Above Roy R. Behrens, Emeritus Professor of Art at the University of Northern Iowa and Independence (Iowa) native has released a new 60-minute online documentary film about Iowa expatriate artist William Edwards Cook, and his close long-term friendship with American writer Gertrude Stein.
Cook: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive
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Gertrude Stein (speaking in the pretended voice of Alice B. Toklas), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933—
[In 1907, Pablo Picasso went back to Spain for the summer] and he came back with some spanish landscapes and one may say that these landscapes…were the beginning of cubism.…
…In these pictures he first emphasized the way of building in spanish villages, the line of the houses not following the landscape but cutting across and into the landscape, becoming undistinguishable in the landscape by cutting across the landscape. It was the principle of the camouflage the guns and the ships in the war. The first year of the war, Picasso and Eve, with whom he was living then, Gertrude Stein and myself, were walking down the boulevard Raspail a cold winter evening.…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 ça, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had. From Cézanne through him they had come to that. His foresight was justified.
