Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
	Gertrude Stein, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1935
Born	February 3, 1874; Allegheny, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	July 27, 1946 (aged 72); Paris, France
Occupation	writer, poet
Nationality	American
Literary movement	Modernist literature

Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American writer who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. She spent most of her life in France. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein from 1874-1914, and the second with Alice B. Toklas from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946. Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein cultivated significant tertiary relationships with ultimately famous members of the avant garde artistic and literary worlds of her time.

Biography

During most of her life, Gertrude lived on the investment income her brother Michael very capably stewarded and invested, after their parents died, leaving Michael and four younger siblings, Gertrude the youngest and in her teens. After the success of her memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in the mid 1930s, Stein became rich in her own right. [1]

Early life

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania [2], near Pittsburgh, the youngest of a family of five children, to well-educated German-Jewish immigrants. Her father, Daniel Stein, was an executive with a railroad, whose prudent investments in streetcar lines and real estate had made the family wealthy. When she was three, the Steins moved for business reasons first to Vienna and then to Paris. She returned to America with her family in 1878, settling in Oakland, California. They would continue to visit Europe periodically on vacation.

In 1888, Amelia Stein (Gertrude's mother) died, and in 1891 Daniel Stein (Gertrude's father) died. Michael Stein (her eldest brother) took over the family business holdings, made wise business decisions and arranged the affairs of his siblings. Michael arranged for Gertrude, and her sister Bertha, to live with their mother's family in Baltimore after the deaths of their parents. (Mellow, 1974, pp. 25-28). It was in Baltimore that Gertrude met Claribel Cone and Etta Cone who modeled the Saturday evening salon which Gertrude would later host in her own right, who shared an appreciation for art and conversation about it, and who modeled a domestic division of labor that Gertrude was later to emulate in her relationship with Alice B. Toklas. (Ibid. pp. 41-42).

Gertrude attended Radcliffe College from 1893-1897, and studied under the psychologist William James, who discovered and encouraged her great capacity for automatic writing, a stream of conscious technique in which the conscious mind is suspended and the unconscious directly evoked. Her studies with James, in psychological experimentation (Mellow, 1947, pp. 31-34), would later resurface in her numerous word portraits. The exaltation of the unconscious mind at the expense of the sophisticated conscious mind was to become an important principle in Stein's work and is manifest in most of her writing. At Radcliffe, she began a lifelong friendship with Mabel Foote Weeks, whose correspondence places much of the progression of Gertrude's life. In 1897, Gertrude spent the summer in Woods Hole, Massachusetts studying embryology at the Marine Biological Laboratory, followed by two years at Johns Hopkins Medical School. In 1901, she left Johns Hopkins without obtaining a degree. [3]

Paris, 1903-1914

Rue de Fleurus (27)

In 1903, Gertrude Stein moved to Paris during the height of artistic creativity gathering in Montparnasse.

From 1903 to 1914 she lived in Paris with her brother Leo, who became an art critic. Gertrude and Leo compiled one of the earliest collections of modern art. They owned early works by Pablo Picasso (who became a friend and painted her portrait, as well as a portrait of her nephew Allan Stein), Henri Matisse, André Derain, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and other young painters. Before World War I, their salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus attracted these and other artists and members of the avant garde, including the poet, dramatist, critic, journalist Guillaume Apollinaire (Kellner, 1988, pp 144-45).

The Gertrude and Leo Stein art collection included many paintings acquired from the Paris art dealer, Ambroise Vollard. Their brother Michael and sister-in-law Sarah (Sally) amassed a large Henri Matisse collection, and Gertrude's friends from Baltimore, Claribel and Etta Cone, collected in a similar vein, eventually donating their collection, virtually intact, to the Baltimore Museum of Art. The collections of the Steins were dispersed by various methods and for various reasons, and over time, as attested in a New York Times reporting of a MOMA exhibition, in an attempt to bring the works back together: The Family Knew What It Liked.

Gertrude and Leo Stein's art collection was reflective of two famous art exhibitions that took place during their residence together at 27 rue de Fleurus, and to which they contributed, either by lending their art, or by patronizing the featured artists. The first, the Paris Autumn Salon of 1905, introduced Fauvism to the Paris art public, to some shock and political cartooning. The second, the Armory Show of 1913, held in New York City, introduced Modern Art to the United States art public, also to some shock and political cartooning.

Leo rented the quarters at 27, Rue de Fleurus, Paris, by April of 1903. Gertrude joined him in the Fall of 1903. (Mellow, 1974, pp.51-53). During this period, Gertrude began friendships with Henri Matisse (about 1905) (Mellow, 1974, p. 82) and with Pablo Picasso (1905) (ibid., p. 85-88 (piecing together conflicting accounts of the first meeting between Picasso and Gertrude)). Gertrude met Mildred Aldrich about 1904, beginning a friendship that lasted to Aldrich's death in 1928. (Kellner, 1988, p. 139-40); Aldrich introduced Gertrude to art patronness Mabel Dodge Luhan (in 1911) (ibid., p. 221) and to the art critic Henry McBride (in 1913) (ibid., p. 225).

