A fierce woman, and a modernist literary pioneer and a leading figure of the pre-World War I art circles in Paris, Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946) established a salon, where some of the leading proponents of modernism in both literature and visual art gathered. Her modernity was embodied not just through the full-time engagement in organizing the salon, and promoting and collecting artworks, but it was also expressed through her radical writing based on her queerness.
The room in her flat that was used as the gallery space was furnished with Renaissance-era furniture and the paintings were positioned along the walls in rows; the space was initially illuminated by gaslight, and shortly prior to World War I, they switched to electric light. her brother Leo Stein visited exhibitions, meeting the artists and talked with critics, and that is how the Stein collection grew. Very often, Stein consulted the celebrated art historian and collector Bernard Berenson.
The first paintings they bought together were amazingly Paul Cézanne‘s Bathers, Paul Gauguin‘s Sunflowers and Three Tahitians, and two by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. By 1906, the Stein siblings owned paintings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Honoré Daumier, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.
I caught it the other day while channel hoping. The familiar Woody Allen opening credits were rolling and I decided to watch it for a fourth time. It seems disingenuous to label a work of art as charming, but Midnight In Paris (2001) has so much charm, so many deft moments, that I felt that I was actually being transported to some magical place. The film is populated with small turns by great actors playing ex-pats and assorted artists, writers and personalities of 1920s Paris. It is an enchantment set in Paris about a family that goes there because of business, and the pair of young people who are engaged to be married who have experiences there that change their lives. It’s about a young writer’s love of Paris, and the illusion people have that a life different from their own would be much better.
The cameos include a perfectly cast Adrien Brody as Salvador Dalí, emphasizing the accent each time he says his name. Also in the cast are my much-adored Corey Stoll as a sexy, young Ernest Hemingway and Kathy Bates as Stein. Bates plays Stein as an Earth-Mother, the no-nonsense, incredibly pragmatic center of the artistic activity of her epoch. Her moments in Midnight In Paris are superb. She embodies Stein as I always imagined her. The entire enterprise is as effervescent as champagne. As a fan of Allen’s films, it is nice to know his work can still intoxicate.
Stein is the sort of author you want people to catch you reading when you are in college. That is how I played it, anyway.
She was a wealthy American art collector and writer who dominated the Paris Avant Garde in the days of Pablo Picasso. She was one of Picasso’s boldest collectors, his only real female friend, and the object of one of his most revolutionary paintings. Picasso’s Portrait Of Gertrude Stein hangs in her apartment in Midnight In Paris.
Stein played herself in her own literary classic The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas, which is not an autobiography at all, but it portrays Stein as seen through the eyes of her lover/partner, Alice B. Toklas.
For me, Stein’s work is exasperating and exhilarating. Her novels, plays, operas, valentines, poems, autobiography, and lectures are challenging to read. She was a revolutionary experimenter with language, French and English. Stein challenged literary tradition. She questioned why stories must have beginnings, middles, and ends. She asked why plays need to have acts of equal length, or why an autobiography must be written only by the person whose life is being told, or why key words need to be repeated in a sentence, or even why they be used only in their usual ways. On the book jacket blurb for one of her tomes, her publisher wrote:
“I do not know what Miss Stein is talking about. I do not even understand the title. That, Miss Stein tells me, is because I am dumb.”
Here is an example, a fragment from the poem If I Told Him A Competed Portrait Of Picasso:
“Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and shutters and so.
And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and
so and
so and also.
Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance,
exactly and resemblance.
For this is so.
Because.”
Stein was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Oakland, California. She studied psychology at Radcliffe College and medicine at Johns Hopkins University, but in 1903, she moved to Paris to be a writer. In 1907, she met the lovely Toklas from San Francisco. Five years later, they moved in together. The couple lived together for nearly four decades, until Stein left this world in 1946.
At their apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus, Stein hosted her famous Saturday night salons that brought together the greats of modern literature and art. Regular participants included Picasso, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, Stephen Rutledge, Henri Rousseau, Paul Bowles, and Henri Matisse. Toklas served as the hostess for the wives, girlfriends, and mistresses of the artists in attendance, who gathered in a separate room.
They were not exactly pretty lipstick lesbians. With her short-cropped hair, Stein challenged the gender stereotypes of her era. Stein’s three year old nephew stated:
“I liked the man alright, but why did the woman have a mustache?”
At a time when polite people never talked about such a thing, Stein and Toklas were an out-of-the closet couple.
Stein died when she was 72 years old, taken by complications from surgery for stomach cancer. When Stein was being wheeled into the operating room, she whispered to Toklas:
“What is the answer?”
Toklas did not reply. Stein then asked:
“In that case, what is the question?”
Stein is buried in Paris in the Père Lachaise Cemetery. After Stein’s demise, Toklas actually did publish her autobiography, What Is Remembered (1963), which abruptly concludes with the death of Stein. Stein’s family swooped in and made claim to the famous apartment and all of the valuable art. Toklas died in poverty when she was 89 years old. She is buried next to Stein. Her name is engraved on the back of Stein’s headstone.
Stein belonged to the first generation of individuals who lived openly gay. She looked at the theme of queerness in her writing; for instance, Steins’ essays were among the first gay revelation stories to be published. Q.E.D. (1903), her first novel, is about romantic affairs involving Stein and her friends Mabel Haynes, Grace Lounsbury, and Mary Bookstaver, between 1897 and 1901. Her books are among those that the radical right-wingers want banned.
In the mid-1930s, Stein returned to the USA after a three-decades-long absence and she was welcomed as a celebrity. She appeared on the covers of magazines and went on a six-month American tour. Stein was an excellent speaker with an ability to dazzle the listeners. She had tea with the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and had partied with Charlie Chaplin.
There is a monument to Stein in Bryant Park, New York City, at which I have often paid my respects.
