A story all your own

Abstract

One hundred years ago, in April 1924, Vanity Fair magazine published in its pages the poem “If I Told Him [...]”, in which Gertrude Stein offers a “finished portrait” of her friend Pablo Picasso (Stein, 1924). If on the one hand the text reflects the influence of Cubism and Picasso’s painting in its form, dismembering and restructuring language in a way that resembles the way Cubism decomposes and reconfigures visual perception, on the other hand, it can also be read as a manifesto in which Stein questions the authority of those who can produce “portraits”.