Pablo Picasso walked into an apartment to find Gertrude Stein sitting in a high-backed Renaissance chair with drink in hand and Henri Matisse by her side. This was Paris in the early-1900s. Stein was hosting one of her now-famous Saturday evening salon dinners, and none of them knew it then, but this one would change the future of art.
Matisse was an increasingly popular modern artist at the time. Known for his bold use of color, his friend André Derain once said that for Matisse, “Colors became sticks of dynamite.” Picasso, on the other hand, was relatively unknown. Just a few years before he was reportedly burning his work to keep his room warm. But Stein saw something special in Picasso. She bought most of his early work believing that once more people saw it, they would agree that Picasso was one of the greatest artists this world would ever see.
She was right.
While Picasso and Matisse were somewhat skeptical of each other, the two did interact quite a bit that night. And during their conversation, Matisse showed Picasso a wooden figurine from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo that he had just bought from a curio shop nearby. Picasso was transfixed. The elongated torso and upturned, mask-like face lit a spark of curiosity deep inside.
In the days that followed, Picasso went to the ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadéro and immersed himself in African art. The dramatic masks, totems, and carved figures moved him, and he spent the next nine months working on an eight-foot-tall painting that he called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. This painting features five nude prostitutes in a brothel in Barcelona, and two of them have faces that look just like those African masks he studied. The piece would go on to become the most famous cubist painting in the world.
I wrote about this story in the book.
Not to document the genesis of one of Picasso’s greatest works, but to understand what he and his friends were doing as the world changed beneath their feet. Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo originally assembled the group, which included James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, Matisse, and more. Stein called them The Lost Generation—a collection of creators left disoriented and wandering in the wake of a devastating global pandemic and World War I, which collectively killed more than 90 million people.
The irony is that those lost souls would help future generations find themselves. They invented modern art, and their writing gave people new meaning in war, depression, love, betrayal, and the like. And as we look at their experience in the wake of life’s hardest moments, I suppose we can’t help but think about our own.
I think about Gared O'Donnell.
When I was growing up there was a band called Planes Mistaken for Stars from Peoria, Illinois, and Gared was the singer. And whether it was a basement so hot that the ceilings sweat, an art gallery with a floor ready to collapse, or an aging VFW hall bulging at the seams, Gared and the band’s early shows were a loud and cathartic experience. And their songs were part of the soundtrack of my youth.
I’m telling you about Gared because he was recently diagnosed with stage three esophagus cancer. He’s currently undergoing chemotherapy and working with doctors to try to preserve his voice. When I heard about this, I couldn’t help but think about Stein’s Lost Generation. Because just like them, Gared didn’t quietly resign himself to a bleak new reality when the world changed beneath his feet. Instead, he wrote a song. And then another one, and another after that. Now Gared has written over 80 new songs since the beginning of the year.
It’s incredible to witness, and it really does make you wonder. What transformative work of art is being created in a dark basement right now? Whether it’s a poem in the margins of a notebook, an idea that will become your next favorite book, or the first chord for a song that the world needs the most, we may not see them right now, but there are incredible things being created by people just like us. And in a time when there aren’t many bright spots, at least that’s one.
To the lost generations who leave no song unsung,
Matt
An update on the book.
With special thanks to Madison Johnson for the interior design and Brad Clifford for the cover layout, Work Songs is now with a printer in Grand Rapids, Michigan for a final proof before they start a run of 2,000 hardcover copies. Typically, this process takes 6-8 weeks, so we are waiting for them to confirm their production timeline before setting the release date. It will be November 2020.
Until then, I'll be sitting in a closet studio recording the audiobook. This is certainly a different type of creative process with its own challenges, but I am really enjoying the change of pace. I am eager to incorporate music and other historical audio into mix to add some additional texture.
Lastly, we are working to setup pre-order packages that we will be able to share in the next month. Brad Clifford put together a really great shirt design using the cover art that I am especially excited to show you.
