Alice B. Toklas and Pablo Picasso
Louis XV-style children’s chairs
[1930]
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers

Man Ray
Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein
1922
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers

The children’s chairs designed by Pablo Picasso and embroidered by Alice B. Toklas (Alice is seated in one of the chairs, before it was upholstered with the Picasso-Toklas tapestry, in the 1922 photograph by Man Ray) were not their first collaboration. The beginning of their earlier work, a piece based on the painter’s 1918 watercolor of a guitar, is recounted in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: “I did not think it possible to ask him to draw me something to work but when I told Gertrude Stein, she said alright, I’ll manage. And so one day when he was at the house she said, Pablo, Alice wants to make a tapestry of that little picture and I said I would trace it for her. He looked at her with kindly contempt, if it is done by anybody, he said, it will be done by me. Well, said Gertrude Stein, producing a piece of tapestry canvas, go to it, and he did. And I have been making tapestry of his drawings ever since and they are very successful and go marvelously with old chairs. I have done two small Louis fifteenth chairs in this way. He is kind enough now to make me drawings on my canvas and to colour them for me.”1