Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
INTRODUCTION
“When this you see remember me.”
—Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts, 1927
Gertrude Stein is justly famous for her innovative modern writing, her friendship with Ernest
Hemingway, and her patronage of vanguard painters in Paris, including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
One of America’s most famous expatriates, Stein lived in France from 1903 until her death in 1946. Born
in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, she spent most of her childhood in Oakland while her father supported the
family by investing in San Francisco street cars.
An imposing woman physically, Gertrude Stein was also large in the multiple ways she inhabited and
reconstructed the world. Her reach across the arts was extraordinary. Her own métier was words, and
she experimented radically with language. But she also sought ways to collaborate with other writers,
artists, and composers to reach new audiences. Even those who have never read her writing probably
recognize “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” And Californians from Oakland still bristle when they hear
her well-known observation “There is no there there,” which actually referred to Stein’s childhood home
and neighborhood, not to the city of Oakland.
This exhibition tells five stories about Stein that place her in the larger context of her visual world.
Taking seriously Stein’s repeated insistence that eyes “were more important than ears,” it explores how,
just as Stein loved language, she loved looking. The sensorium of seeing is at the heart of this exhibition.
Story one, Picturing Gertrude, presents images that interpret Stein, who modeled freely for artists. The
second story, Domestic Stein, looks at the lesbian partnership of Stein and Alice B. Toklas, focusing on
their distinctive dress, home décor, hospitality, food, and pets. The Art of Friendship explores Stein’s
relationships and collaborations after World War I with the neoromantics, a circle of international artists
who were young, male, and gay. Celebrity Stein tells of Stein’s triumphant return to the United States in
1934–35, and the last story, Legacies, explores her ongoing presence in contemporary art.
Stein has always evoked passionate responses. She paraded, even celebrated, her contradictions. Her
literary innovations were radical but her political beliefs conservative. She was a lesbian who preferred
the intellectual company of men. She was born and raised a Jew but did not give Judaism a central place
in her public identity. A self-acclaimed genius, she preferred talking to the man in the street rather than
those in power. She was an expatriate who wanted to be famous in her home country. She was beloved
but also feared and disliked. Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories explores this complex and fascinating
woman.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Deborah Kass (American, born 1952)
Let Us Now Praise Famous Women #3, c. 1994–95
Silk-screen ink and acrylic on canvas
Deborah Kass, New York
Kass, one of numerous contemporary artists inspired by Stein, devoted the 1990s to reworking Andy
Warhol’s oeuvre from a Jewish lesbian feminist perspective. Deborah Kass uses photographs of
Gertrude Stein, her family and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, to reveal different facets of the author’s
history and persona. The silk-screen process she employs here mimics Andy Warhol’s technique. The
title of this piece refers to Warhol’s painting Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1963), a “pictobiography”
of Robert Rauschenberg using family photographs. Warhol’s title points back to the 1941 publication,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the collaboration between the photographer Walker Evans and the
poet James Agee. Other examples of artworks by contemporary artists inspired by Stein are on view in
Legacies, the fifth story of the exhibition.
STORY 1: PICTURING GERTRUDE STEIN
“Gertrude Stein was prodigious. Pounds and pounds and pounds piled on her skeleton—not the billowing
kind, but massive, heavy fat. She wore some covering of corduroy or velvet and her crinkly hair was
brushed back and twisted up high behind her jolly, intelligent face. She intellectualized her fat, and her
body seemed to be the large machine that her large nature required to carry it.”
—Mabel Dodge Luhan, American patron of the arts, European Experiences, 1935
Gertrude Stein became one of the most painted, sculpted, and photographed women of the twentieth
century. This story looks at what her portrait images tell about her childhood in an ambitious uppermiddle-class Jewish family, her evolution into the “new American girl,” and her assertive construction of
her first distinctive identity before the First World War: as a bohemian priestess. In portraits after the
war Stein became a domestic matron and remade herself as mannish and lesbian. Artists used the
neoclassical vocabulary then in fashion to portray her as a Roman emperor, a force of nature, and a
fearless tastemaker in international letters. She learned how to co-author a painting or photograph. She
would choose her dress and accessories, and the artist would pose and frame her.
Gertrude Stein’s appearance—her dress, her hair, her physical presence, documented in hundreds of
portraits from childhood to old age—traces her development of a public identity. All together, the
images of her in paint, bronze, and gelatin silver form a serial portrait, narrating her life and mapping
how different artists received her. The portraits of Stein—far more numerous than those of most
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
modern writers—reveal that she liked to pose for artists and understood the power of imagery to shape
her reputation and public identity. She benefited when portraits of her circulated in exhibitions and in
newspapers and magazines, and artists gained because these works testified to their membership in
Stein’s circle.
A. O. Eppler (American, 19th century)
Stein family in California, c. 1880
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
In 1876, Daniel Stein took his young family to Vienna and Paris, where for three years they took
advantage of European tutors and cosmopolitan urban life. This formal studio photograph was taken
after the family returned from Europe and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Simon poses with his
violin and Bertha feigns absorption in a book, mimicking her father, who reads a large volume at a parlor
table. Michael Stein stands protectively beside his mother. Everyone but Gertrude overperforms; she
ignores the doll in her lap to look skeptically at the camera. This elaborately staged photograph registers
Daniel Stein’s determination that his children be perceived as refined and well educated. It would also
have allayed any concerns of the East Coast relatives about the reputed coarseness of the California
frontier.
Bachrach Studio (American, founded 1868–present)
Gertrude Stein, 1903
Gelatin silver print
Theresa Erhman Papers, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, The Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley
Attending Radcliffe College, Harvard’s new sister school, in the 1890s, Gertrude Stein changed her style
of dress to express her independence from late Victorian conventions. Taking cues from other “new girl”
students, she abandoned the one-piece dresses she had worn since childhood and adopted shirtwaists
with mutton sleeves and long skirts, a style that reduced the distance between female and male clothing
and made it difficult to distinguish the wealthy from the working class. Skirts and blouses announced a
woman’s emancipation and a desire for an education equal to that of men. Clothes, Stein learned, are
never neutral but serve as tools to create an identity. This insight guided her choice of unconventional
dress for the rest of her life. This photograph has the hallmarks of the Bachrach studio in Baltimore,
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
founded by David Bachrach, the husband of Stein’s maternal aunt Fanny. The studio became known for
sensitive lighting that rendered sharp detail and a full range of tones from white to black.
Attributed to Bachrach Studio (American, founded 1868–present)
Leo Stein, c. 1903
Platinum print
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Unidentified Artist
Leo, Gertrude, and Michael Stein, courtyard, 27, rue de Fleurus, Paris, c. 1907
Gelatin silver print in a photo album
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
{ STORY 1 | Picturing Gertrude }
The Stein Family
Gertrude Stein, born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, February 3, 1874, was the youngest of five children.
When she was nearly six years old, the family moved to Oakland. By her seventeenth birthday, she was
an orphan. Her mother, Amelia Stein, died in 1888, when Gertrude was fourteen, and her father, Daniel
Stein, died three years later. Michael, the eldest child, became head of the family. He took over his
father’s chief business venture, the Omnibus Railway Company of San Francisco, and was soon involved
in consolidating the city’s public transit systems, making enough money to set up a trust fund for each of
his siblings. Michael married Sarah (Sally) Samuels of San Francisco, and they had one child, Allan Stein.
Gertrude and Leo—bookish, talkative, and argumentative—became each other’s best friend. Leo went
to Harvard and Gertrude followed him, studying at Radcliffe College. Both studied medicine at Johns
Hopkins.
In 1903 Leo and Gertrude, frequent travel companions, began to live together on the left bank in Paris.
Michael and Sarah Stein soon followed them abroad and took up residence nearby, and the four of them
became pioneer collectors of the new expressionist and cubist art coming out of young artists’ studios in
Paris. In 1914 Gertrude and Leo divided their collection, went separate ways, and were estranged for
the rest of their lives. They both stayed in touch with Michael and Sarah Stein, who remained in Paris
until 1935, when they returned to the Bay Area. The two other Stein siblings led more stationary lives;
Simon was a shopkeeper in the San Francisco area and a cable car gripman; he died in 1917. Bertha lived
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
in Baltimore, married, and had a daughter, whom she named Gertrude, and two sons. Alice B. Toklas
and Gertrude became domestic partners in 1910 and lived together in France for the rest of their lives.
Unidentified Artist
Gertrude Stein and family, c. 1904
Gelatin silver print
Theresa Erhman Papers, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, The Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley
After moving to Paris, Gertrude, Leo, Michael, and his wife, Sarah, became patrons of the new art
emerging from artists’ studios. They also began to look like artists, wearing casual dress and jaunty hats
and smoking in public, as Leo Stein does here. Parisian artists found all the Steins—but particularly Leo
and Gertrude—exotically eccentric and American. They had enough money to buy art but did not dress
or live like the French bourgeoisie, choosing to join the bohemian counterculture then forming on Paris’s
Left Bank. In this photograph Leo and Gertrude stand at left, with Allan, their nephew, between them.
Allan’s parents, Sarah and Michael Stein, are at right. Between the two Stein couples is Theresa Ehrman,
who had come from San Francisco to give Allan piano lessons.
{ STORY 1 | Picturing Gertrude }
Bohemian Stein
The portraits in this section depict Gertrude in her earliest years in Paris, when she created a new image
of herself. In 1903 she and her brother Leo set up housekeeping in an apartment and ground floor
atelier at 27, rue de Fleurus, in the sixth arrondissement in Paris. Leo aspired to be a painter and
Gertrude a modern writer. They quickly cast off lingering traces of middle-class gentility and began to
wear garments custom made of corduroy, a fabric usually used for sporting clothes, and open sandals
with thick socks. They became fixtures at exhibitions of modern painting, where their strange garb called
attention to itself, and they visited artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso in their studios,
buying art directly from them as well as from the occasional gallery marketing avant-garde work. The art
community in Paris was not always sure how to respond. In an art review of 1907, the poet Guillaume
Apollinaire wrote about the Steins’ “Delphic” sandals and the “scientific brows” and of the “American
lady who with her brother and a group of her relatives constitutes the most unexpected patronage of
the arts in our time.”
As their purchases of the new art and their passion for it increased, they transformed their atelier from a
library into a picture gallery and began to invite people in the arts to their salon, Saturday evenings at
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
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nine o’clock. The Steins’ gallery at 27, rue de Fleurus, the first privately owned collection of
contemporary art in Paris, attracted visitors from all over the world.
Pablo Picasso (Born Spain, 1881–Died France, 1973)
Leo Stein, 1905
Pen and ink on paper
Mr. and Mrs. Jerome B. Rocherolle
Unidentified Artist
Gertrude Stein, c. 1905
Gelatin silver print
Theresa Erhman Papers, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, The Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley
Félix Edouart Vallotton (Born Switzerland, 1865–Died France, 1925)
Gertrude Stein, 1907
Oil on canvas
Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of
Baltimore, Maryland
The young Pablo Picasso was the first artist to ask Gertrude Stein to sit for a portrait; Félix Vallotton, a
Swiss artist working in Paris, was the second. Both artists were inspired to request a sitting after
Gertrude and her brother Leo had purchased and installed their paintings in the Stein studio. The artists
then gave Gertrude their portraits for the collection, launching a remarkable patron-friend-artist
dynamic that continued for the rest of her life. Picasso set the template for Stein’s prewar bohemian
identity, painting her at three-quarter length, seated, with her luminous head dominating empty space.
(Picasso’s portrait of Stein is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.) Vallotton painted
Stein in the long, unbelted corduroy robe she wore at the salons, accessorizing it with a stickpin at the
neck and a long Chinese chain of lapis and malachite fastened with a coral pin at her waist. In pulling
Stein’s head back from the picture plane and making her robe a monolithic platform for her massive
head and hands, Vallotton rendered her a female Buddha, a fearsome queen. By the late 1920s, his
interpretation of Stein as imperious, remote, and ageless became the common one.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Designed by Michael Stein (American, 1865–1938)
Gertrude Stein’s Stick Pin, c. 1905
Coral set in silver
Collection of Edward M. Burns
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882–1966)
Gertrude Stein, 1913
Gum platinum print
Courtesy of George Eastman House, Bequest of Alvin Langdon Coburn
Coburn, an American living in London, asked Stein to pose for him when he visited Paris. She wore her
most elegant corduroy kimono, with lined sleeves, for her first sitting for an artist-photographer.
Coburn’s best-known photograph from the session fits Picasso’s schema: Stein leans forward from a
high-back chair, her head and hands radiant in the diffused light. Coburn’s portrait is the most youthful
and traditionally beautiful of the bohemian portraits; his model, thirty-nine years old, for once does not
look older than her age, as she did when she was painted. Stein would not sit for another portrait until
some seven years later, after the First World War, and when she did, a new way of being and seeing
Stein emerged.
Henri Manuel (French, 1874–1947)
Gertrude Stein, 1924
Gelatin silver print
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
Henri Manuel (French, 1874–1947)
Gertrude Stein, 1924
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York
After World War I, the atelier at rue de Fleurus became a living room, and Stein became more matronly
in dress, wearing suits, blouses, and long skirts with her trademark sandals. But the corduroy robes were
still in her closet, and when Henri Manuel asked her to pose in 1924, she re-created her former look, a
warmed-over bohemian in her now tidy domestic space. Manuel, whose trade was society portraiture,
photographed Stein at her writing desk, using darkroom magic to make her conventionally beautiful,
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
more like a Jan Vermeer letter writer than the ambitious woman of letters she actually was. He posed
her as a full-length odalisque in a chintz-covered armchair by the fireplace and inscribed the feminine in
the domestic details around her: fresh white flowers and two dancing Tanagra figurines on a chest,
embroidered flowers on the fire screen, and a fireplace ready to be lit. In the 1920s Stein was betterknown among American artists than French ones, and Manuel was the only French photographer who
ever asked Stein to pose for him.
