Contributor’s Marginalia: Claire Eder on “After Picasso’s ‘Head of a Woman'” by Taneum Bambrick

“Really most of the time one sees only a feature of a person with whom one is, the other features are covered by a hat, by the light, by clothes for sport and everybody is accustomed to complete the whole entirely from their knowledge, but Picasso when he saw an eye, the other one did not exist for him and only the one he saw did exist for him and as a painter, and particularly as a Spanish painter, he was right, one sees what one sees, the rest is a reconstruction from memory and painters have nothing to do with reconstructions, nothing to do with memory, they concern themselves only with visible things and so the cubism of Picasso was an effort to make a picture of these visible things and the result was disconcerting for him and for the others, but what else could he do, a creator can only do one thing, he can only continue, that is all he can do.”

“[A]nd then in 1905 he painted my portrait….
          I posed for him all that winter, eighty times and in the end he painted out the head, he told me that he could not look at me any more and then he left once more for Spain. It was the first time since the blue period and immediately upon his return from Spain he painted in the head without having seen me again and he gave me the picture and I was and I still am satisfied with my portrait, for me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me.”

—Gertrude Stein, Picasso

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I naïvely Googled Picasso’s “Head of a Woman,” hoping to see the artwork that is the title of Taneum Bambrick’s poem, and found that of course there is no one woman, no one head. Picasso produced many paintings and sculptures called “Tête de femme” and it was eerie how the bodyless women changed and repeated themselves through my scroll.

The women’s gazes are direct, though on the same face, one eye might be in profile while the other is facing us. Some women have simplified eyelashes like a line of stitches. Some eyes are gazing calmly with curved lids. Some eyes seem to bulge or emit an energy of excitement, like they are in the middle of a lively conversation.

Some women have crescent moons bisecting their faces. Some women’s noses come off of their faces in a wide shelf. One woman’s nostrils are an infinity symbol. One woman has a hashtag for a mouth.

One woman’s veins are on the outside of her face, and her hair looks like it is made of the lead cames that hold together stained glass.

One woman’s head is the shape of a child’s drawing of a fish.

One woman has a trunk like an elephant and a gray face and a shock of blonde hair.

One woman has clumsy hands like the sharp leaves of a palm.

One woman has striped hair like the headdress of a pharaoh.

I don’t think I know these women, though they fascinate me.

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Is this gaze, with its fixation on a single body part rendered so alive as to be almost grotesque, a look that does violence?

As in Bambrick’s opening: “That night the neighbor’s cat pawed a pigeon down / and tore off one wing.”

To look at something so closely you must wound it? To look at something so closely that you take the part for the whole?

Or is this the only true seeing—how our vision lands on one object or feature and our brain fills in the rest of the scene, image, person? How we are always constructing the reality around us based on isolated plot points of sensory data?¹ Is it more true to focus on the one moment of present-perception and its one, unwhole/incomplete and possibly fractured/dissected/dismembered object?

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The poem shows women as parts: “Across the street—more an alley, the length of my extended / body—I watched a woman’s toes / under a stiff curtain.” The bodies are close enough, almost, to touch, but the observed body is not whole. The woman “mopped to a song / about a girl tearing a flower from her hair. / I think you’re supposed to think a man pinned it there.” In the song (art), the woman rejects the man’s attempt to aestheticize (make art of) her. But there’s something sexy about being art, as the neighbor’s daughter knows: “Her daughter sat in their doorframe. / A boy lighting her lower lip.” The body part isolated, fetishized. “She smoked for the first time. I heard her ask how she looked / holding it.” The girl is the opposite of the song’s subject: she takes the flower for her hair.

Unlike the intimate scenes we observe in the apartment across the street, with sound, light, and bodies so closely involved, we know relatively little about the environment from which the speaker watches, other than that “Whiskey glazed the glasses we kept refilling.” The speaker is with someone else, and at the end of the poem we return to this context: “With you, / I wonder what I should be. Are my hands stitched back? / Is my face completely behind me.” The last sentence end stopped, not even a query, the speaker knows it to be true.

We turn from a dense scene to a blank canvas, where the speaker questions how to be intimate and also be looked at, mediated by one’s own performance of a self as well as another’s inevitably distorted filter. The body parts mentioned are “back,” “behind”: hidden. The speaker wonders if this is what the other wants, this mystery, and whether they must continue to hide. Or the speaker worries that they have inadvertently blocked the other from knowledge of the “true” self—that they’ve failed to show their self as a result of their anxiety over how to present. Or the speaker believes that they can be looked at but never really seen, not the whole—nothing but an assemblage of parts, of moments like cross-sections. Behind it all is the anxiety of a writer: we know we can never fully animate the characters in the scene from the apartment across the street. We have only moments and particulars; we don’t want to misrepresent anyone. But when we are watching, the way that the moments combine and our perceptions stitch together into an insight—this is irresistible. We have to try to capture it.

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Gertrude Stein writes that Picasso’s genius was in his ability to see his subjects in a new way, divorced from memory and associations. His looking was entirely new each time, entirely in the present, and it took each part of an image on its own terms rather than immediately placing it in the context of the whole. But when Picasso paints Stein’s portrait, he does the face completely from memory. And she recognizes the likeness as herself: “The only reproduction of me which is always I, for me.” I don’t understand this paradox—how can an artist’s vision be divorced from what Stein calls “reconstructions from memory” when, as she notes, Picasso rarely used a model? Is the face of Stein’s portrait, and the têtes de femme, a pure product of imagination—meaning, these faces really belong to no one (except the artist)? And how creepy is that?

Maybe the answer is that the creator’s process, of course, relies on a mixture of observation, memory, and imagination. But Picasso took these inputs and used them to recreate, for the viewer, an experience of disjointed perception. The right ear slides off the face, and the mouth is in profile while the eyes and nose are seen head on. It is as if the artist is asking, How well do you really know anyone, when all you see of them is one piece at a time? When really YOU are the one making sense of the pieces? This question is posed to viewers in galleries but also to all art that comes before and after.

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The poem takes place entirely in the past tense, starting with “That night,” until the final lines: “With you, / I wonder what I should be.” Why not narrate the entire poem in present tense, if the action of the poem leads up to this final question? Bambrick creates a rupture between the narrative, a series of remembered images, and what is essentially an ongoing state. We are constantly creating ourselves for others, but we have no control over their visions of us. We have no idea whether the final portrait will represent us to ourselves. There is something erotic about this, imagining the self being imagined. For the neighbor girl, there is the action of posing with the cigarette and then the passivity of letting the boy assemble a picture of you, one that may not be at all who you really are. He zooms in on your pouty lower lip, he remembers movie stars, he sees only the strip of your face that is illuminated by the light pouring out from the window. But as the maimed pigeon of the opening line warns us, the thrill can turn quickly to something darker, when we give others the power to make us. The subject—especially if they occupy a marginalized identity—takes a great risk in being looked at so closely. The art must show the risk, and for Bambrick, this means articulating how the gaze can be obsessive and fracturing. This is the electric space where the poem lives, when memory, imagination, and seeing combine to create something that was there and was not really there, something beyond what was there, something horrific, or grotesque, or sexy, or true, or all of those things.

¹For an account of how our brains process visual information, see this article from The Conversation.