Our greatest expectations

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 March 1906. 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 Andre? 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 of his generation.

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 Trocade?ro 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.

But this story isn’t about the art; it’s about those dinners.

Following in the tradition of the 18th-century Parisian salons that fueled the Enlightenment, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo had been hosting weekly gatherings for years. There was no formal agenda; they simply brought together people whose work they admired, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, Matisse, and so many more. Stein would call them The Lost Generation—a collection of creators who were left disoriented and wandering in the wake of World War I.

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 much like the African figurine that inspired one of Picasso’s greatest works, these dinners played no small part in the group’s other creations. Hemingway’s conversations with Stein and Sherwood Anderson led him to embrace a writing style in The Sun Also Rises that omits words to create meaning. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final novel, Tender is the Night, is filled with characters inspired by his time at those dinners. These gatherings offer us an important lesson for what and how we create.

When you expect big things to happen, they just might.

Whether it’s Ginsberg and Kerouac at Kenneth Rexroth's apartment, Warhol and Dylan at the Factory, or Stein and Picasso at 27 Rue de Fleurus, salons like these changed our world. And it’s not just that these people were more creative and capable than us. It’s that they had a place that wasn’t only about what is—it was about what could be. And that shared expectation that something big might happen is the real source of genius here.

We’ve known for quite some time that human expectations are powerful. In 1966, a Harvard professor named Robert Rosenthal and an elementary school principal named Lenore Jacobson published results from their now-famous study on how teacher’s expectations shape student performance. Specifically, they found that after teachers were told that 20 percent of their students had unusual potential for intellectual growth, those kids showed greater gains in IQ eight months later. This despite the fact that those “unusually bright” students were really just randomly selected. It was expectations, not IQ, that fueled the rise.

In the time since, many other studies have shown the pow- er of our own expectations and those around us to shape what we believe and achieve. In her 1940 book, Paris France, Stein wrote, “One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.” And that’s what those salons were all about. So, when Picasso walked into Stein’s apartment that spring night in 1906, he likely didn’t just expect to do some drinking or networking with fellow artists; he came prepared for his world to change. And that’s probably why it did.

Most of us don’t have a place where we believe that big things will happen. It’s not part of our social fabric or modern work. We have meetings, happy hours, play dates, sports games, date nights, concerts, camping trips, and the like, but maybe there’s room for one more thing. A night where we gather not to talk about what is, but what could be.

A night defined by our greatest expectations.

This is an excerpt from my last book, Work Songs. If you like words like these, you can subscribe to this newsletter.