Man Ray (American, 1890–1976)
Gertrude Stein, 1922
Gelatin silver print
Collection Timothy Baum, New York
Man Ray (American, 1890–1976)
Gertrude Stein, c. 1924–25
Gelatin silver print
Collection Timothy Baum, New York
Picturing Gertrude
Running time: 2:18 minutes
Images appear courtesy of: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American
Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT; Theresa Erhman Papers, The
Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; George
Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film; The Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley; Philadelphia Museum of Art; © 2011 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Carl Van Vechten Estate;
The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s; The New York Public Library
Music: “5 Ladies: Alice Toklas” Composed by Virgil ThomsonPerformed By: Philippe Quint, William
Wolfram
Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. www.Naxos.com
Jacques Lipchitz (Born Lithuania, 1891–Died United States, 1973)
Gertrude Stein, cast before 1948 (Original model: 1920)
Bronze
Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of
Baltimore, Maryland
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
A Jewish artist sculpting a Jewish sitter, Lipchitz was warmly empathetic with Stein and attracted to the
austere beauty of her head, large relative to her five-foot-two-inch height. In his memoir he described
his sitter as “a massive inscrutable Buddha.” Lipchitz perfected Stein’s robust head, imposing symmetry
on her features and smoothing her cheeks and forehead. Taking note of her well-defined hairline, as
artists before him had done, he made her face and hair separate entities, the topknot a crown on her
egg-like head. Stein never took much interest in sculpture, and she never took sculptors into her closest
circles of friends. She did, however, write a word portrait about him.
{ STORY 1 | Picturing Gertrude }
Imperial Stein
“I can see her now sitting majestically like a Roman emperor, taking a deep malicious pleasure in the all
but mortal combat she had encouraged among her guests.”
—Bravig Imbs, American novelist and poet
In January 1926, when Stein was 52 years old, she cut off the long hair she had worn for decades and
adopted a distinctive “Julius Caesar” bob, along with a more masculine style of dress, expressing her
lesbian sexuality more publicly. Everyone in her circle took note, and artists began to reconfigure her in
a neoclassical style, posing her in profile, minimizing her hands and body, and emphasizing her new
resemblance to classical male figures of power. Those who feared Stein as a decision maker in the art
world or were discomforted by her strong ego or open sexuality could use neoclassicism to render her
autocratic and dictatorial. Her admirers, however, classicized her imperial head to give her a new regal
authority.
Man Ray (American, 1890–1976)
Gertrude Stein, 1927
Gelatin silver print
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
In the 1920s Stein called Man Ray her “official” photographer. The two were fellow expatriates but not
friends so much as co-dependents; she needed publicity photographs and he needed what he earned by
selling them to the media. When Stein cut her hair in 1926, Man Ray asked to update his images. Stein
slicked her short hair back over her ears and wore makeup and a dark dress with a scarf and pin; Man
Ray played up her gender bending, imaging her as a man in a woman’s body—or conversely, a man in
female drag. He minimized her body and hands and lit her head and profile so that they read as solid
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
and stony, in effect simulating the busts of ancient Roman rulers. When Man Ray asked Stein in 1930 to
pay him for a recent sitting, they parted company. Money had never been part of their exchange.
Carl Van Vechten
Gertrude Stein, 1934
Gelatin silver print
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of John Mark Lutz, 1965
In focusing his lens on the severe hairline at the back of Stein’s head, Carl Van Vechten expressed the
public’s fascination with her coiffeur. Although it was not strange to see a young woman with bobbed
hair in the years between the wars, it was rare to see such a radical cut on a woman over fifty. Stein,
moreover, wore blouses, vests, and skirts, often made of heavy fabric, with her bob, not the flapper
dresses or pajama-style pants favored by young women. (Stein never wore trousers.) By combining her
imperial cut with a tweed vest—or as here, a plain velvet gown—Stein made her self-fashioning
distinctive. Artists, friends, and journalists strained to describe her late-life appearance, commonly
falling back on analogies to classical sculpture, in particular, busts of Julius Caesar.
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964)
Gertrude Stein, 1934
Gelatin silver print
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.) 2005.27.4434
René Pierre Tal-Coat (French, 1905–1985)
Gertrude Stein, c. 1935–36
Graphite on wove paper
Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of
Baltimore, Maryland
Pavel Fyodorovitch Tchelitchew (Born Moscow, 1898–Died Rome, 1957)
Gertrude Stein, c. 1931
Pen, brush, and sepia on paper
William Kelly Simpson
Tchelitchew, a Russian painter living in Paris, did a series of drawings of Stein as a portly and despotic
Roman emperor. He dramatized her girth, put her in a tunic and toga, and pictured her Caesarian head
as if separate from her body. His metaphor of decapitation vividly captures what he took to be her
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
tyrannical power to make and break artists’ careers. In one drawing, he placed her left hand over a
globe, the world of art. Tchelitchew was angry with Stein because, after visiting his studio, buying work
by him, calling him the leader of the neoromantics, and entertaining him and his partner at her summer
home, she had dropped him. It took the artist years to get over his hurt, but in 1951, five years after her
death, he gave a lecture at Yale about her importance in the history of modern art.
Louis Marcoussis (Born Warsaw, 1878–DiedFrance, 1941)
Avant la letter (Portrait of Gertrude Stein), c. 1927
Drypoint engraving, edition 8/10
Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections
Sir Cecil Beaton (British, 1904–1980)
Gertrude Stein, 1937
Gelatin silver print
ARTnews Collection
Jo Davidson (American, 1883–1952)
Gertrude Stein, Original model c. 1922 (cast date unknown)
Bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Maury P. Leibovitz
Davidson, an American sculptor who specialized in realist portraits of public figures, lived in France for
most of his adult life. Although his portraits were usually bust-length works, seeing the Picasso and
Vallotton portraits of Stein may have inspired him to use the same three-quarter view of her in a life-size
sculpture-in-the-round. Unlike the painters, however, Davidson gave Stein the plump, plain body of a
grandmother, with a bustline and waist, and he dressed her in a skirt and blouse, cuffs with buttons, and
a scarf with a pin. Stein sits comfortably in real space, eyes cast downward, relaxed and approachable.
Accustomed to being compared to Buddha, she once said that Davidson made her “look like the goddess
of pregnancy.” Davidson cast his clay model of Stein once in terra-cotta and then in a small edition of
bronzes.
Peggy Bacon (American, 1895–1987)
Gertrude Stein, 1935
Charcoal on paper
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
The American painter Peggy Bacon made this blunt super-size drawing to run in New Republic magazine
when Stein was touring the States and gathering a lot of publicity. Well known in New York circles for
her artistic sense of humor, Bacon worked from photographs, not from life, and from Stein’s
international reputation, as masculine and statesmanlike. Using the imperial vocabulary that had first
been created and popularized in France, Bacon gave Stein a jowly male head with close-cropped hair.
But then she moved into caricature, adding a swath of fabric and a brooch to Stein’s neckline. This “he”
is really a “she,” the drawing titters. Bacon was one of only five women, all Americans, who made
portraits of Stein. Three were photographers and two, painters. Only one of them—the journalist
photographer Thérèse Bonney—knew Stein personally.
Man Ray (American, 1890–1976)
Gertrude Stein posing for Jo Davidson, c. 1922
Gelatin silver print
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Unidentified Artist
Alice B. Toklas, Date unknown
Gelatin silver print
Collection Timothy Baum, New York
Toklas looks, doe-eyed, straight into the camera. Given the small size of the photograph and her direct
gaze, this may be her passport photograph of 1907. The close-fitting hat with a jagged silhouette and
the tailored jacket Toklas wears hint at what will become Alice’s mode—not the stylishness of high
fashion but a crisp, clean personal aesthetic that incorporated, as here in her strange hat, details that
are frilly or unusual.
Arnold Genthe (Born Prussia, 1869–Died United States, 1942)
Alice B. Toklas, c. 1906
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
When Toklas was approaching her thirtieth birthday, she sat for a portrait by Arnold Genthe, a San
Francisco pictorialist photographer known for transforming his sitters into sensitive, poetic souls. Toklas
wore a mandarin jacket she had bought in San Francisco’s Chinatown and let down her long hair, a selfconscious artiness and exoticism that register her desire to expand her universe as she prepared for her
trip to Paris. Using the conventions popularized by the Pre-Raphaelites and James McNeill Whistler for
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
orientalizing women, Genthe posed Toklas against a curtain, her eyes cast down, dramatizing her
handsome Semitic profile. The portrait reveals aspects of Toklas that are often overlooked: her deep
sympathy for the arts and her enjoyment of dressing with a touch of drama. In her youth, she was a
talented pianist, but in the end she made Stein, rather than music, her career.
{ STORY 2 | Domestic Stein }
Alice
“A very small dark woman with long earrings, looking like a gypsy.”
—Man Ray, American artist, 1922
Alice Babette Toklas enjoyed a comfortable childhood in San Francisco but spent her late teens caring
for her sick mother. After her mother’s death, in 1897, she was left to manage her family’s household
and raise her ten-year-old brother. The housekeeping skills Toklas acquired would prove invaluable
when she managed, with great style and mastery, her domestic life with Stein.
At age thirty, Toklas traveled to Paris from San Francisco with her next door neighbor Harriet Levy for a
planned year-long stay. In the fall of 1907 Toklas and Levy, like other young Jewish women from the San
Francisco Bay Area who visited Paris, looked up the Steins, with whom they both had connections. At
first Gertrude was not taken with Alice, but by the summer of 1908 they were in love. Soon, Alice was
accompanying Gertrude on daily walks, typing her manuscripts, and cooking American-style dinners
when Gertrude’s cook had her night off. Stein, Toklas, and Levy were caught up in a complex
entanglement until 1910, when Levy returned to San Francisco and Toklas moved in to 27, rue de
Fleurus, the home Stein shared with her brother Leo.
Privately, the two women spoke of themselves as married and called each other husband and wife,
dividing up chores along traditional gender lines. Toklas, the homemaker, preferred to stay in the
background as much as Stein sought the limelight. They lived together until Stein’s death in 1946. During
her twenty years of widowhood, Toklas came into more public view, publishing two cookbooks and
essays about fashion. She lived to be 89 and died in 1967.
Man Ray (American, 1890–1976)
Alice B. Toklas, 1922 (printed 2011)
Modern print from original negative
Courtesy of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Man Ray, who had just arrived in Paris, came to 27, rue de Fleurus to see the collection and make
portraits of Gertrude that he might sell to the media. His decision to make a portrait of Toklas that day
was most likely spontaneous, perhaps a response to Gertrude’s wishes. (He also photographed Gertrude
with Alice in his studio.) Toklas must have served tea, as she did every afternoon, and Man Ray put the
silver tea service and a cup in the foreground and framed Toklas’s upper body with the tall candles on
Stein’s writing table, where food was served. Over the next eight years, Man Ray photographed
Gertrude several times, but not Alice. Toklas in general stayed out of the reach of the camera except
when Cecil Beaton or Carl Van Vechten was behind it.
Pavel Fyodorovitch Tchelitchew (Born Moscow, 1898–Died Rome, 1957)
Alice B. Toklas, c. 1926–28
Gouache on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Young artists like Tchelitchew were immediately drawn to Gertrude but warmed more slowly to Alice,
who was less visible and forthcoming. But many came to appreciate Alice’s quick tongue, sense of
humor, and housekeeping skills, especially her needlework and cuisine. They wrote and spoke of their
lingering memories of the two women at leisure, Alice bent over her sewing and Gertrude over a book.
Here Alice, with her conspicuously overstated bangs and flowery blue dress, bends over her handwork.
Eugene Berman (Born Russia, 1899–Died Italy, 1972)
Alice B. Toklas, c. 1930
India ink on paper
Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections
STORY 2: DOMESTIC STEIN
“Each room is as satisfying as the solution of a mathematical problem. . .There is nothing to offend the
eye. . .The food is the best . . . for Alice . . .watches her cook with a rapier eye.”
—Sir Cecil Beaton, British photographer, 1939
Gertrude Stein and her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas, created a life filled with distinctive styles of
dress, home décor, and entertaining. Home was central to Stein: she did all of her writing there. And
there, surrounded by her collection, she also entertained guests. As a daily matter she walked in her
neighborhood; she did not sit in cafés and never used the metro. She traveled little except in summer,
when she sought the countryside in Italy and Spain, and later in the south of France. She often said that
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
her set routines and stability at home made possible her radical contributions to literature and the arts.
Stein’s partnership with Alice B. Toklas, from 1910 until her death, in 1946, was key to her tranquil and
comfortable domestic life. This story recounts how these women met and fashioned themselves as a
couple with deep ties to their shared homes.
Over the years, they set up house at two different addresses in Paris and established a country house in
Bilignin, near Aix-les-Bains, in southeast France. Together they devised an aesthetic of home décor,
food, and dress. After World War I they abandoned their early bohemian casualness for more elegant
living spaces and styles of entertaining. On travels and on walks in Paris, they bought antiques and
bibelots and continually arranged, rearranged, and updated the furnishings of their homes. Alice made
food central to the day’s many pleasures, taking charge of the kitchen and its sequence of cooks and
overseeing the creation of imaginative Franco-American meals and elaborate teatimes. A talented
seamstress with a keen eye for fabric and design, Alice also outfitted herself and Stein over the years
with considerable panache. Their style of dress—mannish for Stein and ultrafeminine for Toklas—gave
them a distinctive look as a lesbian couple.