Q.E.D. (written, 1903)

Gertrude began and finished Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum) which she signed as complete on October 24, 1903. (Ibid., pp. 53-58). This writing is more fully discussed later in this article at Relationship with Alice B. Toklas and its precursors

Fernhurst (written, 1904)

Stein probably began, in 1904, this fictional account of a scandalous triangular affair involving a dean (M. Carey Thomas) and a faculty member (Mary Gwinn) from Bryn Mawr College and a Harvard graduate (Alfred Hodder). (Mellow, 1974, pp. 65-68). Mellow asserts that Fernhurst "is a decidedly minor and awkward piece of writing." (Ibid, p. 67). However, it contains some commentary that suggests Gertrude included autobiography when she discussed the "fateful twenty-ninth year" (ibid.) during which:

all the forces that have been engaged through the years of childhood, adolescence and youth in confused and ferocious combat range themselves in ordered ranks [and during which] the straight and narrow gateway of maturity, and life which was all uproar and confusion narrows down to form and purpose, and we exchange a great dim possibility for a small hard reality.
...
Also in our American life where there is no coercion in custom and it is our right to change our vocation so often as we have desire and opportunity, it is a common experience that our youth extends through the whole first twenty-nine years of our life and it is not till we reach thirty that we find at last that vocation for which we feel ourselves fit and to which we willingly devote continued labor. (Ibid, p. 67-68)

Mellow observes that, in 1904, 30-year-old Gertrude "had evidently determined that the 'small hard reality' of her life would be writing". (Ibid., p. 68)

The Steins Grow a Modern Art Gallery,1904-1907

Leo Stein's acquaintances and study of modern art provided the seed for the famous Stein art collections. He began with Bernard Berenson (Mellow, 1974, pp. 43-44) who hosted Gertrude and Leo in his English country house in 1902, (ibid., p. 47) and who suggested Cezanne and Ambroise Vollard's art gallery. (Ibid., p.52).

The joint collection of Gertrude and Leo Stein began in late 1904, when Michael Stein announced that their trust account had accumulated a balance of 8,000 francs, a windfall. (Mellow, 1974, p.62). They spent this windfall at Vollard's Gallery, buying Gauguin's Sunflowers and Three Tahitians, Cezanne's Bathers, and two Renoirs. (Ibid.)

The art collection grew and the walls at 27 Rue de Fleurus were continuously rearranged to make way for new acquisitions. (27 Rue de Fleurus, circa 1907). (Gertrude seated near sculpture and framed art (1903-04) (MOMA catalog dates photo at 1905 (MOMA, 1970, p. 53)

The MOMA 1970 catalog pinpoints "the first half of 1905" to the timing of the Stein's acquisition of Cezanne's Portrait of Mme Cezanne and Delacroix's Perseus and Andromeda. (MOMA, 1970, p.26). Shortly after the opening of the Paris Autumn Salon of 1905 (on October 18, 1905), the Steins acquired Matisse's Woman with the Hat and Picasso's Young Girl with Basket of Flowers (lower left). (A color plate of Young Girl with Basket of Flowers, or Jeune fille aux fleurs, appears in Hobhouse, 1975, at 68).

By early 1906 the studio of Leo and Gertrude Stein at 27 Rue de Fleurus, Paris was covered with paintings by Manguin, Bonnard, Picasso, Cezanne, Renoir, Daumier, Matisse, and Toulouse-Lautrec. (Museum of Modern Art, 1970, pp. 88-89 (images of paintings at 27, Rue de Fleurus)).

Three Lives (written, 1905-06)

Among the paintings was a portrait of Madame Cezanne which provided Gertrude with inspiration as she began her career as a writer, and which she credited with her evolving writing style illustrated in her early work, Three Lives:

Gertrude claimed that the stylistic method of [Three Lives] had been influenced by the Cezanne portrait under which she sat writing. The portrait of Madame Cezanne is one of the monumental examples of the artist's method, each exacting, carefully negotiated plane--from the suave reds of the armchair and the gray blues of the sitter's jacket to the vaguely figured wallpaper of the background--having been structured into existence, seeming to fix the subject for all eternity. So it was with Gertrude's repetitive sentences, each one building up, phrase by phrase, the substance of her characters. (Mellow, 1974, p. 71). [(Portrait of Madame Cezanne facing Gertrude's work table).]

She began Three Lives in the spring of 1905, and she finished it the following year. (Mellow, 1974, p. 77).

The Makings of Americans (written, 1906-08)

Gertrude Stein fixed the date for her writing of The Makings of Americans from 1906-1908. Her biographer has uncovered evidence that it began in 1902 and did not end until 1911. (Mellow, 1974, p. 114-22). Stein compared her work to James Joyce's Ulysses and to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Her critics were less enthusiastic about its place in the canon of great literature. (Ibid., p. 122).

Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Others

While numerous artists circled into the Stein salon, many of these artists were not represented among the paintings on the wall at 27 Rue de Fleurus (MOMA, 1970 at 28). Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso's works dominated Leo and Gertrude's collection, and Sarah Stein's collection focused on Matisse. (Ibid.) Contemporaries of Leo and Gertrude, Matisse and Picasso became part of their social circle, and were a part of the early Saturday evenings at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Gertrude attributed the beginnings of the Saturday evening salons to Matisse, as

[m]ore and more frequently, people began dropping by to see the Matisse paintings--and the Cezannes: "Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began.(Mellow, 1974, p. 84).

