Gertrude Stein was a well known poet as well as a huge proponent of art. Her and her husband spent much of their life collecting and debating art. They accrued a respectable collection of very famous works and opened their home to guests, both invited and un-invited on saturday nights. Stein fell in love with the cubism that was sweeping across the art world about the time that she was writing Tender Buttons. She became infactuated with the work of one artist inparticular, Pablo Picasso. He was known for his fragmented art and wild cubic style that allowed the viewer to interprit his work however they saw fit. Stein seems to draw on this particular style of art and translates it perfectly into her writing style.
Stein takes various objects that seem rather unimportant and give them new life through a confusing jumble of nouns and adjectives. She talks about “A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading. ”(Stein) At first glance these lines are confusing and seem to have no real meaning. Once the reader delves deeper into the meaning the lines can literally be translated into meaning just about whatever the reader feels. The single hurt color could be red, the color of blood or passion. The glass could be filled with red wine and the cousin could be referring to other kinds of glasses or containers.
Even the title Tender Buttons is a source of debate. Some seem to think that the phrase refers to a womans nipples while other believe that she borrowed the title from a French phrase Tendres Boutons which refers to the budding of plants. Many agree that the latter is the more likely of the sources. Just as a new bud from a plant transforms so do Stein’s words and the meaning behind them. Reading one of Stein’s poems is very similar to viewing one of Picasso’s paintings. In various forms of abstraction the poem or painting can have limitless meanings for the viewer. The work literally goes through a metamorphosis that appears differently to different people.
Neither Picasso nor Stein thought of their work as abstract they simply saw a new avenue to get their point across and used it to their advantage. Their goal is to not just paint a pretty picture with their words or paint brush but to create a sensation that the viewer can interprit and react to.
Stein’s work brings together many small and seemingly unimportant pieces that form a larger whole very similar to cubism. Picasso painted many of his cubic works showcasing movements by isolating different parts of the piece just like Stein isolates her words through the use of impropper grammar and punctuation. Both Stein and Picasso question how things around them were conceptualized by everyday people and challenged the ideas by flipping the script and allowing the viewer to put together all the pieces. They both focused on how things were perceived by strangers and those that new the object or subject intimately.