Unidentified Artist
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Venice, Italy, 1910
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
An unknown photographer made this tourist memento of Stein and Toklas feeding pigeons on Piazza
San Marco in Venice. The image commemorated a special occasion and in it they were pictured together
for the first time without accompanying relatives or friends. In the summer of 1910, while the two
women were living with Leo Stein in Fiesole, Italy, they received word that Harriet Levy, Toklas’s Parisian
roommate, was returning to San Francisco, freeing Toklas to move into 27, rue de Fleurus. To celebrate
their good fortune, Stein and Toklas went to Venice for a few days and posed in their summer hats for
what was, in a manner of speaking, a wedding photograph. Stein and Toklas adopt here the gendered
poses they performed for the rest of their lives: Gertrude dominant in the composition and Alice
modestly behind her. The photograph was originally printed as a postcard.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
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{ STORY 2 | Domestic Stein }
Becoming Gertrude and Alice
“a large owl, perched besides a small black crow.”
—Sir Francis Rose, British artist, 1973
Gertrude and Alice became lovers in the summer of 1908 and domestic partners in 1910. Friends and
family recognized that they were in a lesbian relationship, but they were first photographed together
only in 1914, for a newspaper, with Stein at her writing table and a tiny Alice in the background. During
World War I they achieved parity in photographs when they posed together with the Ford van they used
to deliver medical supplies to hospitals, as volunteers for the American Fund for the French troops. After
the war, they posed comfortably together in their home and by the late 1920s, in public spaces.
Although photographers initially registered Gertrude’s and Alice’s relationship ambiguously, in time they
used conventional husband-wife pictorial rhetoric.
Man Ray (American, 1890–1976)
Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, 1922
Gelatin silver print
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Isabel Wilder
This portrait by Man Ray is about both the collection that hung in the atelier at 27, rue de Fleurus and its
occupants. The artist was seeing Stein’s collection and meeting the two women for the first time. He had
Alice and Gertrude sit on either side of the new fireplace they had recently installed in the atelier, their
bodies subsumed in the domestic furniture, pictures, and decorative objects around them. Their
relationship to each other is unclear; they could be sisters, friends, or two educated, well-off, unmarried
women sharing a household, what was then called a “Boston Marriage.” Stein sits comfortably and
confidently in her ample armchair, and Toklas sits upright in one of the two small chairs she would later
cover with petit point based on designs Picasso made for her.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Man Ray (American, 1890–1976)
Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, 1922
Gelatin silver print
Isidore Ducasse Fine Arts, New York
The same day Man Ray photographed Tolkas and Stein by the fireplace (see the photograph on the left),
he took this equally strong picture, his back to the fireplace and his camera looking toward the new door
the women had constructed so that they
could go from the apartment to the atelier without stepping outdoors. Alice enters the room, her body
backlit by outdoor light, while Stein writes at her table with a pile of books and a wall of paintings facing
her. If one did not know otherwise, Alice could be a maidservant, coming in response to her mistress’s
call. Man Ray was the only artist to photograph the two women together in what is today considered
the most famous rooms in the history of modern art. His photographs of them in the first domestic
space they created together are justly well known.
Sir Cecil Beaton (British, 1904–1980)
Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, 1937
Gelatin silver print
The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s
Sir Cecil Beaton (British, 1904–1980)
Gertrude Stein, 1937
Gelatin silver print
The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s
Beaton made one sly and parodic portrait of Stein, a montage of two images from his first photo shoot
in 1937. Stein stands in the foreground, in hat and coat, and in the background, in a much smaller image,
wearing a skirt, blouse, and vest. Stein is married to herself, the montage suggests, imperial Stein to
lesbian Stein. Beaton, in his diary for 1939, began to call Stein the “General,” echoing those who for over
a decade had noted something military in her dress and manner. In this instance, he used the same
composition he commonly used for couples—dominant male and supportive female—to interpret
Stein’s immense self-love.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Sir Cecil Beaton (British, 1904–1980)
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in the Bilignin garden, 1939
Gelatin silver print
The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s
The centerpiece of the Bilignin property was the walled garden that opened up from the living room and
offered unobstructed views of the Rhône Valley. Stein and Toklas used it as an outdoor living room.
There were three stone-and-tile pavilions that looked something like small pagodas. In Beaton’s
description, they were “as simple as a Noah’s ark house, but with the proportions and textures and
colours of the best relics.” The garden, in the tradition of the jardin de curé, consisted of a series of
individual beds, each hedged with boxwood, with a profusion of blooming plants in the center from
which Alice cut flowers for her much-acclaimed arrangements. There were also vegetable and herb
gardens. As always, Stein and Toklas had hired help—usually a cook, housekeeper, and gardener—to
maintain the house to their high standards.
Sir Cecil Beaton (British, 1904–1980)
Gertrude Stein with Alice B. Toklas, 1945
Gelatin silver print
The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s
Beaton’s final photographs of Stein and Toklas, in the fall of 1945, are poignant. He had not seen them
since the beginning of the war six years earlier. Stein had lost weight, and her face was drawn from the
undiagnosed colon/stomach cancer that would soon end her life. Beaton, reprising his first photographs
of the two women in 1937, recorded them in hats and coats, seated in their Paris apartment; they seem
dressed to leave the world. The photograph exudes the sadness of Beaton’s mourning the end of the
happy times they had once shared. His photographs always make Stein and Toklas’s devotion to each
other palpable and real, though he asked little more than that they sit or stand in front
of his camera with an expressive space between them.
{ STORY 2 | Domestic Stein }
Homes
Alice and Gertrude were always renters, never property owners, and made three different homes
together, two on the left bank in Paris and another in a tiny village in southeastern France. Their urban
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
sanctuary for almost three decades was the apartment and atelier at 27, rue de Fleurus, on the western
edge of the Luxembourg Gardens. After Leo Stein moved out in 1913–14 and the Saturday night salons
ended, Stein and Toklas lavished attention on the atelier, where they hung the cream of their collection,
updated the décor, served tea, and entertained guests. In 1938, they moved into a grander Parisian
apartment, carved out of a seventeenth-century hôtel particulier, at 5, rue Christine, where Alice
continued to live after Stein’s death. Their third home was in the country. In 1929, after summering in
various locales, they rented a gracious seventeenth century manor house in Bilignin, not far from the
Swiss border. This became their summer residence until 1943.
Unidentified photographer
Exterior of 27, rue de Fleurus, 2010
Reproduction from digital image
Courtesy of Tirza True Latimer
Unidentified Artist, possibly Michael Stein (American, 1865–1938)
Studio at 27, rue de Fleurus, c. 1909
Gelatin silver print
Studio at 27, rue de Fleurus, c. 1906
Gelatin silver print
Studio at 27, rue de Fleurus, c. 1909
Gelatin silver print
All three photographs are courtesy of Theresa Erhman Papers, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and
Life, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
A series of vintage photographs of the “gallery” at 27, rue de Fleurus document the evolution of Leo and
Gertrude Stein’s collection. Someone—perhaps Michael Stein—photographed the atelier walls every
two years or so, registering the family’s awareness that they were engaged in a pioneering enterprise.
The paintings were hung salon style, floor to ceiling, with individual works moved from position to
position depending on the importance brother and sister assigned them at the time. The Steins bought
heavy wooden Renaissance-style tables and chairs in Italy to furnish the space. Bohemian casualness
and disorder hung over the room. For lighting, there was a single gas lamp in the middle of the room,
and for heat, a small potbellied coal stove at one end. The space was modernity itself, unpredictable, in
flux, a work-in-progress.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Unidentified artist
Studio at 27, rue de Fleurus, c. 1914–15
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
Unidentified artist
Studio at 27, rue de Fleurus, c. 1914–15
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
In 1913–14 Leo and Gertrude Stein divided their collection and went separate ways. Under the new
regime of Alice and Gertrude, the once crowded and disorderly studio became a tidy and artful living
room. The women persuaded their landlord to replace the potbellied stove with a tiled fireplace, to
install electric lighting, and to create an enclosed hallway between the atelier and their living quarters.
They blocked the large studio doors with a sideboard and decorative pieces, giving the space better
definition as a four-walled room. The women spaced the paintings in orderly fashion and cleared Stein’s
writing table of its clutter. When Stein sat at the table, she faced her prized Cézanne, with major
portraits by Picasso and Matisse and a row of studies for Picasso’s painting Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon
behind her.
Unidentified Artist
Studio at 27, rue de Fleurus, after 1915
Gelatin silver print
Collection Timothy Baum, New York
The last formal photograph of the atelier taken during Stein and Toklas’s residency records their final
transformation of the space, this time into an elegant parlor. The women discarded the heavy
Renaissance furniture and purchased smaller, lighter pieces, often antiques. Stein’s hefty writing table in
the center of the room gave way to a small desk, against the wall. The high-backed wooden chair that
Stein occupied in papal style became a wicker armchair; twenty-year-old chintz-covered furniture was
replaced by pieces elegantly upholstered in tufted black horsehair. A modern radiator is in the back right
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
corner. The perennial favorites still hang on the walls, but also the work of Stein’s new favorite painter,
Francis Rose.
Unidentified Artist
Studio at 27, rue de Fleurus, 1934
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Ed Burns
Two Louis XVI children’s armchairs upholstered in petit point by Alice B. Toklas (Born United States,
1877–Died France, 1967) after designs by Pablo Picasso
(Born Spain, 1881–Died France, 1973)
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
The 1934 photograph of the atelier features three pieces of Alice’s petit-point upholstery done to
Picasso’s designs. The needlepoint on the footstool at lower right was based on a tiny watercolor of a
cubist guitar Picasso had given Stein as a gift. (It hangs as the topmost work over the fireplace in the
photograph.) The success of this initial petit point prompted the two women to ask Picasso to provide
designs for their two small Louis XVI-style chairs, and he obliged, creating an abstract synthetic cubist
design for one and, for the other, a set of fluttering arabesques wound around a surrealist hand on the
chair’s back. The two chairs sat prominently, in the middle of the atelier, testifying that Toklas in this
instance, not Stein, had collaborated with Picasso.
Unidentified Artist
Exterior of Bilignin, 1930s
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
Stein often told the story of vacationing in southeastern France and seeing a gracious seventeenthcentury manor house from across the valley of the Rhône. She and Alice, deciding on the spot that it was
the house of their dreams, sought out the landlord. Three years later, in 1929, when the tenant at last
moved out, “we took the house still only having seen it from across the valley.” They first stayed for two
summer months but over time extended their stays to four to five months, and during World War II they
lived there year-round. Unlike their Paris apartments, the Bilignin house had numerous bedrooms, and
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
the women shifted much of their entertaining from the city to their home in the country. They issued
invitations regularly to their circle of young male artist and writer friends to visit and stay with them.
The painters Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, André Masson, and Salvador Dalí also came for meals on the
terrace there.
George Platt Lynes (American, 1907–1955)
Gertrude Stein, Bilignin, 1931
Toned gelatin silver print
Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, Gift of Adelyn D. Breeskin
Lynes, at age eighteen, looked up Stein in Paris in 1925, during his first tour of Europe. He aspired to be
a writer and would take up photography only later. Stein adopted him as one of her young men, giving
him the pet name “baby George.” When Lynes, back home in New Jersey, opened a bookshop and
launched a small publishing enterprise, he printed and distributed Stein’s Descriptions of Literature and
published pieces by René Crevel and Ernest Hemingway, two authors he had met through Stein. After
making a success of the bookstore for three years, Lynes sold it to finance a return to Europe in the
company of his lovers, the writers Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott. They encouraged Lynes to
take photography, until then his hobby, seriously. When Lynes visited Stein and Toklas in Bilignin in
1931, he took this photograph of Stein looking out over the Rhône Valley. Another image from the series
he took at Bilignin was featured on the cover of Time magazine two years later.
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964)
Gertrude Stein reclining at Bilgnin with Pépé and Basket, 1934
Gelatin silver print
Collection Terry Castle
This photograph has a handwritten inscription from Stein to Alexander Woolcott, “and we do like so
many things which is a nice way of talking and so we do like talking, and to say that we like and we tell
each other about it which is even more to our liking.”
Sir Francis Cyril Rose (British, 1909–1979)
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, 1939
Gouache on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Isabel Wilder
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Sir Cecil Beaton (British, 1904–1980)
Gertrude Stein, Bilignin, 1939
Gelatin silver print
The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s
The manor house at Bilignin was picture-book France, old and full of character. Its living room walls
were paneled and decorated with paintings of musical instruments; and tall windows with outside
shutters opened up to the terrace garden. When the two English artists Cecil Beaton and Francis Rose
came for a visit in the summer of 1939, they were so taken by the beauty of this room and its four
occupants—Gertrude, Alice, and the two dogs, Basket and Pépé—that they both made images of it.
Beaton’s photograph shows Gertrude at her writing desk, and Rose’s woodcut offers a genre scene of
marital harmony: Toklas knitting in a wicker chair and Stein reading in her favorite rocker.
Unidentified photographer
Exterior of 5, Rue Christine, 2010
Reproduction from digital image
Courtesy of Tirza True Latimer
In 1937 the landlord of 27, rue de Fleurus, surprised Stein and Toklas by asking for the return of the
apartment. They quickly located a lovely place on the second floor at 5, rue Christine, two blocks from
the river and quai des Grands Augustins. Like their summer home in Bilignin, their new apartment had
good historical bones: tall shuttered windows, French doors, and architectural detailing in the main
rooms. They moved there in January 1938.
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964)
Gertrude Stein with dove wallpaper, 1935
Gelatin silver print
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Estate of John Mark Lutz
Toklas and Stein’s most dashing decorating gambit in their new apartment at 5, rue Christine, was to
wallpaper their boudoir in a bright blue pattern with white doves. They had discovered the paper in a
decorator’s shop in New York during Stein’s lecture tour in the United States. The design reminded them
of a much-quoted line from Stein’s opera libretto for Four Saints in Three Acts: “Pigeons on the grass
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
alas.” They were so tickled by the paper that they obtained a sample, and Van Vechten photographed
Stein against it. Three years later, they ordered the paper for their new bedroom.
The sample in the Stein archive at the Beinecke Library at Yale University served as the model for recreating it in this exhibition.