Among the Picasso circle who frequented the Saturday evenings were: Fernande Oliver (Picasso's mistress), Georges Braque (artist), Andre Derain (artist), Max Jacob (poet), Guillaume Apollinaire (poet), Marie Laurencin (Apollinaire's mistress and an artist in her own right), Henri (Le Douanier) Rousseau (painter) (Mellow, 1974, p. 94-95).

Marking the height of their joint art collecting, Leo and Gertrude held a luncheon honoring the artists they patronized, in late 1906 or early 1907. The records are incomplete, as to the specific date of the luncheon and as to the guest list. (Mellow, 1974, pp. 101-02). Artists who were frequent guests at the Rue de Fleurus at the time, or whose art the Steins had purchased, who would have been considered for the guest list included: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Felix Vallotton, Maurice Denis, Henri Manguin, Alfred Maurer, Georges Braque, Mahonri Young, H. Lyman Saven, Pierre Bonnard. Shortly after this luncheon, Gertrude met Alice B. Toklas. About this time, also, Picasso's art turned toward Cubism, as did Gertrude's writing, developments of which Leo vocally disapproved: "Leo could not accept Cubism as having any permanent value, and his disparagement of Gertrude's writing became more severe as she identified her own aims in literature with those of Picasso in painting" (MOMA, 1970, p. 28).

Alice B. Toklas, 1907

Stein met her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas [4], on September 8 1907 on Alice's first day in Paris, at Sarah and Michael Stein's apartment. (Mellow, 1974, at 107) On meeting Stein, Toklas wrote:

She was a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair. She was dressed in a warm brown corduroy suit. She wore a large round coral brooch and when she talked, very little, or laughed, a good deal, I thought her voice came from this brooch. It was unlike anyone else's voice--deep, full, velvety, like a great contralto's, like two voices.

(Mellow, 1974, at 107-08) (reference from previous edit^[1]).

Shortly thereafter, Gertrude introduced Alice to Pablo Picasso in his studio, where Picasso was at work on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Mellow, 1984, at 109-14). Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was a painting that "marked the beginning of the end of Leo's support for Picasso." (Ibid., at 113).

In 1908, they summered in Fiesole, Italy, Alice staying with Harriet Levy, her companion on the trip from the United States and house mate until Alice moved in with Gertrude and Leo, in 1910. (Ibid., at 122). That summer, Gertrude stayed with Michael & Sarah Stein, their son Allan, and Leo in a villa nearby. (Ibid.) Gertrude and Alice's summer of 1908 is memorialized in images of the two of them in Florence, at the piazza in front of Saint Mark's (ibid.): (1) image); (2) image.

Alice arrived in 1907 with Harriet Levy and Alice maintained living arrangements with Harriet until Alice moved to 27 Rue de Fleurus, in 1910. In a portrait written at the time, Gertrude humorously discussed the complex efforts, involving much letter writing and Victorian niceties, to extricate Harriet from Alice's living arrangements. (Mellow, 1974, at 149-51). In "Harriet", Gertrude considers Harriet's nonexistent plans for the summer, and then her nonexistent plans for the winter:

She said she did not have any plans for the summer. No one was interested in this thing in whether she had any plans for the summer. That is not the complete history of this thing, some were interested in this thing in her not having any plans for the summer .... Some who were not interested in her not having made plans for the summer were interested in her not having made plans for the following winter. She had not made plans for the summer and she had not made plans for the following winter ... There was then coming to be the end of the summer and she was then not answering anything when any one asked her what were her plans for the winter.

(Portraits and Prayers, 1934, at 105-07).

Alice's March 1967 obituary in the New York Times outlines some aspects of her relationship with Gertrude.

The Rousseau Banquet, 1908

Gertrude's version of the Rousseau Banquet of 1908, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas assigned it "legendary status as a symbol of the freewheeling bohemian life of Paris in the decade before World War I." (Mellow, 1974, 139). The banquet, held sometime in 1908 at Picasso's Bateau Lavoir studio, was prompted by Picasso's purchase of a Rousseau painting and gathered together the pre-World War I avante garde, until the wee hours of the morning. (Ibid., at 138). Various, and conflicting, accounts of the banquet exist: Gertrude's, Leo Stein's, Fernande Oliver's, Maurice Raynal's, and Andre Salmon's. (Ibid.) The tales place the famous names in inebriated and compromising positions, and, in a sense, mark a high point in the pre-war years of youthful creativity and dissipation. (Ibid. at 138-44).

