Sometimes people who grow up surrounded by wild and cultivated nature do not notice its beauty: nature is just what has been there—what they drive through to get somewhere else, or what they use in order to achieve some particular goal, such as fishing in a lake for dinner or market—and something out of the ordinary has to develop, some aesthetic sense, some proposed loss, for them to have the appreciation for nature. If someone goes away to college or for work, and then returns, he or she is likely to have the distance to see what has been taken for granted as beautiful or special. (I have found land beautiful for a long time, but then I have both an aesthetic and an alienated sensibility—I can see objects from a distance.) Nature does not stand still in the way a work of art does. Nature changes with the seasons, and one autumn may be very different from another. I was struck recently by the particular green of the grass in a cane field after weeks of first drought then rain—the grass was long, rich, shimmering, and wild, before it was dusted and killed by a plane hired by a farmer, after which it began to yellow and brown. The green had seemed dreamy, and the yellow sickly; and neither seemed quite real, a perception that may suggest how odd the perception of what is natural can be. Often what is considered natural is what is considered mundane, not special or startling; and it is art that encourages us to take a second look and a third and fourth. Contemplation is the door to the sublime. Yet, the green of that field of glowing grass does not quite match the green that could be seen in the detail published by a national newsweekly of a Picasso painting, La Rue-des-Bois, owned by the experimental writer Gertrude Stein (Time, June 6, 2011; pages 49 and 52). Picasso’s trees do not remind me, really, of trees I have seen in New York or Louisiana but I do see his painting and think woods. The color and shapes in the Picasso painting are both abstract and figurative: they evoke plant life but go beyond it. Of course, it is rarely that art is only mirror reflection; usually, it contains both interpretation and style. Stein herself was a stylist of prose, and it was a style that had to be noticed, and yet that style—abstract, musical, and repetitive, a complexity created out of almost confounding simplicities—pointed to realities that were not named by other writers.
I read Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen years ago, a book inspired by twentieth century war, appreciating its personal and social commentary, and also liked her writing on Picasso, and more recently read her “Q.E.D.,” short fiction focused on the relationship among three women. The June 2011 Time magazine article on Gertrude Stein’s art collection (“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Richard Lacayo) shows Picasso’s portrait of Stein—the prophetic depiction of her, that she would grow into—and paintings by Matisse and Juan Gris, some of the works appearing in an exhibit of works, collected in Paris by Stein and her family, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, an exhibit scheduled to travel to Paris and New York. The journalist Lacayo claims that it is better to remember Stein as an art collector rather than a writer, a foolish assertion: it is not necessary to belittle one endeavor in order to praise another. It is important to recall that many things inspire and sustain a writer, and the other arts are usually to be found at the top of that list of things, especially painting, which is frequently not about what to see but about how to see.
Reading Stein’s “Q.E.D.,” what I found striking was how abstract it is, and also how intense, describing the friendship among three women and what seems the romantic entangled of first Helen and Mabel and then Helen and Adele. It is a story written in 1903, and yet here is observation of character, of social setting, of personal obsession: and the things that are not named—sexual possibility, sexual seduction—are the things that seem most clear. It is a lesson to writers who have come later, writers given to describing throbbing and thrusting limbs and members that do not seem connected at all to heart, mind, or spirit. (It is also a lesson for editors and teachers of fiction, who would be inclined to butcher such a story—not understanding the point of its exposition or meditation: it is not only experience that is presented, but dignity that is created and sustained, with transcendence achieved.) Stein knows that what matters only matters because of whom it is happening to: if you have no particular character, and no particular consciousness, what you do—and what is done to you—is little different from animal behavior. It was Stein’s unique perspective that was the key to her seeing what was unique in the work of men such as Matisse and Picasso; she could appreciate the strange.