Sir Francis Cyril Rose (British, 1909–1979)
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, 1939
Tempera and gouache on cardboard
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the T. Mellon Evans Foundation and Gallery
purchase
Francis Rose painted Stein and Toklas in their new space, using the iconography of a happy family.
Toklas works on a tapestry frame, perhaps on a design by Picasso or by Rose; Stein writes at her desk;
and their dog Pépé snoozes on the horsehair couch. Paintings by Picasso hang in, around, and
sometimes on top of the seventeenth-century plaster relief work on the walls.
Sir Cecil Beaton (British, 1904–1980)
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in wallpapered room, 1938
Modern print from original negative
The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s
Red Grooms (American, born 1937)
Gertrude Stein, 1975
Color lithograph and collage on paper mounted on paperboard
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Kainen and museum purchase through a
grant from the National Endowment for the Arts
Red Grooms’ three-dimensional pop-up portraits celebrate iconic figures in American culture and
contribute to the iconography of 1970s pop art. This piece memorializes Stein in a domestic setting. The
fifth and final story of the exhibition, Legacies, elaborates on Stein’s impact on contemporary art.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
ALICE B. TOKLAS COOKBOOK CASE
“Alice was one of the really great cooks of all time. She went all over Paris to find the right ingredients
for her meals. She had endless specialties, but her chicken dishes were especially magnificent. The secret
of her talent was great pains and a remarkable palate.
—James Beard, Obituary of Alice B. Toklas, New York Times, March 7, 1967
After Stein’s death in 1946, Alice persevered through widowhood by writing on fashion and food. In
1954 she published The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, a project she conceived much earlier, while Stein was
still alive. Like Julia Child, whose Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published seven years later,
Alice was delighted to introduce Americans to the principles of French cooking.
One of Toklas’s recipes became so famous that many people during the hippie era of the 1960s and
1970s linked the name of Alice B. Toklas not to Stein but to brownies. In her first cookbook, she had
included a recipe for “Hashisch Fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day).” Because marijuana
was illegal in the States, the fudge recipe was dropped from the first American edition but not from the
British version.
Alice B. Toklas (Born United States, 1877–Died France, 1967)
Handwritten recipe for cookies, September 1947
Hans R. Gallas Collection
Alice B. Toklas (Born United States, 1877–Died France, 1967) Illustrations by Sir Francis Rose (British,
1909–1979)
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 1954
New York: Harper and Brothers, New York
Hans R. Gallas Collection
Alice B. Toklas (Born United States, 1877–Died France, 1967) Illustrations by Sir Francis Rose (British,
1909–1979)
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (British edition), 1954
London: Michael Joseph
Hans R. Gallas Collection
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Alice B. Toklas (Born United States, 1877–Died France, 1967)
“Food, Artists, and the Baroness”
Vogue magazine, March 1950
Hans R. Gallas Collection
HEARING GERTRUDE STEIN
Tap the iPad screen to begin
Permission was granted by the Estate of Gertrude Stein, through its literary executor, Mr. Stanford
Gann, Jr., of Levin and Gann, PA
LES CHIENS
Marie Laurencin (French, 1883–1956)
Portrait of Basket II, c. 1945
Oil on Canvas
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American
Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
“Everything changes I had never had any life with dogs and now I had more life with dogs than with any
one.”
—Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, 1937
A white standard poodle Gertrude and Alice named Basket joined the Stein-Toklas ménage in 1929, the
same year they leased their summer home in Bilignin and bought their new Ford car, “Godiva.” These
events redefined their family life between the two world wars. Stein coined the term “Basketing” to
describe the forms of contemplation she discovered in her new dog’s company. In 1932 Francis Picabia
gave them a second dog, a Chihuahua, Byron, to keep Basket company. When Byron died of pneumonia,
Picabia provided another, Pépé. Basket was succeeded in time by an identical replacement, Basket II,
who lived on for nearly a decade after Stein’s death. “He has filled the corners of the room and the
minutes and me so sweetly these last years,” Toklas wrote. The dogs figure in Stein’s meditations on
writing, poems, and plays. Pépé even had a role in her ballet, A Wedding Bouquet.
Many artists captured the dogs in sketches, photographs, and formal portraits. Marie Laurencin’s
portrait of Basket II observes the most dignified conventions of bust-length portraiture and displays the
artist’s hallmark palette of pinks and grays. Stein, who purchased the first painting Laurencin ever sold,
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
posed for the photographer Horst with this portrait shortly before her death. (This photograph is on
view later in this section.)
Photographic reproductions:
Man Ray, Portrait of Basket, 1929. Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale
Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
Horst P. Horst, Gertrude Stein with Basket II, 1946. Courtesy of the Horst P. Horst Estate, Miami, FL
Horst P. Horst (Born Germany, 1906–Died United States, 1999)
Gertrude Stein wearing Balmain Suit, 1946
Photo mural from original gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Horst P. Horst Estate, Miami, FL
Horst P. Horst (Born Germany, 1906–Died United States, 1999)
Gertrude Stein at Balmain fashion show, 1946
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Horst P. Horst Estate, Miami, FL
The haute couturier Pierre Balmain was a young man when Stein and Toklas frequented his mother’s
fashion boutique in Aix-les-Bains. By 1941 he was designing and making for them the warm clothes that
they wore through the war years, and he became a significant member of their late circle of friends.
When Balmain opened his own fashion house in Paris in the fall of 1945, he invited Stein and Toklas to
the opening and asked them to help him find American clients for his new venture. Soon thereafter,
Balmain designed for Stein a beautiful outfit with his own house label. Toklas described it as “an imperial
evening suit of brown velvet heavily embroidered in jet [frogging] and a heavenly embroidered jet cap
from which a long tassel flowed.”
Horst P. Horst (Born Germany, 1906–Died United States, 1999)
Gertrude Stein wearing Balmain Suit, 1946
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Horst P. Horst Estate, Miami, FL
Pierre Balmain arranged for Stein to wear his clothes and sit for his friend Horst P. Horst, a young
fashion photographer. Horst photographed Stein over two days, first at Balmain’s studio, where she
wore a heavy tweed coat and sat like Friar Tuck, her dog Basket at her side, meeting a glamorous fashion
model dressed in a Balmain ball gown. On the second day, Horst photographed Stein in her new Balmain
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
suit in a series of poses, some with Basket, one with Balmain, and another with Horst himself and the
hands of his lover, Carl Erickson, as he sketches Stein. These were the last portraits anyone made of her,
for she died a short time later.
Horst P. Horst (Born Germany, 1906–Died United States, 1999)
Gertrude Stein and Horst with the artist Carl Erickson, 1946
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Horst P. Horst Estate, Miami, FL
{ STORY 2 | Domestic Stein }
Fashion
Stein and Toklas, bred to late Victorian dress standards, maintained them throughout their lives. Each of
them kept a suit in the closet to wear when going out into the streets of Paris. Stein might forgo hat and
gloves and had no use for handbags, but Alice felt undressed without such accessories. There are few
snapshots of either woman in housedress or disarray. Though Gertrude had long hair until she was fiftytwo, no photographs show her with her hair down or braided, as she wore it for sleep. Gertrude typically
let others help her decide about dress, and Alice, interested in fashion design since childhood,
increasingly did so. In time, they evolved a late lifestyle of dress that became their signature as a lesbian
couple: Gertrude in textured wools and Alice in flowery dresses.
Unidentified Artist
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in matching batik dresses, Italy, c. 1910
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy Beth Coffelt
Toklas, a fine seamstress, had an excellent eye for fabric and trim. Her tastes in dress were more
traditionally feminine than Stein’s but like Stein, she did not dress in high fashion. In her first years
abroad, she sought out hand-printed cotton batiks, a taste allied to the then current artists’ passion for
the “primitive” and “tribal.” It was surely Toklas who picked out the batik for the dresses she and Stein
wear in this early snapshot; most likely she designed and stitched the dresses herself, styling Gertrude’s
as a kimono and her own with a waistline and cuffs. Given Gertrude’s preference for solid colors, it is
surprising to see her in a dress that matches Alice’s. Their twinning expresses sweetly the passion of
their dawning romance and their early desire to be, as Stein later put it, “two-in-one.”
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Unidentified Artist
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Aix-les-Bains, France, c. 1927
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
This stunning studio photograph captures Gertrude and Alice’s sartorial makeover in the late 1920s.
Beginning with Stein’s radical haircut of 1926, the women created an homme-femme style, a lesbian
mode of dressing still in fashion today. Stein, in a solid-colored suit, flat shoes, and fedora, stands next
to Toklas, who looks like a peacock in her floral outfit, long earrings, heeled shoes, and ultrafeminine hat
and handbag. They posed comfortably as a couple, without any of the dissembling that marked
photographs of the two of them in earlier years.
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964)
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Bilignin, France, 1930s
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of John Mark Lutz
Possibly made by Alice B. Toklas (Born United States, 1877-Died France, 1967)
Gertrude Stein’s waistcoat, after 1926
Cotton with metallic thread
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Stein formed a collection of vests, each one made from a distinctive material and in a different style. The
waistcoat, as she called it, accommodated her shape and short stature, drawing attention away from her
waistline. It also gave her and Alice the pleasure of seeking out stunning fabrics, distinctive buttons, and
edgings. Some vests were silk, some cotton, some wool; the four that survive are all lined and
beautifully crafted; none have a seamstress’s or designer’s label. Alice may have designed and stitched
many of them, if not all.
Carl Van Vechten, Gertrude Stein, with Fania Marinoff and Alice B. Toklas trying on waistcoats, April 23,
1935, Gelatin silver print, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The
New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Man Ray (American, 1890–1976)
Gertrude Stein, 1929
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Sandra and Gerald Fineberg
Stein’s post-haircut fashion combined a skirt, blouse, and decorative vest. For this photograph by Man
Ray, Stein wore a floral-patterned blouse, a vest edged with a continuous Greek pattern, a floral scarf
tucked into the neckline of her blouse, and a brooch. Her look here is that of a gypsy or riverboat
gambler. On other days, she would dress in combinations that made her resemble a male dandy or a
quaint elder.
Possibly made by Alice Babette Toklas (Born United States, 1877-Died France, 1967)
Gertrude Stein’s waistcoat, after 1926
Black silk brocade with butterflies
Collection of Sandra and Gerald Fineberg
On occasion, Stein gave one of her vests as a gift to a valued friend, and Toklas continued this tradition
after Gertrude’s death. This lively brocade vest in a butterfly pattern went to Stein’s close friend Virgil
Thomson, the American composer. The vest was in Thomson’s estate when he died.
Unidentified Artist (possibly Marshall Fields)
Necklace
20th-century Paste necklace, 1930s
Mixed media
Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections
Stein bought this necklace for Alice in Chicago on her trip to the United States in 1934.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
STORY 3: THE ART OF FRIENDSHIP
“Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.”
—Gertrude Stein, Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded, 1931
Stein is almost as well known for her friendships with talented writers and artists as for her own creative
work. She cultivated these relationships, often leveraging her friends’ fame for her own. In her memoir,
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein inventories the modernists who attended the
Saturday evening gatherings at 27, rue de Fleurus before the First World War, including the Parisian
artists Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Georges Braque and the Americans Marsden Hartley
and Charles Demuth. Visitors from all over came to see the Steins’ legendary personal museum of
modern art and frequently followed Gertrude and Leo’s lead by collecting the avant-garde work of these
still-unknown artists. As a consequence, artists too came seeking the Steins’ patronage. With the
outbreak of World War I, however, and Gertrude and Leo’s parting of ways in 1914 (they never spoke
again), the salon days ended.
The war altered the cultural landscape of Paris dramatically, and Stein’s life changed after the armistice.
During the 1920s the writers Stein named the “lost generation” came to see her at rue de Fleurus. F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Sherwood Anderson were part of her postwar circle of friends.
Stein’s temperament and ego ended many of her friendships as she abruptly turned her attentions
elsewhere. The opportunism evident in her friendships with men also characterized her relations with
women. With women, however, Stein rarely experienced the complicity she enjoyed repeatedly (if
sometimes only briefly) with men. She never collaborated professionally with a woman (Toklas
excepted) or a group of women, and she never gave her women friends pet names like those she
invented for members of her male entourage. Toklas’s putative jealousy helps to explain the marginal
status of female friendship in Stein’s life, but only in part, because Toklas’s vigilance extended to male as
well as female interlopers. Gender bias, which limited professional options for women of Stein’s
generation, made her alliances with men more expedient. True, the men with whom Stein forged her
most loyal relationships were, like the author herself, marginalized by their sexual nonconformity. Yet
many gay men had significantly more professional agency, fiscal autonomy, artistic influence, social
visibility, and cultural clout than women, who had not yet won fully enfranchised citizenship. Thus Stein
found men more interesting and more useful than women. And gay men were more likely than
heterosexual men to accept her authority and even claim her as one of their kind.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Man Ray (American, 1890–1976)
Gertrude Stein, 27, rue de Fleurus, 1922
Gelatin silver print
Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection
Mabel Thérèse Bonney (Born United States, 1897–Died France, 1978)
Gertrude Stein, 27, rue de Fleurus, c. 1926
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Sir Cecil Beaton (British, 1904–1980)
Gertrude Stein, 5, rue Christine, 1945
Gelatin silver print on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transferred from the Department of Exhibitions and
Collections Management, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
{ STORY 3 | The Art of Friendship }
Picasso
“I was alone at this time in understanding him, perhaps because I was expressing the same thing in
literature.”