Mabel [Ganson Evans] Dodge [Sterne] Luhan, 1911-1913

Mabel Dodge Luhan had a short lived, but eventful, friendship with Gertrude that was a catalyst to Gertrude's renown in the United States. Mabel Dodge attributed the break to an exchange in the autumn of 1912, when over lunch, Gertrude sent her "such a good strong look over the table that it seemed to cut across the air to me in a band of electrified steel--a smile traveling across on it--powerful--Heavens!" (Kellner, 1988, pp. 220-21.) Alice interpreted the look as a flirtation, left the room (ibid., p. 222), prompting Gertrude to follow, and when Gertrude returned, she said, "[Alice] doesn't want to come lunch ... She feels the heat today." (Mellow, 1974, p. 180) Earlier, in 1911, Mildred Aldrich had introduced Gertrude to Mabel Dodge, at 27 Rue de Fleurus, at which time they became immediate admirers. (Kellner, 1998, p. 221). Mabel was enthusiastic about Gertrude's sprawling The Makings of Americans and, at a time when Gertrude had much difficulty selling her writing to publishers, privately published 300 copies of Portrait of Mabel Dodge at Villa Curonia, (ibid.) a copy of which was valued at $25,000 in 2007 (James S. Jaffee Rare Books). Dodge was involved in the publicity and planning of the 69th Armory Show in 1913, "the first avant-garde art exhibition in America." (Ibid.) She also wrote the first critical analysis of Gertrude's writing to appear in America, in "Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose," published in a special March 1913 publication of Arts and Decoration. (Mellow, 1974, at 170). Foreshadowing Gertrude's later critical reception, Mabel wrote in "Speculations":

In Gertrude Stein's writing every word lives and, apart from concept, it is so exquisitely rhythmical and cadenced that if we read it aloud and receive it as pure sound, it is like a kind of sensuous music. Just as one may stop, for once, in a way, before a canvas of Picasso, and, letting one's reason sleep for an instant, may exclaim: "It is a fine pattern!" so, listening to Gertrude Steins' words and forgetting to try to understand what they mean, one submits to their gradual charm.(Ibid)

Carl Van Vechten and Henry McBride, 1913

Carl Van Vechten (music critic for the New York Times and then drama critic for the New York Press), and Henry McBride (art critic for the New York Sun), did much to further Stein's American reputation. (Mellow, 1974, pp. 197, 192). Both had wide-circulation newspaper platforms in which they frequently offered Gertude's name to the public.

Of the art collection at 27 Rue de Fleurus, McBride commented: "in proportion to its size and quality ... [it is] just about the most potent of any that I have ever heard of in history." (Ibid. p. 193). McBride also made the observation that Gertrude "collected geniuses rather than masterpieces. She recognized them a long way off." (Ibid.)

Van Vechten's first writing about Gertrude appeared, before he met her, in the New York Times in the article, Cubist of Letters Writes a New Book. (Mellow, 1974, p. 198). Van Vechten became a life-long friend, and his Stein portraits, many of which are in the public domain, provide images of Gertrude and Alice through the years. (Van Vechten self-portrait with Stein and Toklas (1925)).

Writings, 1908-1914

First Publication in Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work (August 1912)

Gertrude's Matisse and Picasso word portraits appeared in Alfred Stieglitz's August 1912 edition of Camera Work, a special edition devoted to Picasso and Matisse, and represented her very first publication (Kellner, 1988, p. 266). Of this publication, Gertrude said, "[h]e was the first one that ever printed anything that I had done. And you can imagine what that meant to me or to any one." (Ibid.)

Word Portraits (written, 1908-1913)

Gertrude's word portraits apparently began with her portrait of Alice B. Toklas, "a little prose vignette, a kind of happy inspiration that had detached itself from the torrential prose of The Makings of Americans". (Mellow, 1974, p. 129). Gertrude's early efforts at word portraits are catalogued in Mellow, 1974, p. 129-37 and under individual's names in Kellner, 1988. Matisse and Picasso were subjects of early portraits (Mellow, 1974, 154-55, 157-58), later collected and published in Geography and Plays (published 1922) and Portraits and Prayers (published 1934). (Kellner, 1988, pp. 34-35 and 56-57). The Matisse and Picasso portraits were reprinted in MOMA, 1970, pp. 99-102.

Her subjects included many ultimately famouse personages, and her subjects provided an inside view of what she observed in her Saturday salons at 27 Rue de Fleurus: "Ada" (Alice B. Toklas), "Two Women" (The Cone Sisters) (Claribel Cone and Etta Cone), "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" (Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire), "Men" (Hutchins Hapgood, David Edstrom, Maurice Sterne), "Matisse" (1909) (Henri Matisse), "Picasso" (1909) (Pablo Picasso), "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia" (1911) (Mabel Dodge Luhan), and "Guillaume Apollinaire (1913).

Tender Buttons (written, 1912)

Tender Buttons is the best known of Gertrude Stein's hermetic works. (Kellner, 1988, p. 61-62). Its publication in 1914 created a rift between Mabel Dodge Luhan and Gertrude, because Mabel had been working to place it with another publisher. (Mellow, 1974, p. 178). Mabel wrote at length about the bad choice in publishing it with the press Gertrude selected. (Ibid.) Evans wrote Gertrude:

Claire Marie Press ... is absolutely third rate, & in bad odor here, being called for the most part 'decadent" and Broadwayish and that sort of thing. . . . I think it would be a pity to publish with [Claire Marie Press] if it will emphasize the idea in the opinion of the public, that there is something degenerate & effete & decadent about the whole of the cubist movement which they all connect you with, because, hang it all, as long as they don't understand a thing they think all sorts of things. My feeling in this is quite strong.

