Chapter 6 Portraiture After Landscape

Abstract

Voris contends that when Stein resumed writing portraiture during the early 1920s, she did so with a markedly changed method based on the model of knowledge resulting from her landscape writing. Writing “second portraits” of Alice Toklas and of longstanding friends, Carl Van Vechten and Picasso, Stein extends the compositional task of the landscape plays, namely “the problem of time in relation to emotion.” Voris identifies where the new style begins, and in a close reading of “If I Told Him A Completed Portrait Of Picasso,” presents a new interpretation of this well-known portrait that accords with Stein’s radical epistemology. The style of the second portraits is a robust articulation of Stein’s epistemological discovery that in place of representation, knowing may be an expressive dimension distributed and unfolding in composition.