searching for