(Ibid.) Gertrude ignored Mabel's exhortations, and eventually Mabel, and published 1,000 copies of the book, in 1914. (An antiquarian copy was valued at over $1,200 in 2007). Tender Buttons is part of the Gutenberg project which offers a free on-line version: Tender Buttons

Separation of Leo and Gertrude's Art Collection, 1914

After Gertrude's and Leo's households separated in 1914, she kept most of the Picasso paintings the two had collected and later acquired examples of Picasso's Cubist art. (Gertrude several years later). The break occurred in April 1914, when Leo moved to Settignano, Italy, near Florence. The division of their art collection was described in a letter by Leo, in which he stated:

The Cezanne apples have a unique importance to me that nothing can replace. The Picasso landscape is not important in any such sense. We are, as it seems to me on the whole, both so well off now that we needn't repine. The Cezannes had to be divided. I am willing to leave you the Picasso ouvre, as you left me the Renoir, and you can have everything except that. I want to keep the few drawings that I have. This leaves no string for me, it is financially equable either way for estimates are only rough & ready methods, & I'm afraid you'll have to look upon the loss of the apples as an act of God. I have been anxious above all things that each should have in reason all that he wanted, and just as I was glad that Renoir was sufficiently indifferent to you so that you were ready to give them up, so I am glad that Pablo is sufficiently indifferent to me that I am willing to let you have all you want of it.

(Mellow, 1974, at 207-08) (An image of "the Cezanne apples" appears in MOMA, 1970, Plate 19).

World War I

When Britain declared war on Germany in World War I, Stein and Toklas were visiting Alfred North Whitehead in England. They returned to France and, after Stein had been taught to drive by her friend William Edwards Cook, they volunteered to drive supplies to French hospitals; they were later honored by the French government for this work. Stein and Toklas became close friends with writer Natalie Barney, and Stein became friends with wealthy writer and magazine publisher Bryher.

1920s

In the 1920s, her salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus, with walls covered by avant-garde paintings, attracted many of the great writers of the time, including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, and Sherwood Anderson. While she has been credited with coining the term "Lost Generation" for some of these expatriate American writers, at least three versions of the story that led to the phrase are on record, two by Ernest Hemingway and one by Gertrude Stein (Mellow, 1974, pp. 273-74). During the 20s, she became friends with writer Mina Loy, and the two would remain lifelong friends. Extremely charming, eloquent, and cheerful, she had a large circle of friends and tirelessly promoted herself. Her judgments in literature and art were highly influential. She was Ernest Hemingway's mentor, and upon the birth of his son he asked her to be the godmother of his child. In the summer of 1931, Stein advised the young composer and writer Paul Bowles to go to Tangier, where she and Alice had vacationed.

World War II

Prior to World War II she made public her sardonic opinion that Adolf Hitler should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. "I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace ... By suppressing Jews ... he was ending struggle in Germany" (New York Times Magazine, May 6, 1934). Stein was later to comment on Hilter, Mussolini, and Roosevelt: "There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing" (Blackmer 1995).

With the outbreak of World War II, Stein and Toklas moved to a country home that they had rented for many years previously in Bilignin, Ain, in the Rhône-Alpes region. Referred to only as "Americans" by their neighbors, the Jewish Gertrude and Alice escaped persecution probably because of their friendship to Bernard Faÿ, a collaborator with the Vichy regime and connections to the Gestapo. When Faÿ was sentenced to hard labor for life after the war, Gertrude and Alice campaigned for his release. Several years later, Alice would contribute money to Faÿ's escape from prison.

After the war, Gertrude's status in Paris grew when she was visited by many young American soldiers. She died at the age of 72 from stomach cancer in Neuilly-sur-Seine on July 27 1946, and was interred in Paris in the Père Lachaise cemetery.

In one account by Toklas^[2], when Stein was being wheeled into the operating room for surgery on her stomach, she asked Toklas, "What is the answer?" When Toklas did not answer, Stein said, "In that case, what is the question?"

Stein named writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten as her literary executor, and he helped to usher into print works of hers which remained unpublished at the time of her death. A monument to Stein stands on the Upper Terrace of Bryant Park, New York.

Relationship with Alice B. Toklas, and its precursors

Stein is the author of one of the earliest coming out stories Q.E.D. (published in 1950 as Things as They Are), written in 1903 and suppressed by the author. The story, writing during travels after dropping out, is based on a love triangle she joined while studying at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. The triangle was complicated in that Stein was less experienced with the closeted social dynamics of romantic friendship as well as her own sexuality and any moral dilemmas regarding it. Stein maintained at the time that she detested "passion in its many disguised forms". The relationships of Stein's acquaintances Mabel Haynes and Grace Lounsbury ended as Haynes started one with May Bookstaver. Stein fell in love with Bookstaver but was unsuccessful in advancing their relationship. Haynes and Lounsbury later married men. (Blackmer 1995, p.681-686)

Her growing awareness of her sexuality began to interfere with the bourgeois values implicit in her medical studies and would have put her at odds with contemporary feminist theory and opinion and Q.E.D may have assisted her with understanding her scholarly and romantic failure. However, Stein began to accept and define her masculinity through the misogynistic and anti-Semitic ideas of Otto Weininger's Sex and Character (1906). Weininger, though Jewish, considered Jewish men effeminate and women as incapable of selfhood and genius, except for "female homosexuals" who may approximate masculinity. (ibid)

More positive affirmations of Stein's sexuality and gender began with her relationship with Toklas. Ernest Hemingway describes how Alice was Gertrude's 'wife' in that Stein rarely addressed his (Hemingway's) wife, and he treated Alice the same, leaving the two "wives" to chat. Alice was 4'11" tall, and Gertrude was 5'1" (Grahn 1989).

