Gertrude Stein was Jewish, American, homosexual and influential when Pablo Picasso was Spanish, communist, immensely gifted but penniless. On paper, everything opposed them. After 90 posing sessions, the Minotaur, having fallen under the spell of this woman with a colossal physique, a glutton for knowledge and a compulsive buyer, nevertheless completed his portrait. The two giants had tamed each other and were ready to develop together, one in painting, the other in writing, the foundations of a new language... More than a century after their artistic and intellectual encounter , the musée du Luxembourg offers a documented approach to the life of the collector in the light of her friendship with Picasso. The exhibition, centered around the heroic years of the Demoiselles d'Avignon, thus connects the paintings of the Spanish master with the texts of the American poet before illuminating the posterity of her work with emblematic pieces by Robert Rauschenberg, Carl Andre or Bruce Naumann. At the end of the tour, the famous polyptych Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century by Andy Warhol on which the face of Gertrude Stein sits alongside that of Einstein, Freud or Kafka, confirms the adage that behind every great man there is a woman...

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