—Gertrude Stein, Picasso, 1938
In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein took credit for launching the painter who became the
standard-bearer for European modernism: Picasso. Her certainty of his importance—before, as she says,
“there was any general recognition of [his] quality of genius”—earned Stein a reputation as genius
maker, and thus (if indeed it takes one to know one) a genius herself. This logic underwrote Stein’s
reputation and gave her the power to make or break artistic careers as both her reputation and
Picasso’s grew in the 1920s and 1930s. Her friendship with Picasso, with its reciprocity and exchange,
moreover, became the measure of all her subsequent affiliations. Picasso, for his part, benefited
enormously from her early patronage, the exposure he received when Stein displayed his works in her
salon, and the important clients she steered his way before his work was widely known. Mutual selfinterest and admiration bound the two artists together throughout their lives, despite shifts in the
power dynamics of their relations.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Gertrude met Picasso in 1905, when she bought one of his paintings. Picasso was proud to see his
canvas hanging in Stein’s collection, alongside works by his rival Henri Matisse and the inspirational Paul
Cézanne. And Stein was proud of her first “discovery.” When Picasso asked her to sit for her portrait
shortly thereafter, she was thirty-one and not yet published. Picasso was twenty four, living in a coldwater studio in Montmartre. During World War II, they both took measures to safeguard “their”
portrait. Although it was never exhibited outside of Stein’s homes during her lifetime, it was reproduced
photographically in so many literary and artistic publications that it enjoyed a public reputation of its
own. Photographs taken of Gertrude with the painting throughout her life created a powerful dialogue
between the real Gertrude and Picasso’s image of her. It was the only painting Stein bequeathed to an
institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a bequest she knew would benefit her
posthumous reputation as well as Picasso’s. This painting is currently on view at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art.
Man Ray (American, 1890–1976)
Picasso in His Studio on the rue de La Boëtie, Paris, 1922
Gelatin silver print
Philadelphia Museum of Art: A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1952
PICASSO CASE
Gertrude Stein (Born United States, 1874–Died France, 1946)
Picasso (French edition)
Paris: Librairie Floury, 1938
Hans R. Gallas Collection
Stein wrote her book about Picasso in French so that the artist could read something she had written.
(Picasso did not speak or read English.) Toklas translated the book for the English language edition.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946)
Camera Work, Special Issue, August 1912
Magazine
Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Alfred Stieglitz, the New York photographer and editor of the little magazine Camera Work, published
two of Stein’s earliest word portraits in 1912: one of Henri Matisse, the other of Pablo Picasso. This was
the first time Stein’s work was published in the United States, and she always remained grateful to
Stieglitz for his early support of an unknown author. The two word portraits closely identified Stein with
two painters whose work she presciently collected. Stein became very proud of these early associations,
particularly her friendship with Picasso which continued until her death.
Pablo Picasso (Born Spain, 1881–Died France, 1973)
Hommage à Basket, c. 1931
Mixed media on cardboard
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Photo reproduction: Unidentified artist, Olga, Paolo and Pablo Picasso, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude
Stein with their dogs, c. 1931. Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of
American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
Toklas had always imagined French poodles carrying baskets of flowers in their mouths and so chose the
name “Basket” for the dog she and Stein adopted in 1929. In the summer of 1931, Picasso, with his
family and their dog, visited Stein and Toklas at their villa in Bilignin and met Basket for the first time.
Shortly thereafter, a gift arrived—supposedly from Picasso’s ten-year-old son, Paul, but crafted by the
elder Picasso. The toy poodle, made of wire covered with white yarn, carrying a lace basket in his
mouth, bore a label, handwritten on Picasso’s calling card: “Voici un petit frère pour votre chien” (Here
is a little brother for your dog). The gift playfully acknowledged the arrival of Basket as tantamount to
the birth of a child in Stein and Toklas’s family. Picasso may have sent the gift in hopes of making up for
his own dog’s aggressive behavior toward Basket during his family’s visit.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
{ STORY 3 | The Art of Friendship }
“Second Family”
“We are surrounded by homosexuals, they do all the good things in all the arts.”
—Gertrude Stein, Letter to Samuel M. Steward, c.1934
Stein turned her attention anew to visual artists in the late 1920s. She called the new devotees, mostly
young and gay, her “second family” and entertained them over teas and dinners prepared by Toklas. The
members of this group, with Stein’s encouragement, launched an international art movement,
neoromanticism, emphasizing collaboration, sentiment, and figuration. Stein, in her memoirs, passed
lightly over her affiliation with these artists, who are generally less familiar than the modernists whose
works Gertrude and Leo had collected. The neoromantics revered Stein for her literary innovations, her
confidence as a tastemaker, and her sexual openness. They introduced one another into her household,
vied for her attention, created tributes to her, and drew her into collaborations that enhanced her
reputation as well as their own vanguard cachet. This was a time, Stein said, when “all the young men
were twenty-six years old.” Though associating with Stein boosted the reputations of the neoromantics,
none of them achieved the status of her prewar cubist protégés.
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964)
Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, and Alice B. Toklas, 1935
Gelatin silver print
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.) 2005.27.4504
“SECOND FAMILY”
Evidence of Gertrude’s friendships and collaborations with the “Second Family” are on view throughout
the exhibition.
1. Pierre Balmain (1914-1982)
French Fashion designer
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964), Pierre Balmain, 1947.
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT.
2. Cecil Beaton (1904-1980)
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
English fashion and high-society photographer.
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964), Cecil Beaton, late 1930s.
Courtesy of the Carl Van Vechten Trust. © National Portrait Gallery, London
3. Christian Bérard (1902-1949)
French painter, stage designer
Sasha [né Alexander Stewart] (British, 1892-1953), Christian Bérard, 1930.
Courtesy of the Hulton Archive, Getty Images.
4. Lord Gerald Berners (1883-1950)
English composer
Gordon Anthony (British, 1902-1989), Lord Gerald Berners, 1937.
Courtesy of the Hulton Archive, Getty Images.
5. Charles Demuth (1883-1935)
American painter
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946), Charles Demuth, 1923.
Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
6. Bernard Faÿ (1893-1977)
French scholar of American history
Unidentified artist, Bernard Faÿ, date unknown.
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT.
7. Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)
American painter
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946), Marsden Hartley, 1911.
Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
8. Georges Hugnet (1906-1974)
French poet, translator, and publisher
Unidentified artist, Georges Hugnet, c. 1930.
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
9. Bravig Imbs (1904-1946)
American writer, journalist, critic
Cover photo from Confessions of Another Young Man by Bravig Imbs, New York: Henkle-Yewdale House,
1936.
10. George Platt Lynes (1907-1955)
American book dealer/publisher, photographer
George Platt Lynes (American, 1907–1955), Self-Portrait, 1933.
Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
11. Sir Francis Rose (1909-1980)
English painter
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964), Sir Francis Rose, 1937.
Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of John Mark Lutz, 1965.
12. Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957)
Russian painter, stage designer
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964), Pavel Tchelitchew, 1934.
Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, Boatwright Memorial Library, The University of
Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, Carl Van Vechten-Mark Lutz Collection.
13. Virgil Thomson (1986-1989)
American composer
George Platt Lynes (American, 1907–1955), Virgil Thomson, 1936.
Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, David Hunter McAlpin Fund,
1941(41.65.7).
14. Kristians Tonny (1907-1977)
Dutch painter, graphic artist
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964), Kristians Tonny, 1937.
Courtesy of The Prints and Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
15. Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964)
American novelist, photographer, and critic
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964), Self Portrait, 1934.
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT.
16. Thornton Wilder (1897-1975)
American novelist and playwright
Unidentified artist, Thornton Wilder, 1937.
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT.
Sir Cecil Beaton (British, 1904–1980)
Sir Francis Rose and Gertrude Stein, Bilignin, 1939
Modern print from original negative
The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s
The art dealer Georges Maratier, Kristians Tonny’s lover, introduced Gertrude Stein to paintings by the
twenty-two-year-old Sir Francis Rose at an exhibition in Paris. Stein bought several canvases and
arranged to meet the artist. Rose, a playboy born to Scottish gentry, was flattered by Stein’s attention
and created numerous tributes to her. Stein, hoping that he might become her next Picasso, purchased
dozens of Rose’s works. She nurtured his career by displaying his paintings in her homes, making
professional connections for him in America, and writing about him. In her role as matchmaker, she
introduced him to Cecil Beaton, the photographer. In this photograph, Rose shows off a painting he has
made in Bilignin, where he vacationed in 1939 with Beaton, Stein, and Toklas. Despite Stein’s advocacy,
Rose never became her new Picasso. Beaton offered her this explanation: “Serious critics haven’t
written about him much, because they are afraid of disagreeing with what you [have said]…and they
can’t see for themselves that you are right.”
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Sir Cecil Beaton (British, 1904–1980)
Gertrude Stein, 5, rue Christine, 1938
Gelatin silver print
The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s
Taken late in her life, a graying Stein stands in what she playfully called the Salon des Refusés gallery at
5, rue Christine. Paintings and books surround her. Hanging on the wall in the background, there is a
neo-classical portrait by Francis Picabia of Stein dressed in a roman toga. The six paintings on the side
wall and the stacks of them leaning against the table all appear to be by Francis Rose. No one knows for
sure how many paintings Stein bought by Rose—estimates vary from forty to a hundred paintings—but
there can be no doubt that she bought more of his work than that of any other painter after World War
I.
Designed by Sir Francis Cyril Rose (British, 1909–1979)
Fabricated by Ascher Ltd.
Gertrude Stein scarf, c. 1946
Silk twill
The Ascher Collection
“rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”
—Gertrude Stein
Rose was a continent-hopping playboy during the 1930s, with both male and female partners. His male
partners abused him, stealing his money and property, and his female partners bore him three children.
He drank to excess. Stein, who urged him continually to settle down and commit to painting full-time,
also continued to indulge him as she might a son. When Rose came home from service in the Royal Air
Force in 1945, ill and bankrupt, he wrote Stein a flurry of letters, asking for money and selling her a
painting. He hustled up numerous projects that capitalized on his friendship with her. This scarf is one of
them, designed around drawings Rose had made of Stein, Toklas, their dog Basket, and their
environment in Paris and Bilignin. Rose produced the scarf after Stein’s death, taking to an extreme the
happy coincidence of his surname and Stein’s aphorism “rose is a rose. . . .” Stein had a logo on both her
stationery and her wax seal that used the rose and the maxim in its design. In the design for the scarf,
Rose encircled a neoclassical bust of Stein with her signature aphorism and a wreath of roses.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Sir Francis Cyril Rose (British, 1909–1979)
Alice B. Toklas, Bilignin, 1932
Gouache on wood
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
Rose made this portrait on his first visit to Stein and Toklas’s summer home in Bilignin. He was just
getting to know the two women, whom he would later describe as his family. (He called Stein his second
mother.) Alice posed for him in the Bilignin garden, wearing one of her signature flowered dresses, and
Rose made her flatteringly young and pretty.
Attributed to Pavel Fyodorovitch Tchelitchew (Born Moscow, 1898–Died Rome, 1957) and Allen Tanner
“Groupes de mariages et en tous genres”, c. 1929
Collage, photograph on doily
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
A snapshot of Pavel Tchelitchew, probably taken by his lover, the composer Allen Tanner, is at the heart
of this cheeky collage, which is rife with double meanings. Tchelitchew and/or Tanner most likely
created the piece to commemorate a summer picnic with Stein and Toklas in Bilignin, their home in
southeastern France. Stein (whose famous saying “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” had made the flower
her hallmark) would have appreciated the motif embellishing the paper doily that frames the
composition. The mount, appropriated from a local photographer’s studio, provides a caption for the
snapshot. It identifies the picture as an example of “Photographie Moderne” and presents the sitters
under the rubric “Groupes de mariages et en tous genres” (marriage groups of every kind), perhaps a sly
comment on gay marriage and other unconventional ménages.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Pavel Fyodorovitch Tchelitchew (Born Moscow, 1898–Died Rome, 1957)
Gertrude Stein, c. 1927
Ink on paper
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Joan and Lester Avnet Collection, 1978
While living in Paris in the 1920s, the Russian émigré painter Pavel Tchelitchew successfully courted
Stein’s favor and became her protégé for several formative years of his international artistic career. This
drawing is one of several he made of Stein during this period; he also made a portrait of Alice. Stein
published a word portrait of him in Dix Portraits (1930) and invited him to contribute a self-portrait to
that publication, which includes illustrations by fellow neoromantics. Tchelitchew intended to execute
an easel portrait of Stein, but when she introduced him to Edith Sitwell, who became a major patron,
Sitwell’s numerous commissions distracted him from that project. Stein, who never paid to sit for an
artist, was displeased by Tchelitchew’s divided loyalties and dropped the artist abruptly in 1929, hurting
and angering him.
Kristians Tonny (Dutch, 1907–1977)
After van Eyck (Gertrude Stein), c. 1930–36
Black ink over tempera on primed Masonite adhered to cardboard
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner
Collection Fund
Kristians Tonny was inspired by Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts to re-imagine her as a saint in a
red clerical robe. Tonny knew all about Stein’s successful collaboration with Virgil Thomson because he
was commissioned to make murals for the modern auditorium at the Wadsworth Atheneum, where the
opera had premiered. Tonny took his St. Gertrude from a fifteenth-century drawing by Jan van Eyck of
St. Barbara seated in front of a Gothic tower. The flamboyant architecture in Tonny’s painting resembles
that of the Antwerp cathedral. Tonny has put the Star of David at the top of the spire, registering the
irony of a Jewish woman’s writing an opera about Catholic saints. In the painting Stein wears a straw
hat, whose rim becomes a halo.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Kristians Tonny (Dutch, 1907–1977)
Gertrude Stein with Basket, 1930
Oil on canvas
Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections
Stein lent this double portrait of herself with her beloved poodle to the Wadsworth Atheneum in
Hartford, Connecticut, for a 1931 exhibition of works by the young neoromantic painters she supported
at this time. Virgil Thomson had introduced Stein to Kristians Tonny, describing the nineteen-year-old
Paris-based Dutch painter as “a virtuoso draftsman of Flemish fantasy.” Thomson owned a number of
Tonny’s works and encouraged Stein to become his patron. She purchased at least one of his surrealistinspired paintings, sat for her portrait, and invited Tonny to contribute two illustrations—a self-portrait
and a portrait of Bernard Faÿ—to Dix Portraits (1930), her collection of word portraits.
