User:DeRossitt/Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein

Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein with two shorter stories (also known as G. M. P.) is a book by American writer Gertrude Stein, self-published by Stein in 1933 as part of her Plain Edition project. It contains the story "G. M. P." along with "Many Many Women" and "A Long Gay Book."

Overview
Within a year after finishing The Making of Americans, Stein started writing in a radically new style—fragmented, opaque, and image-rich. She had no fixed idea where this style would take her, but it moved her in new psychic directions. As she used this style in G. M. P., A Long Gay Book, and shorter pieces in the "portrait" genre, something new rose up from her unconscious—an archaic longing for her mother.... [T]he fragmented style ... gave her access to feelings for her mother, feelings that had been entirely obscured in the patricidal scuffle of The Making of Americans.

A Long Gay Book, G. M. P., Tender Buttons, and the shorter pieces Stein wrote in the same period share certain key image-clusters, among them images of dirt and variations of the color red. These images very often have anatomical associations.

In G. M. P., she associates "song" or aural art (possibly her own art) with the mystery of pregnancy: "Sing the song with the pleasure of the incubator."

In G. M. P., Stein unearths a time when her mother had been a powerful and loving presence. Every infant loves its mother intensely, whether or not the feeling is adequately returned; and in G. M. P., Stein reversed a powerful censorship in her own mind when she recovered an awareness of that early love.... the maternal memory was directing her imagination; something was making the memory approachable for the first time

Reception
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