The more affirming portrait "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" is one of the first coming out stories to be published. The piece, like Q.E.D is informed by Stein's growing involvement with a gay and lesbian community (Grahn 1989) though it is based on lesbian partners Maud Hunt Squire and Ethel Mars (Blackmer 1995). The piece contains the word "gay" over one hundred times, perhaps the first published use of the word "gay" in reference to same-sex relationships and those who have them (Blackmer 1995) and as such uninformed readers missed any lesbian content. A similar portrait of gay men begins more obviously with the line "Sometimes men are kissing" but is less well known. (ibid)

Steins work begins, with Tender Buttons, to celebrate lesbian sexuality and abound "highly condensed layers of public and private meanings" created by wordplay including puns on "box", "cow", and in titles such as "tender buttons". (ibid)

Political Views

Gertrude was politically ambiguous, but clear on at least two points: she disapproved of unemployment when she had trouble getting servants (Hobhouse, 1975, p.209), and she had "a general dislike of father figures". (Ibid.) As for the unemployed she said,

'It is curious very curious ... that when there is a great deal of unemployment and misery you can never find anybody to work for you.' 'But that is natural enough ... because if everybody is unemployed everybody loses the habit of work, and work like revolutions is a habit it just naturally is.'

(Ibid., with citations to Gertrude Stein's words in Everybody's Biography). As for father figures, Gertrude's thoughts and deeds demonstrated a bipartisan disrespect for political father figures:

she disliked Trotsky as much as Franco, and Roosevelt as much as either, and she referred to liberals like Blum as 'people with unhappy childhoods'. It was a position that irritated her friends. When William Rogers sent her a packet of American corn seeds and warned her not to give any of the corn to her fascist neighbours in Bilignin, Gertrude returned the gift with a request: 'please send us unpolitical corn.' Why shouldn't she give her friends the corn, she asked, 'why not if the fascists like it and we like the fascists ...'

(Hobhouse, 1975, p. 210, with citation to W.G. Rogers, When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person, Rinehard, New York, 1948).

Artistic Renderings of Gertrude Stein

1906--Pablo Picasso, painting; 1907--Felix Vallotton, painting; 1912--Michael Brenner, sculpture; 1913--Alvin Langdon Coburn, photograph; photograph; 1920--Jacques Lipchitz, sculpture; 1923--Man Ray, photograph (with Alice B. Toklas); photograph (with Joe Davidson); 1923--Jo Davidson, sculpture, photo of Jo Davidson sculpture by Dewitt Ward; 1927--Man Ray, photograph; 1928--Christian Berard, drawing, drawing; 1929--Eugene Berman, Portrait of Gertrude Stein at Bilignin, pen and ink (Mellow, 1974, image insert pp. 340-41); 1930--Pavel Tchelitchew, brush and black ink drawing; 1930's? (n.d.)--Antoinette Champetier De Ribes, sculpture; 1931--George Platt Lynes, photograph; photograph; 1933--Francis Picabia, painting; photograph of painting (Beinecke Library); 1934/1963--Carl Van Vechten 1963 photograph, of a 1963 painting by Richard Banks (artist), of a 1934 photograph by Carl Van Vechten; 1934--Samuel Johnson Woolf, drawing for October 27, 1934 Newsweek; 1935--Pierre Tal-Coat, painting; 1935--Imogen Cunningham, photograph; 1936--Cecil Beaton, photograph; 1938--Cecil Beaton, photograph; 1945--Francesco Riba-Rovira, painting (referenced in Kellner, 1988, p. 242); 1975--Red Grooms, multi-media; 1980--Andy Warhol, painting; 1991--Faith Ringgold, quilt.

Snapshots: Welcome to 27 Rue de Fleurus; Auntie and Alice B. Toklas; small (passport-sized) photos; small (passport-sized) photos; with Alice; with Alice; with Alice and Basket at Bilignin; with Alice (studio portrait); Moving Forward; War's End; MOMA Installation of Picasso Portrait.

Hobhouse, 1975; Kellner, 1988; Mellow, 1974; Stendhal, 1994 (image dating and source authors).

Writings

Stein's writing appears on three different planes: her hermetic works that have gone largely unread, as best illustrated by Stein's The Making of Americans: The Hersland Family; her popularized writing in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which made her famous; and her speech writing and more accessible autobiographical writing of later years, of which Brewsie and Willie is a good example.

After moving to Paris in 1903, she started to write in earnest: novels, plays, stories, libretti and poems. Increasingly, she developed her own highly idiosyncratic, playful, sometimes repetitive and sometimes humorous style. Typical quotes are: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"; "Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle"; about Oakland, "There is no there there"; and "The change of color is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable."

These stream-of-consciousness experiments, rhythmical word-paintings or "portraits", were designed to evoke "the excitingness of pure being" and can be seen as an answer to Cubism, and/or photomontage, in literature. Many of the experimental works such as Tender Buttons have since been interpreted by critics as a feminist reworking of patriarchal language. These works were loved by the avant-garde, but mainstream success initially remained elusive.

