It was here that she first published her writings, where she was allowed her to be her true self, where she was able to influence the artistic world in countless, far-reaching ways. This is the plaque that hangs on Gertrude Stein's former apartment building. The building Gertrude Stein's apartment was located in. Unassuming on the outside, it looks like most other buildings in Paris, despite having housed such a famous occupant. Another view of the facade of Gertrude Stein's apartment building.
A portrait of Gertrude Stein reclining on a sofa in her Paris apartment, just below a portrait of her painted by Pablo Picasso. Playwright, novelist, poet and art collector, Gertrude Stein embodied many roles during her life. One of the only female members of the Lost Generation, she had an extensive influence on the artists and writers living in Montparnasse during the Interwar period. By looking at her life in Paris, one can see in detail the unique opportunity this bohemian neighborhood offered a woman interested in art and culture.
Gertrude's sales have turned up in all the best places. It is now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. In , in need of money to finance her publishing venture, the Plain Edition of her work, Gertrude parted with the handsome Picasso, "Girl With a Fan," to art dealer Marie Harriman, wife of Ambassador Averell Harriman.
Tracing the itinerary of these and other Stein pictures could keep a full team of curators busy for months. In Baltimore, fortunately, there is a convenient store of former Stein pictures housed in the Cone Collection of the Baltimore Museum. Claribel and Etta Cone were wealthy Baltimore sisters, friends of the steins, whom Gertrude and Leo persuaded to by Picasso drawings whenever that artist was short of funds. The impossibly contorted figure of Matisse's nude occasioned a great deal of bitter debate and ridicule on its American tour.
Irate Chicago art students hanged Matisse in effigy and burned a replica of the painting. The show--which rocked the conservative art establishment--also produced one of the many jokes equating Gertrude Stein with obscurantism and abstract art. The following anonymous poem appeared in The Chicago Tribune:. The painting, a picture of Mme. Matisse in a superabundant hat, had been the scandal of the Salon d'Automne in Alfred Barr has called the purchase "an act of considerable courage and extraordinary discernment.
It also marked, in effect, the beginning of Gertrude's lifetime association with artists of varying degrees of talent and genius. Her relationships with the dozen or more artists who entered and left her life, like her relationships with as many writers, were not always smooth. Character was what interested her, and she had a formidable character of her own.
It often came in conflict with those who surrounded her. Her sense of herself and of her mission, her need for praise, praise, praise to the end--abetted, it would seem, by Alice's Byzantine fondness for intrigue--caused her to ruffle some and banish others. But it was her strength of character which attracted people and which, no doubt, induce the artists of her acquaintance to take her as their subject.
For besides Picasso's unique portrait, Lipschitz and Jo Davidson made sculptures of her, Vallotton, Picabia and number of the lesser lights tried to set down her commanding presence. When she chose to, Gertrude could display a remarkable degree of tact in dealing with the sensibilities of others.
In the early years, when the walls of the atelier had become crowded with the works of younger artists, she and Leo decided to give a luncheon for the painters in their collection. The affair went of so successfully they had to send out twice for more bread. It was only after lunch, as the guests were departing, that Matisse looked back into the atelier and realized that Gertrude had seated each of the artists own picture.
A proof, he jokingly advised her later, that Mlle. Gertrude was very wicked. But that may have been Alice's Byzantine gloss. The friendship with the Matisses was dampened considerably when Gertrude developed a much greater interest in Picasso. It was damaged, almost beyond repair, with the publication of "The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas," in which, among other things, Mme, Matisse was described as having "a long face and a firm large loosely hung mouth like a horse. He observed that it was Mme. Michael Stein, rather than Gertrude and Leo, who had displayed the most perceptive understanding of modern art. There was, at least, some point to his recognition of the less heralded members of the Stein family.
The Michael Steins--Gertrude's elder brother and his wife--were the first avid American collectors of Matisse's work 19 of their early Matisses, a fraction of their collection, were once confiscated in Germany: they had loaned them to an exhibition there just before the outbreak of World War I, and it was only after several years that most of them were retrieved.
It was Michael Stein who managed the family finances and usually advanced the necessary funds when, as often happened, Gertrude and Leo could not come to a meeting of the minds on a single purchase and so decided to buy in pairs. But of the many artists with whom Gertrude was associated, it is with Picasso that her name is most clearly linked. Certainly, the pair was joined in Leo's mind.
On separating from the Rue de Fleurus establishment, Leo delivered himself of the opinion--to a friend- -that Gertrude's writing and Pablo's painting were "the most Godalmighty rubbish that is to be found. In his last year, Leo congratulated himself on having survived both Michael and Gertrude, but he still fretted over the ghost of his sister's greater reputation.
Reviewers of his book, "Appreciation," published in , insisted on manufacturing a feud between them, largely over the question of her discovery and appreciation of Picasso.
