William Rubin argues that Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905-6) is vitally significant because it represents "a crucial leap from a perceptual to a conceptual mode of working." Picasso repainted Stein's face, in an Iberian style, from memory. The likeness can therefore only be conceptual, based not upon close observation and perception, but upon the characteristic aspects of Stein's appearance, those remaining in Picasso's mind, which are more likely to be coterminous with his experience of her personality than are her actual features.
Specifically Cubist portraits follow in this manner. Picasso's Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde (1910) makes no attempt at visual resemblance in the conventional sense. It allows the "linear scaffolding" of the background to invade his face and reduce his features to splintered lines and facetted planes. However, comparison with a photo of Uhde reveals a startling likeness in the portrait. The small, piercing eyes are captured by showing one eye in profile, while his pursed lips are recreated with a few deft strokes of the brush, suggesting a terse personality. In this way the work reveals even more of Uhde's personality than does the photo.
Primitive art was not only instrumental in effecting this preference for conception over perception; it also influenced the manner in which this conception was articulated. It has been argued that primitive art provided the basis for the new treatment of space in Cubist works. The nature of the problem facing Cubists was demonstrated but not solved by Les Demoiselles D' Avignon: that of rendering volume on a flat surface. As already mentioned, Picasso began a period of intense experimentation, the result of which was his invention of the Cubist method, but I would argue that a comparison of his Cubist works with primitive art confounds the belief that Picasso obtained his solution from this source.