Francisco Riba-Rovira (Spanish, 1913–2002)
Gertrude Stein, 1945
Oil on canvas
Alida and Christopher Latham
Patronage remained an important aspect of Stein’s reputation, and she was still on the lookout for
promising artists when she came upon Francisco Riba-Rovira, a young Spanish painter, at work on a
cityscape in her picturesque Paris neighborhood. In 1945 he painted her portrait at least twice and was
the last painter for whom Stein sat. Diminished by the war years and already ailing from the cancer that
would take her life, Stein is uncharacteristically gaunt in Riba-Rovira’s portrait. The artist created a coat
of arms for her, basing it on her bookplate. Two identical hounds rear up on either side of an Edenic
apple tree as a serpent winds its way around the trunk—perhaps a metaphor for Stein and Toklas’s
fruitful erotic relationship. The portrait was included in Riba-Rovira’s first solo show in Paris, for which
Stein wrote the brochure.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
René Pierre Tal-Coat (French, 1905–1985)
Gertrude Stein, c. 1935–36
Oil on canvas
Baltimore Museum of Art, Bequest of Saidie A. May
Pierre Tal-Coat exhibited in Paris during the 1930s with a group called Forces Nouvelles. He made
several portraits of Stein, one of which earned him the highly coveted Paul Guillaume prize in 1936. “I sit
and he sits and we do not talk together,” she wrote. “I look out over the roofs and sit not very
comfortably and he draws to get acquainted with my portrait. It is interesting me to do it again. Yes
again.” Although Tal-Coat never caught on in America, he made an enduring mark on the visual arts in
France. There, he is best remembered for the paintings he created in abstract modes from the 1940s
forward.
Charles Henry Demuth (American, 1883–1935)
Love, Love, Love. Homage to Gertrude Stein, 1928
Oil on panel
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain
Demuth, an American painter, greatly admired Stein’s writing and visited the author in Paris. Stimulated
by her word portraits that evoke but do not describe a person, he spent five years painting
nonrepresentational portraits of friends he admired. Inventing a style that drew on the low art of
billboards as well as the high modernism of cubism, he called them “portrait posters.” They are not
literal transcriptions but referential and poetic works. In this portrait, the principal elements are
numbers, the word love, and a mask. Stein used numbers prominently in her work and made repetitions
like love, love, love a key element of her style. The mask in the painting is a sign for theater and Stein’s
writing of plays but also, among gays and lesbians at the time, a common reference to masquerading
and hiding one’s sexuality from public view.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877–1943)
One Portrait of One Woman, 1916
Oil on composition board
Lent by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Bequest of
Hudson D. Walker from the Ione and Hudson D. Walker Collection. 1978.21.64
Hartley was the first American (and gay) artist whom Gertrude Stein encouraged. In 1912 he came to the
Saturday salons and she made two studio visits to see his paintings. Flattered and hoping for continuing
support, Hartley painted this symbolic portrait of Stein, focusing on the afternoon teatime ritual at 27,
rue de Fleurus. A blue teacup with a cross sits on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth—the altar—with
two burning candles on either side. Across the table a mandala shape with a small circle in red suggests
an illuminated head above a massive body. The red, white, and blue palette recalls the French and
American flags, and gold evokes light, aura, and holiness. Hartley anchors the painting with the French
word moi (“me”), which recalls Hartley’s position across the table from Stein and the word portrait she
wrote about him in a play she called IIIIIIIIII but also anoints Stein as the one, the “me” around whom
the art world orbited.
ART AND FRIENDSHIP CASE
Gertrude Stein (Born United States, 1874–Died France, 1946)
Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia, 1913
Hand-covered pamphlet
Rare Books and Special Collections, Boatwright Memorial Library, The University of Richmond,
Richmond, Virginia, Carl Van Vechten-Mark Lutz Collection
Gertrude Stein (Born United States, 1874–Died France, 1946)
Dix Portraits, 1930
Translated by Georges Hugnet (French, 1906–1974) Paris: Editions de la Montagne, copy 30
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
Gertrude Stein started writing word portraits in the first decade of the 20th century, including one of
Picasso in 1909. These prose descriptions of friends in her circle invoke the subjects without depicting
them literally. Dix Portraits collected a group of Stein’s word portraits with painted portraits of her ten
subjects by various artists in a bilingual (French and English) publication conceived as a collector’s book.
Its target audience was an elite transatlantic readership conversant with trends in literature, music, and
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
art. Among Stein’s portrait subjects are Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pavel Tchelitchew, Virgil
Thomson, Bernard Faÿ, and Kristians Tonny.
Gertrude Stein (Born United States, 1874–Died France, 1946)
Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded
Written on a Poem by Georges Hugnet (French, 1906–1974)
Paris: Plain Edition. 1931
Hans R. Gallas Collection
Gertrude Stein (Born United States, 1874–Died France, 1946)
“Word Portrait of Carl van Vechten”
Useful Knowledge
London: John Lane, The Bodley Head Limited, 1929
Hans R. Gallas Collection
Stein was an arts networker, and she often agreed to write a few words about an artist- friend or
protégé to help them get ahead. Beginning with Juan Gris in the 1920s, and continuing with artists like
Francis Picabia and Francis Rose in the 1930s, she penned short appreciations for publication in
exhibition brochures. When Stein was in Chicago on her lecture tour, the Arts Club mounted a series of
one-man exhibitions based on Stein’s recommendations and she supplied a statement for each of the
catalogues.
The Arts Club of Chicago: Juan Gris (Born Spain, 1887–Died France, 1927), January 3–27, 1939
Printed brochure
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
The Arts Club of Chicago: Paintings by Sir Francis Rose (British, 1909–1979), November 9–30, 1934
Printed brochure
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
Associated American Artists Galleries: Sir Francis Rose (British, 1909–1979), April 14, 1947–May 3, 1947
Printed brochure
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Galerie Renou & Colle, Sir Francis Rose (British, 1909–1979), c. 1940
Printed brochure
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
{ STORY 3 | The Art of Friendship }
Theater and Collaborations
“I’m always wanting to collaborate with some one.”
—Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, 1937
Stein engaged repeatedly in collaborative ventures during the interwar years, with varying success.
Some of her first attempts to collaborate fell flat (for example, her brief alliance in 1930 with the
French poet Georges Hugnet), and many collaborations never got off the ground. Several joint ventures
during the 1920s and 1930s earned her little acclaim. For instance, the illustrated book she created in
1926, A Book Concluding with As a Wife Has a Cow, contained several drawings by the Spanish artist
Juan Gris but garnered no critical notice for either collaborator. Stein’s A Village, Are You Ready Yet Not
Yet: A Play in Four Acts (1928), with elaborate page borders rendered by French painter Elie Lascaux,
met with similar critical indifference.
Subsequent collaborations, however, yielded spectacular results, helping to shape Stein’s career and
legacy in important ways. Stein collaborated with the American illustrator Clement Hurd to produce a
children’s book, The World Is Round (1939), and with the artist Francis Rose on both the British edition
of The World Is Round and on First Reader and Three Plays, of 1946, her last book. All these joint
ventures were successful, and Stein expressed great satisfaction.
This section of the exhibition features Stein’s most notable collaborations, which were in opera and
ballet theater. She collaborated again and again with the resilient Virgil Thomson, who composed scores
for Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), based on the life of Saint Teresa of Avila, and The Mother of Us All,
reflecting on Susan B. Anthony and her campaign for women’s suffrage. (The latter premiered in 1947,
after the author’s death). Stein also joined forces with the English composer Lord Gerald Berners, who
wrote the score for the ballet A Wedding Bouquet (1937). Stein’s collaborations gave her new visibility,
and in some cases the notoriety she craved. Yet professional advantages alone do not explain Stein’s
persistent enthusiasm for collective effort. Artistic intimacy, however unstable—with Picasso, with her
young partners in Dix Portraits, and with Thomson—was clearly something she relished.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
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Vintage footage of Gertrude Stein, Bilignin
Running time: 40 seconds
Original footage taken by Mrs. Gilbert “Bobsy” Chapman
Footage appears courtesy of Robert Storr and the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Mrs. Gilbert V. Chapman Papers.
Four Saints in Three Acts
“Why did Gertrude Stein and I decide to write an opera about saints? Simply because we viewed a
saint’s life as related to our own. In all times the consecrated artist has tended to live
surrounded by younger artists and to guide them into the ways of spontaneity. And thus to characterize
one’s gift is indeed to invite ‘inspiration’ and just possibly, through art, make ‘miracles.’”
—Virgil Thomson
Four Saints in Three Acts was Gertrude Stein’s first libretto and Virgil Thomson’s first opera score. Stein
and Thomson set the opera in Spain, choosing the theme of religious devotion because they saw a
connection between the lives of saints and their own lives as artists. Stein delivered the finished libretto
to Thomson in 1927, and Thomson then composed a score that supported the religious theme with
melodies from American hymns and spirituals. Stein’s libretto, which focused more on the sounds of
words than on presenting a narrative, included some of her most noted phrases, among them “Pigeons
on the grass alas” and “When this you see remember me.” Because the text contained no stage
directions, Thomson assembled a team to mount the production. He asked his lover Maurice Grosser to
conceive a dramatic scenario that would make the opera work as a performance. He persuaded the
artist and salon hostess Florine Stettheimer to design the sets and costumes, for which she chose
fanciful materials such as cellophane, ostrich feathers, and sequins. At Thomson’s request, Frederick
Ashton came from London to choreograph the opera. And John Houseman, who was only thirty-one,
was the director. This extraordinary team defied many traditions of opera production. Moreover,
Thomson made a decision, unprecedented in American opera history, to recruit an all African American
cast to perform as “saints.”
The opera premiered in February 1934 to a full house at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford,
Connecticut. Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Buckminster Fuller, Clare Boothe, Abby Aldrich
Rockefeller, and other luminaries traveled to attend this first performance, which became a sensation.
When the production began, the audience gasped at the sight of the African American chorus. Two
weeks later, the production moved to Broadway and became an instant hit. Stein did not attend the
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
opening, nor did she see the opera on Broadway. Later that year, Stein and Toklas attended a
performance in Chicago during her American tour.
Mabel Thérèse Bonney (Born United States, 1897–Died France, 1978)
Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, c. 1929
Modern print from original negative
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Maurice Grosser (American, 1903–1986)
Virgil Thomson, date unknown
Oil on canvas
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
The composer Virgil Thomson sat for this formal portrait in the Paris apartment he shared with his lover,
the painter Maurice Grosser. The portrait presents a man in his early forties with a high brow,
exaggerated by a receding hairline, that suggests intelligence and cultivation. During this period Grosser
collaborated with Thomson and Stein on their operas, Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us
All. Because Stein’s librettos did not block out the staging, Thomson asked Grosser to create workable
scenarios based on Stein’s texts. Grosser devised dramatic frameworks that let the other artistic
collaborators find in Stein’s “deeply fanciful work,” as he put it, “stimulus to their own imaginations.”
George Platt Lynes (American, 1907–1955)
Frederick Ashton and the principal dancers of
Four Saints in Three Acts, 1934
Gelatin silver print
The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. © The Estate of George Platt Lynes.
George Platt Lynes photographed Frederick Ashton, the choreographer, in an elegant suit and tie,
kneeling to encircle three supine Four Saints cast members in his embrace. Ashton’s pose, in conjunction
with the performers’ nudity, implies an erotic as well as an artistic alliance. By his own account, Ashton
had sexual relationships with at least two of the opera’s male cast members. The choreographer’s
formal costume and his elevated position in relation to Maxwell Baird, Floyd Miller, and Billie Smith
visually posits his superior status, while the bare skin and intertwining limbs of the dancers code them as
an undifferentiated corps, reliant on Ashton for shape and direction. The dramatic lighting and staging
of this photograph exemplify the theatrical style of Lynes’s studio portraiture during this period.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Unidentified Artist
Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, and Harry McCormick at the Chicago premiere of Four Saints in Three
Acts at the Auditorium Theater, Chicago, 1934
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University, Virgil Thomson Papers
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964)
Four Saints in Three Acts, 44th Street Theatre Marquee, New York City, 1934
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS CASE
Four Saints in Three Acts, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, February 8, 1934
Playbill pamphlet
Open: Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont,
CA
Closed: Rare Books and Special Collections, Boatwright Memorial Library, The University
Of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, Carl Van Vechten-Mark Lutz Collection
Gertrude Stein (Born United States, 1874–Died France, 1946)
Virgil Thomson (American, 1896–1989)
Four Saints in Three Acts: An Opera
Complete Vocal Score
New York: Music Press, Inc., and Arrow Music Press, Inc.
Hans R. Gallas Collection
Caricatures by William Henry Cotton (American, 1880–1958)
“Miss Gertrude Stein of Paris and Broadway”, 1934
Vanity Fair magazine
Hans R. Gallas Collection
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Harold Swahn
Production shot of Four Saints in Three Acts, 1934
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
The Mother of Us All
Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson began their second opera, The Mother of Us All, in 1945. It was a
dramatic tribute to Susan B. Anthony, a major figure in the fight for women’s suffrage in the United
States. The opera presents vignettes from Anthony’s life in the manner of an old-fashioned historical
pageant. The supporting cast includes figures from both American history and Stein’s biography.
Thomson’s score incorporates motifs from hymns, folk songs, marches, and children’s ditties—“all those
sounds and kinds of tunes that were once the music of rural America.”
Stein did not live to see the opera produced. After her death, Thomson added a character named
Gertrude S. in her honor. Because Stein wrote no stage notes or directions in her libretti, Maurice
Grosser devised staging for this opera, making Gertrude S. and Virgil T. commentators to pace and
structure the drama.
