American writer and daring collector of avant-garde art since she settled in Paris in 1903. Every Saturday, the cream of the Parisian bohemian scene met in her salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus; from Jean Coctau to Henry Matisse, including Picasso, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Little by little, the walls of the already known Stein Room were covered with a Gauguin, a Picasso, a Delacroix, a Matisse, another Picasso, a Cezanne… Another Picasso! Gertrude especially admired the work of the Malaga-born artist, being one of the first people to perceive the great value that his first paintings already possessed. She also established an intense friendship with the famous Malaga-born painter in which they both painted each other, he with paints and she with words. This is the seed of Portraits, a completely experimental work, much criticized for being impenetrable. Indeed, its repetitive style twists the meaning and deforms the language, exploring new expressive possibilities. The author herself stated that she used a compositional technique of an abstract nature, seeking the correlate in the literature of pictorial cubism. In its pages, Gertrude painted Matisse, Picasso, Braque and Henry James, among others, with cubist words.