SOURCE: “Gertrude Stein and Cubist Narrative,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 22, No. 4, Winter, 1977, pp. 543–55.

In the following essay, Rose considers Three Lives as a “verbal portrait” in the style of cubist narrative.

“… If it were possible that a movement were lively enough it would exist so completely that it would not be necessary to see it moving against anything to know that it is moving,” writes Gertrude Stein in “Portraits and Repetition” (1935). “That is what we mean by life and in my way I have tried to make portraits of this thing.”¹ She is discussing here her own verbal portraits of the 1920's. But she could just as well be discussing the internal movement of shifting styles in her Three Lives (1908) or the successive juxtapositions of referential ground in Lucy Church Amiably (1931) or the rapid summaries in Ida (1941)—or, for that matter, her lifelong friend Picasso's Cubist portraits...