The opera premiered at Columbia University in 1947 and has since enjoyed numerous revivals. Two of
the most spectacular productions—staged by the Center Opera Company (1967) and the Santa Fe Opera
(1976)—featured sets and costumes designed by the pop artist Robert Indiana.
Robert Indiana (American, born 1928)
Tyrone Guthrie Theater production The Mother of Us All, 1967
Lithograph
Hans R. Gallas Collection
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Robert Indiana (American, born 1928)
Costume designs for The Mother of Us All
Santa Fe Opera production, 1976
Cut paper on board
Collection of the McNay Art Museum, Gift of Robert L. B. Tobin, 1978.12.4
Top row, left to right:
Susan B. Anthony
Gertrude S.
Lillian Russell
Bottom row, left to right:
Henrietta M.
Virgil T.
Jo the Loiterer
Robert Indiana, one of many American artists attracted to Stein’s operas, created the set and costume
designs for the Santa Fe Opera company’s American Bicentennial production of The Mother Of Us All.
Using the same flat primary color scheme he used in his pop art paintings, the artist festooned the stage
with red, white, and blue banners and issued star-spangled pickets affirming the universal right to vote.
His aesthetic choices democratize the opera stage by evoking popular signage and advertising. His
decorative scheme for the production of 1976 built on his interpretation of 1967, when the Center
Opera Company produced Stein’s opera at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater.
Unidentified Artist
Pépé from A Wedding Bouquet, 1937
Gelatin silver print
The Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox
and Tilden Foundations
Gordon Anthony (Irish, 1902–1989)
Lord Gerald Berners and Gertrude Stein, 1937
Photographic reproduction
Hulton-Deusch Collection/CORBIS
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Felix Fonteyn (British, active 1940s–1950s)
Full cast of A Wedding Bouquet, 1937
Gelatin silver print
The Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox
and Tilden Foundations
A WEDDING BOUQUET CASE
A Wedding Bouquet, Sadler’s Wells, London, England, April 27, 1937
Program booklet (open and closed copies)
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
A Wedding Bouquet
Bystander magazine, May 12, 1937
Rare Books and Special Collections, Boatwright Memorial Library, The University of Richmond,
Richmond, Virginia, Carl Van Vechten-Mark Lutz Collection
{ STORY 3 | The Art of Friendship }
The Wedding Bouquet
For The Wedding Bouquet, a 1937 comedic ballet, Stein selected one of her plays, the English composer
Lord Gerald Berners wrote the music and designed the sets and costumes, and the legendary Frederick
Ashton choreographed the half-hour ballet for Sadler’s Wells in London. In the story line a merry French
provincial wedding is interrupted by the groom’s former mistresses, who have come to harass him. One
of them arrives with her dog, Pépé, a small dancer costumed to look like Stein and Toklas’s Chihuahua.
The activity—much of it hilarious and melodramatic—takes place against a curtain with an oval image of
the manor house in Bilignin. Berners had visited Stein and Toklas there, and an American hooked rug
they owned inspired the oval-shaped frame. Berners’ music incorporated the words of Stein’s play; in
the original production of the ballet these were sung and chanted by an onstage chorus. (In later
productions, a narrator recited the words, seated either onstage at a table at the wedding or in a box in
the theater.) Every once in a while a well-timed line from Stein’s play comments hilariously on an action
onstage. At the end of the ballet, the groom dances a farewell tango with his former girlfriends and then
a beautiful nocturnal pas de deux with his bride.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
This was the only premier of one of her collaborative works that she ever attended. In Everybody’s
Autobiography (1937), Stein wrote about the experience:
And then we went to the Sadlers Wells Theatre for the rehearsal I had never seen a rehearsal a dressrehearsal … and I liked hearing my words and I like it being a play and I liked it being something to look
at and I liked their doing it again and I like the music going on … I did like the ballet it was a play and well
constructed and the drop-curtain had a bouquet that was the most lively bouquet I have ever seen
painted and Pépé the dog was charming … the music and all went together and really there is no use in
going to see a thing if you have not written it no use at all, anyway that is the way I feel about it.… it was
exciting, it was the first time I had ever been present when anything of mine had been played for the first
time and I was not nervous but it was exciting, it went so very well. English dancers when they dance
dance with freshness and agility and they know what drama is, it all went so very well, each time a
musician does something with the words it makes it do what they never did do, this time it made them
do as if the last word had heard the next word and the next word had heard not the last word but the
next word … I guess it was a great success … And then we went somewhere and we met every one and I
always do like to be a lion, I like it again and again, and it is a peaceful thing to be one succeeding.
A WEDDING BOUQUET
MUSIC BY LORD GERALD BERNERS | LIBRETTO BY GERTRUDE STEIN | CHOREOGRAPHY BY FREDERICK
ASHTON
For A Wedding Bouquet, a comedic ballet that premiered in 1937, Stein selected one of her plays (They
Must. Be Wedded. To Their Wife.), the English composer Lord Gerald Berners wrote the music and
designed the sets and costumes, and the legendary Frederick Ashton choreographed the half-hour ballet
for Sadler’s Wells in London.
The excerpt on view features the libretto adapted from Stein’s original text:
Act I, Scene II
They have. Not forgotten. The sister. And daughter. Neither. Will they. Like it.
And so. The month. Of July. Opens. And closes.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Scene III
This scene is in a place where. They are.
Violet: Oh will you. Ask Him. To marry me.
Marcel: He laughed.
Josephine: After many opposite to. It.
Ernest: Politeness
Therese: I am older. Than a boat. And there. Can be no
folly. In owning. It.
Vintage production:
The Sadler’s Wells Ballet
Royal Opera House – London, UK
1949
Music performed by RTE Sinfonietta and RTE Chamber Choir, 1996
Credits: Production images by Roger Wood Photographic, courtesy the Royal Opera House Collections ©
The Sadler’s Wells Ballet 1949 revival of ‘A Wedding Bouquet’ (1937) at the Royal Opera House, Covent
Garden. Music recording published by G. Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP) o/b/o Chester Music Ltd. (PRS).
Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. and The Berners Trust.
Contemporary production:
Joffrey Ballet
Auditorium Theatre – Chicago, IL
2004
Credits: Footage and audio courtesy of The Joffrey Ballet.
THE MOTHER OF US ALL
MUSIC BY VIRGIL THOMSON | LIBRETTO BY GERTRUDE STEIN
Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson began their second opera, The Mother of Us All, in 1945. It was a
dramatic tribute to Susan B. Anthony, a major figure in the fight for women’s suffrage in the United
States. The opera presents vignettes from Anthony’s life in the manner of an old-fashioned historical
pageant.
Act I, Scene 4
Jo: I know, you are awake Susan B.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Susan B.: Negro man, would you vote only if you can and
not she?
Negro Man: You bet.
Susan B.: I fought for you that you could vote, would you
vote if they would not let me?
Negro Man: Holy Gee.
Susan B.: If I believe that I am right and I am right if they
believe that they are right and they are not in the
right, might, might there be what might be?
Act II, Scene II
Jenny Reefer: I have converted her, she will give all
herself and all she earns.
Women’s Chorus: Lillian is converted, she will give all
herself and all she earns.
Jenny Reefer: Oh wonderful day
Women’s Chorus: Oh wonderful day
Jenny Reefer: I know what you will say.
Women’s Chorus: I know what you will say.
Vintage production:
Center Opera Company
Tyrone Guthrie Theater – Minneapolis, MN
1967
Credits: Production images courtesy of Minnesota Opera. Music by The Santa Fe Opera, 1977, published
by G. Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP). Virgil Thomson, The Mother of Us All NW 80288. © 1977 Anthology of
Recorded Music, Inc. Used with permission. The Santa Fe Opera, John Crosby General Director,
Conducted by Raymond Leppard, performers include Mignon Dunn, James Atherton, Philip Booth,
Batyah Godfrey, William Lewis, Linn Maxwell, and Helen Vanni.
Contemporary production:
San Francisco Opera
War Memorial Opera House – San Francisco, CA
2003
Conducted by Donald Runnicles
Set design by Allen Moyer
Costume Design by Gabriel Berry
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Credits: Footage courtesy of San Francisco Opera. This production was based on the production by
Glimmerglass Opera and New York City Opera.
FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS
MUSIC BY VIRGIL THOMSON | LIBRETTO BY GERTRUDE STEIN
Four Saints in Three Acts was Gertrude Stein’s first
libretto and Virgil Thomson’s first opera score. Stein and
Thomson set the opera in Spain, choosing the theme of
religious devotion because they saw a connection
between the lives of saints and their own lives as artists.
Four Saints premiered in 1934 in Hartford, Connecticut
with an all African-American cast. It went on to enjoy
success on Broadway. Stein and Toklas attended a
performance of Four Saints in Chicago during Stein’s
1934-35 American Tour.
Act One
Saint Therese in a storm at Avila there can be rain and
warm snow and warm that is the water is warm the river is
not warm the sun is not warm and if to stay to cry.
Act II, Scene X
Saint Therese: Once in a while.
Saint Therese: When.
Saint Settlement: Then.
Saint Genevieve: When.
Saint Cecile: Then.
Saint Ignatius: Then.
Saint Ignatius: Men.
Saint Ignatius: When.
Saint Ignatius: Ten.
Saint Ignatius: Then.
Saint Therese: When.
Saint Chavez: Ten.
Saint Plan: When then.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Saint Settlement: Then.
Saint Anne: Then.
Saint Genevieve: Ten.
Saint Cecile: Then.
Saint Answers: Ten.
Saint Cecile: When then.
Saint Answers: Ten.
Saint Chavez: Saints when ten.
Saint Settlement: Ten.
Saint Plan: Ten.
Saint Anne: Ten.
Saint Plan: Ten.
Saint Plan: Ten.
Saint Plan: Ten.
Act III, Scene II
Pigeons on the grass alas.
Pigeons on the grass alas.
Short longer grass short longer longer shorter yellow
grass. Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow
grass alas pigeons on the grass.
Original production: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
– Hartford, CT1934
Scenario by Maurice Grosser
Musical Direction by Alexander Smallens
Production by John Houseman
Staging and Choreography by Sir Frederick Ashton
Scenery and Costumes by Florine Stettheimer
Choral Direction by Eva Jessye
Credits: Archival footage by Julien Levy, excerpted with
permission from Virgil Thomson Composer, directed by
John Huszar © 1980 FilmAmerica, Inc.® Musical recording
of original score conducted by Virgil Thomson in 1947,
courtesy of RCA Records and FilmAmerica, Inc.®
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Recording features Beatrice Robinson-Wayne, Inez
Matthews, soprano; Edward Matthews, Randolph
Robinson, baritone; Ruby Greene, alto; Charles Holland,
David Bethea, tenor; Altonell Hines, mezzo-soprano;
Abner Dorsey, bass; Virgil Thomson, conductor.
Contemporary production:
Mark Morris Dance Group
Zellerbach Hall, University of California – Berkeley, CA
2005
Choreography by Mark Morris
Sets by Maira Kalman
Costumes by Elizabeth Kurtzman
Lighting by Michael Chybowski
Conducted by Jeffrey Thomas
with Berkeley Symphony Orchestra and American Bach Soloists
Credits: Footage courtesy Mark Morris Dance Group,
recorded with funds from the Doris Duke Charitable
Foundation, for the Archive of the recorded Moving Image,
part of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Zellerbach
Hall, Cal Performances, Berkeley, September 30, 2005.
World Premiere: June 28, 2000, The Coliseum, London,
UK, Discalced, Inc. © 2000
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
STORY 4: CELEBRITY STEIN
“Everyone talks about Ms. Stein, a few read her, some attempt with noble futility to understand her and
none, alas, with the minor exception of Gertrude Stein, do.”
—Boston Evening Transcript, December 29, 1934
Stein achieved celebrity in the United States in the early 1930s with three events: the enthusiastic
reception, in 1933, of her book The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, which became a best seller; the
opening on Broadway of the opera she created with Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts, in 1934,
which put her name in lights; and her triumphant return to the United States after thirty years in France,
a victory lap during which she traveled the country, lecturing on her writing and her love of modern
painting. The idea of a lecture tour appealed to Stein: it would structure and pay for the trip and,
perhaps more important, would gain public attention for her earlier literary work. She and Toklas
engaged dressmakers to fashion them traveling clothes as well as a gown each for evening events.
For seven months in 1934–35, with Toklas always at her
side, Stein traveled across the country,speaking to the
young at colleges and universities and occasionally to art
associations and museum
audiences. Stein gave around seventy lectures, averaging
two to three a week. Stein traveled with Toklas by car,
train, or plane, speaking throughout metropolitan New
York and Chicago before journeying as far north as
Boston, west as California, and south as Texas and New
Orleans. At each stop she would lecture, meet with the
press, explore the region, and—according to her memoirs
do a lot of eating at local hotels and restaurants and at
parties given in her honor.
From the moment the women arrived in New York, the American press followed them avidly, giving
Stein more coverage, headlines, and photographs than she had ever elicited before. Lionized at last, she
had achieved the fame she always desired. On returning to France, Stein continued to write books and
articles for her new American public until the Second World War cut off her access to friends,
publishers, and the media. But once the Allies achieved victory, Stein became famous all over again,
lavishing attention on American soldiers, sailors, and airmen, who called her Gertie.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
{ STORY 4 | Celebrity Stein }
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
“…a wonderful self-portrait of a perfect egotist.”
—Isabel Patterson, Political philosopher and literary critic
In the early 1930s, Stein decided to write an autobiography, one of the few literary genres she had never
tried. In writing it, Stein put her long partnership with Alice front and center and told the story of their
domestic partnership as an unqualified success story. In writing of their colorful life together and of the
important cultural figures whose lives they had both affected, and in putting Alice’s name, not her own,
in the title of the book, Stein opened up a space for Alice in America’s cultural history. Stein wrote the
book quickly, in a few months, and used a new, more self-consciously accessible voice that she called,
and subsequent scholars have called, her “audience writing.”
