Gertrude, Alice, Andy & More

Andy Warhol did some canvases of camouflage.
These abstract canvases are of a design common today
on everything from bandannas to school notebooks.
The camouflage design, however, has a particular art historical
significance. In her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
Stein recounts an incident involving Pablo Picasso.
The artist was struck by the sight of camouflaged war machines
on the streets of World War I Paris:

All of a sudden down the street came some big cannon,
the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged.
Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C'est nous qui avons fait
ca, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he
was right, he had. From Cezanne through him they had come to
that.

In Warhol's camouflage canvases, the strange confusion and
interpenetration of reality and art come full circle.
From Cubism to camouflage to the walls of the Warhol.

But Warhol and Gertrude Stein have something more
significant in common.
And that is celebrity.
Gertrude was constantly annoyed that people were more
interested in her than in her work.
She craved glory.
Nonetheless, by the first two decades of this century,
her reputation was primarily based on who she was
and where she lived and whom she knew--
rather than upon her literary accomplishments.

James Joyce and T. S. Eliot were her competitors.
She saw herself as Picasso's equal. She was lazy and
difficult and she possessed an enormous ego.
Her biography sadly is littered with broken
relationships, quarrels. But equally with rapprochements.

Her fame, other than that of being at the center of the
art revolution that shook this century, was to have taken the
English language by the throat and given it a good shake--
of being one of those who shook it into our present.

Her meaning is often obscure. Her method often boring.
Explicators of her works mostly never succeed--though they
often flatter themselves that they have. But, like Picasso
and Braque in painting, she, in writing,
ripped the language apart. At the end of her beloved 20th
Century she remains as avant-garde as she was in 1914.

But really, it is her lifelong relationship with Alice B.
Toklas that is the most wonderful thing about her. Very rarely,
I suppose, does such a closeness, such a complexity, such a
symbiosis, exist between two people. Gertrude and Alice. Alice
and Gertrude. Humorous at times. At times shocking. At times
waspish. At times loving.
But, at all times, with one another.

Barry Chad