Judy Grahn lists the following principles behind Stein's work: 1) Commonality, 2) Essence, 3) Value, 4) Grounding the Continuous present, 5) Play, and 6) Transformation

Though Gertrude collected cubist paintings (primarily by Picasso until she could no longer afford them), the biggest visual or painterly influence on Stein's work is that of Cezanne, specifically in her idea of equality, what Judy Grahn calls commonality, distinguishing from universality or equality: "the whole field of the canvas is important" (p. 8). Rather than a figure/ground relationship, "Stein in her work with words used the entire text as a field in which every element mattered as much as any other." It is a subjective relationship that includes more than one viewpoint, to quote Stein: "The important thing is that you must have deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality."

Grahn ascribes much of the repetition of Stein's work to her search for descriptions of the "bottom nature" of her characters, such as in The Making of Americans where even the narrator's essence is described through the repetition of narrative phrases such as "As I was saying" and "There will be now a history of her". Grahn: "Using the idea of everything belonging to a whole field and mattering equally, as well as each being having an essence of its own, she inevitably wrote patterns rather than linear sequences." (p.13)

Grahn means value in the sense of overall lightness or darkness of a painting. Stein used many Anglo-Saxon words and few Latin-based words: blood instead of sanguine. She also avoided words with "too much association". "One consequence of developing value and essence as the basis of her work, rather than social themes, dramatic imagery or linear plots, is that she developed a remarkable objective voice. To an uncanny degree at times, social judgement is absent in her author's voice, as the reader is left the power to decide how to think and feel about the writing." Grahn continues, "Anxiety, fear and anger are not played upon, and this alone sets her apart from most modern authors. Her work is harmonic and integrative, not alienated; at the same time it is grounded useful, not wistful and fantastic." (p.15)

Stein predominantly used the present tense, "ing", creating a continuous present in her work, which Grahn argues is a consequence of the previous principles, especially commonality and centeredness. Grahn describes play as the granting of autonomy and agency to the readers or audience, "rather than the emotional manipulation that is a characteristic of linear writing, Stein uses play." (p.18) In addition Stein's work is funny, and multilayered, allowing a variety of interpretations and engagements. Lastly Grahn argues that one must "insterstand ... engage with the work, to mix with it in an active engagement, rather than 'figuring it out.' Figure it in." (p.21)

Gertrude Stein wrote in longhand, typically about half an hour per day. Alice B. Toklas would collect the pages, type them up and deal with the publishing and was generally supportive while Leo Stein publicly criticized his sister's work. Indeed, Toklas founded the publisher "Plain Editions" to distribute Stein's work. Today, most manuscripts are kept in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

In 1932, using an accessible style to accommodate the ordinary reading public, she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; the book would become her first best-seller. Despite the title, it was really her own autobiography. She described herself as extremely confident, one might even say arrogant, always convinced that she was a genius. She was disdainful of mundane tasks and Alice Toklas managed everyday affairs.

The style of the autobiography was quite similar to that of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which was actually written by Alice and contains several unusual recipes such as one for Hashish Fudge (also called Alice B. Toklas brownies), submitted by Brion Gysin.

Several of Stein's writings have been set by composers, including Virgil Thomson's operas Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All, and James Tenney's skillful if short setting of Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose as a canon dedicated to Philip Corner, beginning with "a" on an upbeat and continuing so that each repetition shuffles the words, eg. "a/rose is a rose/is a rose is/a rose is a/rose."

Reception

Sherwood Anderson in his public introduction to Stein's 1922 publication of Geography and Plays wrote:

For me the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entirely new recasting of life, in the city of words. Here is one artist who has been able to accept ridicule, who has even forgone the privilege of writing the great American novel, uplifting our English speaking stage, and wearing the bays of the great poets to go live among the little housekeeping words, the swaggering bullying street-corner words, the honest working, money saving words and all the other forgotten and neglected citizens of the sacred and half forgotten city.

In a private letter to his brother Karl, Anderson said,

As for Stein, I do not think her too important. I do think she had an important thing to do, not for the public, but for the artist who happens to work with words as his material.

(Mellow, 1974 at p.260)

F. W. Dupee (1990, p.IX) defines "Steinese" as "gnomic, repetitive, illogical, sparsely puncutated...a scandal and a delight, lending itself equally to derisory parody and fierce denunciation.

Though Stein influenced authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright, as hinted above, her work has often been misunderstood. Composer Constant Lambert (1936) naively compares Stravinsky's choice of "the drabbest and least significant phrases" in L'Histoire du Soldat to Gertrude Stein's in "Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene" (1922), specifically: "[E]veryday they were gay there, they were regularly gay there everyday", of which he contends that the "effect would be equally appreciated by someone with no knowledge of English whatsoever," apparently entirely missing the pun frequently employed by Stein.

James Thurber ridicules Stein saying that,

Anyone who reads at all diversely during these bizarre nineteen twenties cannot escape the conclusion that a number of crazy men and women are writing stuff which remarkably passes for important composition among certain persons who should know better. Stuart P. Sherman, however, refused to be numbered among those who stand in awe and admiration of one of the most eminent of the idiots, Gertrude Stein. He reviews her Geography and Plays in the Aug. 11 issue of the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post and arrives at the conviction that it is a marvellous and painstaking achievement in setting down approximately 80,000 words which mean nothing at all.

