Fine Art Friday

In "With a Face Like That..." (Newsweek, May 15), Blake Gropnik writes:

[T]he bromide about great portraits is that they capture “inner lives.” It turns out, however, that you need to have decided beforehand what kind of life has been captured, to be sure of the interiority you’re witnessing.

Fresh from reading this observation, I came upon a Time article about the San Francisco Museum of Art's exhibit "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde." The exhibit includes Pablo Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905-1906), and, with a touch of that ol' synchronicity / serendipity / synthesis, I found myself wondering, What kind of life has been captured?

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art's notes about the work:

When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will."

She will. Heh, heh, heh.