Trudging through a fierce winter evening in Paris with Alice B. Toklas, Pablo Picasso and Eva (‘Eve’) Gouel, Gertrude Stein witnessed an uncanny encounter between avant-garde aesthetics and military hardware in the darkened streets of Montparnasse. Recounted from Toklas's perspective, Stein illustrated how avant-gardes perceived themselves in relation to technology at the dawn of mechanised total war:

In this famous anecdote, Stein renders Picasso's moment of ‘foresight’ self-consciously in hindsight. In doing so, she establishes artistic vanguards as cultural prophets, on the one hand, but, on the other, also passive bystanders who are overwhelmed by the scale and ferocity of global events along with everyone else. However, the role of technology here is ambiguous: Stein simultaneously includes and excludes its avant-garde witnesses from its systems of production. Technology emerges yet is also defamiliarised by their work. On a proverbial dark and stormy night, technology becomes a cipher for the avant-gardes’ encounter with modernity – a monumental ‘black box’ that mediates and instantiates the potent forces converging in the First World War.

Nevertheless, Stein's carefully staged scene is itself a work of camouflage, remarkable as much for what it conceals as for what it reveals. The ‘big cannon’ arrive suddenly, like infernal apparitions of war, but the setting creates a deeper chronological frame for the encounter. Her reference to ‘the retreat from Moscow’ alludes to the Napoleonic Wars, while the Boulevard Raspail, previously known as the Boulevard D’Enfer [Boulevard of Hell], skirts Cimetière du Montparnasse.