(From Collecting Himself, Michael Rosen, ed.)

Selected works

Three Lives (The Grafton Press, 1909)
Tender buttons: objects, food, rooms (1914) online version
An Exercise in Analysis (1917)
A Circular Play (1920)
Geography and Plays (1922)
The Making of Americans: The Hersland Family' (written 1906-1908, published 1934)
Four Saints in Three Acts (libretto, 1929: music by Virgil Thomson, 1934)
Useful Knowledge (1929)
How to Write (1931)
They must. Be Wedded. To Their Wife (1931)
Operas and Plays (1932)
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
Lectures in America (1935)
The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936)
Everybody's Autobiography (1937)
Picasso (1938)
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938)
Paris France (1940)
Ida; a novel (1941)
Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (1943)
Wars I Have Seen (1945)
Reflections on the Atom Bomb (1946) online version
Brewsie and Willie (1946)
The Mother of Us All (libretto, 1946: music by Virgil Thompson 1947)
Last Operas and Plays (1949)
The Things as They Are (written as Q.E.D. in 1903, published 1950)
Patriarchal Poetry (1953)
Alphabets and Birthdays (1957)

Quotations

"I do want to get rich, but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich."
"A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears".
"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense".
"Hemingway, remarks are not literature".
"I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich".
"America is my country, but Paris is my hometown".
"You are all a lost generation".
"It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true".
"A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose".
"To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write".
"Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle".
"There is no there there."
"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."
"I have made it [white electric light] but have I a soul to pay for it."

Tributes

In 2005, playwright/actor Jade Esteban Estrada portrayed Stein in the solo musical ICONS: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol. 1 at Princeton University.
In the 2006 motion picture The Devil Wears Prada, the character Christian Thompson, played by Simon Baker, attributes the statement "America is my country, but Paris is my hometown" to Gertrude Stein.
Famous Scottish rockers, Idlewild, released a single called Roseability in 2000 from the album 100 Broken Windows. In the song, they repeatedly say "Gertrude Stein said that's enough, I know that that's not enough now."
The phrase 'a rose is a rose...' appears in the musical 'Singing in the Rain', when Gene Kelly is receiving elocution lessons to allow him to move from silent films to talkies. He sings it with Donald O'Connor.
In an episode of The X-Files called "Bad Blood," the character Fox Mulder, played by David Duchovny, warns his partner, Dana Scully, played by Gillian Anderson, that if she goes to prison, "your cellmate's nickname is gonna be Large Marge, she's gonna read a lot of Gertrude Stein."
In "La Vie Boheme", a song from the musical Rent, a toast is made to Gertrude Stein.
The Elephant 6 band Olivia Tremor Control mentions Stein in their song "Define a Transparent Dream".
In Anastasia (1997 film), Gertrude Stein is seen in a car singing "Where a rose is a rose!" during a musical number, "Paris Holds The Key to Your Heart".
In The Rutles' song "Another Day," a reference to her is made: "A glass of wine with Gertrude Stein,/I know I'll never share,/but I don't mind. That's just the kind/of cross each man must bear./I'm on my way,/I cannot stay another day."
In the Marvel comic Runaways (comic),one character is named Gertrude Yorkes while her boyfriend's name is Chase Stein.
Loving Repeating is a musical by Stephen Flaherty based on the writings of Gertrude Stein and is unified through a 1934 speech that Stein delivered at the University of Chicago. Stein and Alice B. Toklas are both characters in the eight person show.

References

^ Alice B. Toklas Books and Writers
^ Someone Says Yes to It: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and "The Making of the Americans"; Janet Malcolm; The New Yorker, June 13 & 20, 2005; p.148-165 see p.164 for another description that Toklas gave of Stein's last words: "What is the question and before I could speak she went on--If there is no question then there is no answer".

Blackmer, Corrine E. "Gertrude Stein" in Summers, Claude J. (1995). The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage. ISBN 0805050094.
Grahn, Judy (1989). Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology with essays by Judy Grahn. Freedom, California: The Crossing Press. ISBN 0-89594-380-8.

External links

Allegheny City (Deutschtown), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Birth Placard

Photographic portraits of Gertrude Stein, by Carl Van Vechten, in the public domain

A letter by Alice relating Gertrude's thoughts about Pittsburgh

The World of Gertrude Stein, extensive biography site

Photo Gallery (type "Gertrude Stein" as the search string)

Gertrude Stein Links

The Work of Gertrude Stein by William Carlos Williams

Works by Gertrude Stein at Project Gutenberg

Interview with Paul Bowles on Gertrude Stein

Listening

UbuWeb: Gertrude Stein featuring a reading of If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso and A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson.

Art of the States: Becoming Becoming Gertrude Text-sound piece featuring excerpt from The Making of Americans.

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[1] Alice B. Toklas Books and Writers

[2] Someone Says Yes to It: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and "The Making of the Americans"; Janet Malcolm; The New Yorker, June 13 & 20, 2005; p.148-165 see p.164 for another description that Toklas gave of Stein's last words: "What is the question and before I could speak she went on--If there is no question then there is no answer".

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