Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874-1914 (Gertrude and Leo), and the second with her partner Alice B. Toklas, from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946 (Gertrude and Alice). Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein also cultivated significant relationships with well-known members of the avant garde artistic and literary world.
Biography
Stein was gregarious and had a wealth of friends and modern paintings that attracted many to her Paris salon. Her personality also allowed her to transform her social outlets, by focusing on new friendships, members of the youthful generation of the time. For example, Stein was friends with "up and coming" artists Matisse and Picasso in the early 1900s, writers Thornton Wilder and Ernest Hemingway in the 20s, and with the American GI's in the 40s.
Each period marked Stein's connections with young, and artistic people at the center of contemporary developments and events. Her writing reflects, or in the case of The Autobiography , reflects on each decade.
Gertrude Stein's early life
Gertrude Stein, the youngest of a family of five children, was born in 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, to well-educated German-Jewish immigrant parents. (Stein family portrait) (image of Gertrude at between two and three years old) (four years old) 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 Gertrude was three years old, the Steins moved for business reasons first to Vienna (Stein children in Vienna, with governess and tutor) and then to Paris. Her family returned to America in 1878, settling in Oakland, California, where she attended First Hebrew Congregation of Oakland's Sabbath school..
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, and 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). In 1892 she lived with her uncle David Bachrach. It was in Baltimore that Gertrude met Claribel Cone and Etta Cone who held Saturday evening salons which Gertrude would later emulate in Paris, who shared an appreciation for art and conversation about it, and who modeled a domestic division of labor that Gertrude was later to replicate 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. Under James' supervision, Stein and another student named Leo Solomons conducted experiments on Normal Motor Automatism, a phenomenon hypothesized to occur in people when their attention is split between two simultaneous intelligent activities, like writing and speaking. These experiments bore examples of writing that appeared to represent "stream of consciousness," a psychological theory often attributed to James, which became the term used to describe the style of modernist authors like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In 1934, behavioral psychologist, B.F. Skinner in fact interpreted Stein's notoriously difficult poem, Tender Buttons , as an example of the "normal motor automatism" Stein had written about in the experiment at Radcliffe. According to a letter she wrote in the 1930s, however, Stein had never fully accepted the theory of automatic writing, explaining: "there can be automatic movements, but not automatic writing. Writing for the normal person is too complicated an activity to be indulged in automatically." 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. Hopkins Medical News: The Unknown Gertrude at www.hopkinsmedicine.org
Gertrude and Leo Stein's modern art gallery
Much of Gertrude Stein's fame derives from a private modern art gallery she assembled, from 1904 to 1913, with her brother Leo Stein. The collection quickly commanded a worldwide reputation; the salon, and the social circle that developed around it, provided the inspiration for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Leo Stein's acquaintances and study of modern art provided the seed for the famous Stein art collections. He began with Bernard Berenson, who hosted Gertrude and Leo in his English country house in 1902, and who suggested Paul Cézanne and Ambroise Vollard's art gallery.
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. They spent this windfall at Vollard's Gallery, buying Gauguin's Sunflowers and Three Tahitians , Cézanne's Bathers , and two Renoirs.
The art collection grew and the walls at 27 Rue de Fleurus were continuously rearranged to make way for new acquisitions. In "the first half of 1905" the Steins acquired Cézanne's Portrait of Mme Cézanne and Delacroix's Perseus and Andromeda . 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).
By early 1906, Leo and Gertrude Stein's studio was filled with paintings by Henri Manguin, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Honoré Daumier, Henri Matisse, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Their collection was reflective of two famous art exhibitions that took place during their residence together in Paris, and to which they contributed, either by lending their art, or by patronizing the featured artists. Collecting was a shared interest in Gertrude and Leo's inner circle; their elder brother, Michael, and sister-in-law Sarah (Sally) acquired a large number of Henri Matisse paintings; Gertrude's friends from Baltimore, Claribel and Etta Cone, collected in a similar vein, eventually donating their art collection, virtually intact, to the Baltimore Museum of Art. While numerous artists circulated into the Stein salon, many of these artists were not represented among the paintings on the wall at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Where Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso's works dominated Leo and Gertrude's collection, Sarah Stein's collection focused on Matisse.
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
Among the Picasso circle who frequented the Saturday evenings were: Fernande Olivier (Picasso's mistress), Georges Braque (artist), André Derain (artist), Max Jacob (poet), Guillaume Apollinaire (poet), Marie Laurencin (Apollinaire's mistress and an artist in her own right), Henri Rousseau (painter).
A permanent familial break, and a separation of the art collection, was finalized 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:
After Gertrude's and Leo's households separated in 1914, she continued to collect examples of Picasso's art which had turned to Cubism (Gertrude several years later). At her death, Gertrude's remaining collection focused on the artwork of Picasso and Juan Gris, having sold most of her other pictures.
Paris, 1903-1914
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, an art critic. During this period, Gertrude determined that she was a writer. Her earliest writings focused on retellings of her college experiences. A turning point, was in her critically acclaimed "Three Lives."
- Q.E.D. (written, 1903)
Gertrude completed Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum) on October 24, 1903. (Ibid., pp. 53-58). This piece is more fully discussed later in this article at Relationship with Alice B. Toklas and its precursors
- Fernhurst (written, 1904)
In 1904 Stein began 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). It contains some commentary that suggests Gertrude included in her autobiography when she discussed the "fateful twenty-ninth year" (ibid.) during which:
Mellow observes that, in 1904, 30-year-old Gert
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