Man Ray, Gertrude Stein and Picasso

Last month a post here about the Man Ray exhibition currently at the National Portrait Gallery in London bemoaned the cost of its catalogue. But subsequently I had the chance to browse a copy bought by a less parsimonious friend (people from South West England are notoriously tight-fisted). I was surprised to read that the picture in the background to a Man Ray photograph of Gertrude Stein with Alice B Toklas (below left) was, according to the catalogue, Picasso’s portrait of Stein.

Surely the picture in this photograph, taken in 1922, is one of Cezanne’s studies of his wife - Madame Cézanne à l'éventail (The Artist's Wife with a Fan), c 1878/88 (above lower right) - which was at that time owned by Stein and is now at the Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection in Zurich? A post here in December 2011 about the exhibition Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso… L’aventure des Stein, then in Paris, juxtaposed Picasso’s Gertrude Stein 1905-6 (below left) with the Man Ray photograph of Stein taken in1924 which has the Picasso in the background. In 1946 Stein left her portrait to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Ah well, I’m sure there are far worse errors in this blog.