A scribbled note amidst his last papers reads: "There is no more quarrel or feud in my relations to Gertrude than in my relations to Picasso. In both cases I have impressions and opinions which are not necessarily in agreement with certain opinions widely prevalent. Both in possession of strong personalities, Picasso and Stein would, during the early years of their friendship, have arguments that lead to periods of estrangement.
But, as Hobhouse records, the artist remained "both morally and financially supported by the Stein family". It was also through the Steins that Picasso became acquainted with Matisse. It was in Matisse's studio, indeed, that Picasso first encountered African sculptures, thereby influencing Picasso's transition from his Rose and Blue periods to his Cubist phase. Picasso introduced Stein to Cubism and she, in turn, played a key role in furthering the movement through her writing.
While many were critical of his early experiments, Stein grasped the significance of what Picasso was on the cusp to achieving. For instance, while there was near universal criticism of his "ugly" prototype Cubist work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , Stein offered support: "in the effort to create the intensity and the struggle to create this intensity, the result always produces a certain ugliness, those who follow can make of this thing a beautiful thing because they know what they are doing, the thing having already been invented, but the inventor because he does not know what he is going to invent inevitably the thing he makes must have its ugliness".
Not known for her modesty, Stein later told Picasso that "there are two geniuses in art today, you in painting and I in literature". Picasso's experiments in Cubism would mark the point at which sister and brother parted ways. Leo could never fully endorse the Cubist style and he became more and more disinterested in modern art. As Hobhouse noted, "the advent of Cubism marked the end of Leo's career as a crusader for the avant-garde in painting", while for Stein it marked her independence as a major player in the art world.
Indeed, Hobhouse argued that "For years she had sat patiently taking a secondary role in the goings-on at the rue de Fleurus. Now she began to tire of his leadership [ A major event in Stein's life occurred in the fall of when her sister-in-law Sally brought Alice Toklas, a woman she had met while on a recent trip to San Francisco, to visit the apartment. The two took an immediate liking to each other and began a romantic relationship that would last the rest of their lives.
Moving in a year later, Toklas supported Stein by transcribing and editing her writing. As her role as a major influencer of modern art was being cemented, Stein's creative writing began to gather momentum with her first, and many believe to be her most important, novel Three Lives published in Three Lives comprised of three short stories exploring the essence of human relationships of which "Melanctha", the story of a young mulatto girl who engages in a doomed affair with a black doctor was singled out for special recommendation by the likes of the famous Harlem Renaissance writer and critic Carl Van Vechten.
Combining both her passions writing and art , a selection of her writings were focused on artists and the art world, the earliest being her series of brief summaries on the life of some of her artist friends which she aptly called "portraits".
Taken with her growing reputation, the art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz featured images from her art collection, accompanied by her written "portraits" of Matisse and Picasso, in a edition of his Camera Work magazine. Another of her American advocates was the art patron Mabel Dodge. Stein's "portraits" had brought her a certain mystique and, for Americans, the excitement and controversy the Armory Show evoked saw the name of Gertrude Stein inextricably linked with the avant-garde and making her the person to meet when in Paris.
Stein was at the very center of the rise of modernity in both art and literature but her new status also brought personal trials. Her relationship with Leo, which had started to disintegrate following her relationship Toklas, was only exacerbated by her love of Cubism, and Leo's dislike of her experimental writing style.
Their relationship came to a permanent end in when he moved out of the apartment after dividing up their art collection with Gertrude of course taking the Picassos. Knowing she could best serve as a supplies driver, in she purchased a car which she named "Auntie" after her Aunt Pauline, because, as Stein reasoned, "[Pauline] always behaved admirably in emergencies and behaved fairly well most times if she was properly flattered". According to Hobhouse, Stein made friends with many of the wounded soldiers and she shared a particular affinity with the American GIs.
She also did all she could to support her artist friends financially and by helping to arrange the sale of Cubist paintings by Auguste Herbin and Juan Gris who was experiencing acute financial hardship and ill health. Following the war, Stein's circle of friends had disintegrated and Cubism had begun to fall out of fashion "it was a changed Paris.
Guillaume Apollinaire was dead" bemoaned Stein. It proved a very difficult period for Stein who did not take to the avant-garde's move towards abstraction, declaring, "the minute painting gets abstract it gets pornographic". After the war, Stein's reputation as a writer continued to grow. Still the person to be seen with in Paris, she began friendships with two icons of American literature, F. Gertrude Stein was born on February 3, , in Allegheny, Pennsylvania.
Stein was an imaginative, influential writer in the 20th century. The daughter of a wealthy merchant, she spent her early years in Europe with her family. The Steins later settled in Oakland, California. While at the college, Stein studied psychology under William James and would remain greatly influenced by his ideas.
She went on to study medicine at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Medical School. In , Stein moved to Paris, France, to be with her brother, Leo, where they began collecting Post-Impressionist paintings, thereby helping several leading artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
She and Leo established a famous literary and artistic salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. Leo moved to Florence, Italy, in , taking many of the paintings with him. Stein remained in Paris with her assistant Alice B.
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