The title page said simply The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and named no author. Nor did the
caption for the photograph by Man Ray, used for the cover and frontispiece, mention Stein, even though
she was at her desk in the picture: “Alice B. Toklas at the door, photograph by Man Ray.”
The first half of the book is filled with stories about the building of the Stein collection and the comings
and goings of the bohemian avant-garde at 27, rue de Fleurus. In naming the artists, critics, writers,
poets, and composers who came to see the collection, Stein constructed an early transatlantic who’s
who of modernism—of the locals and expatriates who would eventually work their way into standard
histories of modern art. To help create her history, Stein included in the book photographs of herself
and of the atelier hung with paintings. That artists disputed her claims in the Autobiography made the
book all the more attractive in the States, where it was a runaway best seller. The first run of 5,400
copies in 1933 sold out immediately, and by 1935 there had been three more printings. When the
Atlantic Monthly magazine ran four excerpts from the Autobiography, just before the book was
published, there was considerable buzz about who actually wrote the book and whether Alice B. Toklas
was a real person or a figment of Stein’s imagination. At least one newspaper critic claimed Stein had
made up Alice, inspiring three people, including Carl Van Vechten, to write letters to the editor of the
newspaper assuring him that Toklas not only existed but had lived with Stein for twenty-five years and
was Stein’s “intimate companion.”
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Stein had tried for years to get Atlantic Monthly to publish her work, but the editor found it too abstract
and difficult. However, he agreed to serialize The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas because it was
written in a more accessible style. The four excerpts appeared in the May through August 1934 issues
and sparked so much interest that the first edition of the book sold out quickly.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS CASE
Gertrude Stein (Born United States, 1874–Died France, 1946)
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (The Guild Selection Edition), 1933
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company
Hans R. Gallas Collection
“Stein’s Way”
Photograph by George Platt Lynes (American, 1907–1955) Time magazine, September 11, 1933
Hans R. Gallas Collection
“Testimony against Gertrude Stein” Supplement No. 1 to Transition magazine, February 1935
Rare Books and Special Collections, Boatwright Memorial Library, The University of Richmond,
Richmond, Virginia, Carl Van Vechten-Mark Lutz Collection
In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein carved out a central place for herself and 27, rue de
Fleurus in the birth of international modernism. The book created the first transatlantic who’s who in
modern art, naming artists like Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and Gris as canonical figures in art
history. The Autobiography, published in a French edition issued soon after the English one, angered
Parisian artists, who felt that Stein misrepresented them. In Testimony against Gertrude Stein, a special
supplement to the Paris-based little magazine Transition, several French artists wrote rebuttals. Tristan
Tzara called the book a grab “for fame and publicity” in a “baby style” that erects “artifices of the lowest
literary prostitution.” Matisse defended the beauty of his wife, whom Stein described as having “a long
face and a firm large loosely hung mouth like a horse,” and Braque maintained that Stein did not
understand cubism.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Steve Wolfe (American, born 1955)
Untitled (Study for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas), 2004–5
Oil, lithography, modeling paste on paper
Collection of Joel Wachs
Steve Wolfe creates exacting three-dimensional reproductions of Vintage, Dover, and Penguin classics as
tributes to authors such as Gertrude Stein whose books shaped his intellectual development. This is a
study for the replica of Wolfe’s well-loved edition of Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and one of
several Stein titles that he commemorated in this way.
AMERICAN TOUR CASE
Miguel Covarrubias (Mexican, 1904–1957)
“Impossible Interview: Gracie Allen vs. Gertrude Stein”
Vanity Fair magazine, January 1935
Rare Books and Special Collections, Boatwright Memorial Library, The University ofRichmond, Richmond,
Virginia, Carl Van Vechten-Mark Lutz Collection
Miguel Corvarrubias pictured Stein for Vanity Fair as an earthy granny posed next to a younger Gracie
Allen, who played the zany wife to the straight-man George Burns, her husband, in a popular radio
program. In the accompanying text, Gracie begs Gertrude to play cat’s cradle with her and Stein
declines, too old and grand for a silly game. The caricaturist gave Stein kindly eyes, a toothless grin, and
the body of a plump, old-fashioned American matron, wearing a prominent brooch bearing the
unmistakable profile of Toklas. American journalists and illustrators did not see imperial Stein, as the
Europeans characterized her, but Grannie Gertie, with a loveable voice, smile, and laugh, earnestly
instructing her fellow Americans about modern art and letters.
W. J. V. Hofmann
“Contemporary Portraits, I: Gertrude Stein”
Literary America, December 1934
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
Gertrude Stein (Born United States, 1874–Died France, 1946)
“I Came and Here I Am”
Cosmopolitan magazine, February 1935
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Unidentified artist for the Associated Press
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas disembarking from SS Champlain, 1934
Photographic reproduction
Bettman/CORBIS
Stein’s first interview with the New York City press was on shipboard before disembarking. After talking
with reporters, Stein and Toklas posed for this press photograph.
Rayhee Jackson
Gertrude Stein, 1934–35
Gelatin silver print
Collection Timothy Baum, New York
The media welcomed and pursued Stein throughout her lecture tour. They ceaselessly photographed
and interviewed her. They made a Pathé newsreel about her arrival in New York, and recorded her voice
reading selections from her work. These recordings are available at listening stations in the Domestic
Stein room.
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964)
Gertrude Stein with American Flag, 1935
Gelatin silver print on board
Rare Books and Special Collections, Boatwright Memorial Library, The University of Richmond,
Richmond, Virginia, Carl Van Vechten–Mark Lutz Collection
This photograph of Stein against an American flag, served as the frontispiece of her book, Lectures in
America.
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883–1976)
Gertrude Stein, 1935
Gelatin silver print
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
In early 1935, Random House published Lectures in America, a book of the six lectures Stein gave
throughout her tour. Imogen Cunningham, a San Francisco photographer, posed Stein seated in the
Mark Hopkins hotel holding a copy of the new book.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Alan Dunn
“It begins like this: ‘Gertrude says four hats is a hat is a hat.’ What the hell can you make out of a
declaration like that, chief?”
The New Yorker, October 27, 1934
Photographic reproduction
The New Yorker Collection, The Cartoon Bank
American newspapers and magazines frequently parodied Stein’s use of repetition in her writing and
manner of speaking. Everyone identified her with the axiom “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”
Unidentified Artist
Gertrude Stein signing books, c. 1935
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
Stein agreed to book signings in several American cities. Toklas accompanied her and, on occasion, was
asked to autograph The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964)
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas departing Newark Airport with Zuni fetishes, 1934
Gelatin silver print
Rare Books and Special Collections, Boatwright Memorial Library, The University of Richmond,
Richmond, Virginia, Carl Van Vechten–Mark Lutz Collection
Van Vechten convinced Stein and Toklas to fly for the first time in order to arrive in time to see a
performance of Four Saints in Three Acts in Chicago. Stein had never seen the opera performed. The two
women were anxious about flying, so Van Vechten accompanied them and gave each a small Zuni fetish.
They left for their trip brandishing these good luck charms. Stein loved flying over what she called the
“cubist landscape of the Midwest” and from then on flew often to get from city to city while touring.
Stein said that air travel afforded her time to write because the noise of the plane’s engines drowned
out any possibility of conversation.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880–1964)
Gertrude Stein, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1935
Gelatin silver print
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Estate of John Mark Lutz
Van Vechten accompanied Stein and Toklas on their visit to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville
and posed the writer against the famous rotunda designed by Thomas Jefferson. In addition to lecturing,
Stein visited Jefferson’s home at Monticello and a local shrine to Edgar Allen Poe. A university official
gave Stein a key to Poe’s room at the university.
Unidentified Artist
Carl Van Vechten seeing Gertrude Stein off to Paris on the SS Champlain, 1935
Gelatin silver print
Prints and Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
Upon leaving New York, Stein waved a final goodbye to the press and her friends, promising to come
again. But she never returned to her native land.
A large grouping of Gertrude Stein’s first edition books are on view here.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
The Wars I Have Seen
Running time: 2:18 minutes
Images appear courtesy of: Vogue magazine; Life magazine; Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers,
Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT; and
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
{ STORY 4 | Celebrity Stein }
Wars
During World War I Stein and Toklas, while continuing to provide a meeting place for modernists in
Paris, also served as volunteers for the American Fund for the French troops. Stein had ordered a Ford
truck from the United States and drove it, with Alice as passenger, so that they could deliver supplies to
French hospitals. They called the truck, their first vehicle, “Auntie,” for Stein’s sensible Aunt Pauline,
“who always behaved admirably in emergencies.” To show friends their wartime efforts, they sent
photographic postcards of themselves with “Auntie.” These were the first photographs documenting the
two women at work as a couple, side by side in the public sphere. In 1922 the French government
awarded Stein a medal of recognition (Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française) for her service.
During World War II, Stein and Toklas lived quietly in southeastern France, where they customarily
summered, becoming intimate with the locals and handling the daily negotiations necessary in wartime
to keep food on the table. Although German soldiers were billeted twice to their home in the village,
and they were repeatedly advised to leave France, Toklas and Stein were committed to staying. Stein, as
if in denial, never talked about what they risked by remaining in Nazi occupied France.
There has been much speculation about how Stein and Toklas survived in Nazi-occupied France as Jews,
homosexuals, and Americans. The story is complicated because one of their closest friends during this
period was the writer Bernard Faÿ, a figure in the upper echelons of the Vichy government, who ensured
their safety and that of their art collection. The extent and exact form of this protection remain unclear,
as does the amount of contact the women had with Faÿ during the darkest days of the war. It is certain,
however, that his deep affection for Stein was never tainted by his aggressive anti-Semitism. The two
friends worked together on translations and intellectual projects, and Faÿ had helped Stein organize her
lecture tour in America. The Life magazine article published in 1944 after liberation never mentioned
that Alice and Gertrude were Jewish, instead presenting as their triumph their success in keeping their
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
nationality from the Germans. Both Stein and American journalists repeatedly told the story of the
Germans’ failure to recognize Stein as a famous American writer.
When the war ended, Stein’s deep and passionate patriotism led her to invite hundreds of GIs to the
home she shared with Toklas in Paris, feeding them and showing off her collection, and to accept
invitations to lecture to and talk with U.S. troops wherever they were stationed. Her fondness for
American soldiers—she called them godsons—which had begun during the first war, became
newsworthy and good press copy in 1944–45. Stein’s Wars I Have Seen, written behind enemy lines
from 1942 to 1944, the two years she was out of communication with the outside world, sold briskly and
put her life back in the American press. War would be Stein’s last big subject in her writing until her
death in 1946.
WARS CASE
Mabel Thérèse Bonney (Born United States, 1897–Died France, 1978)
“Gertrude Stein in France”
Vogue magazine, July 1, 1942
Rare Books and Special Collections, Boatwright Memorial Library, The University of Richmond,
Richmond, Virginia, Carl Van Vechten-Mark Lutz Collection
Carl Mydans (American, 1907–2004)
Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, c. 1944
Gelatin silver print
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
“Gertrude Stein Safe, Safe, is Safe”
International News Wire Service Press Release, September 29, 1944
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
Carl Mydans (American, 1907–2004)
“The Liberation of Gertrude Stein”
Life magazine, October 2, 1944
Museum purchase
Gertrude Stein (Born United States, 1874–Died France, 1946)
“Off We All Went To See Germany”
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Life magazine, August 6, 1945
Museum purchase
Unidentified artist
Gertrude Stein with military cinematographer in her Paris apartment, 1945
Photographic reproduction
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Gertrude Stein (Born United States, 1874–Died France, 1946)
Wars I Have Seen
New York: Random House, Inc., 1945
Hans R. Gallas Collection
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Born Cuba, 1957–Died United States, 1996)
“Untitled” (Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris), 1992
Framed C-print
The Capital Group Companies, Inc., Los Angeles, California
The flowers pictured in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ homage to Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein evoke the
grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, where both women are buried; the flower beds they cultivated
in their garden in Bilignin; and Toklas’s love of gardening, cut flowers, and floral prints. But is this really a
photograph of Stein and Toklas’s tomb? And if not, does it matter? The artist, by calling the work
“untitled,” leaves the answers to these questions to viewers. The parenthetical description of the
photograph’s content and the technical brilliance of the photograph’s execution, however, may prompt
them to accept the sincerity of the artist’s sentimental gesture.
Tammy Rae Carland (American, born 1965)
Untitled (Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Grave, Oakland), 2010
Color photograph
Courtesy of Tammy Rae Carland, Oakland, CA
Tammy Rae Carland’s Untitled (Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Grave, Oakland) points back to the Felix GonzalezTorres photograph Untitled (Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s Grave). Carland’s formally and
conceptually analogous photograph functions, in her words, as “an homage to Gonzalez-Torres’ homage
to Stein and Toklas.” Both works reflect on love, loss, mourning, memory, memorialization, and lineage.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Jacques Lipchitz (Born Lithuania, 1891–Died United States, 1973)
Gertrude Stein II (also known as Sketch for Gertrude Stein), 1938
Bronze
Collection of Rice University, Houston, TX
Gift of Jane Blaffer Owen
In memory of Robert Lee Blaffer, Trustee of Rice Institute 1935–1942
After sculpting Stein in 1920, Lipchitz did not see her again until 1938, when he was struck by her
physical decline. “She had lost a great deal of weight,” the artist wrote, and looked “now like a shriveled
old rabbi with a little rabbi’s cap on her head.” He made two sketches of her head, one without a cap
and this one, with the cap, now called the “rabbi portrait.” Lipchitz, blunt in detailing Stein’s human
frailties, plastered and smeared clay to render the texture of loose flesh, deep wrinkles, and sunken
cheeks. Judging her as few others did, he wrote that “the massive, self-confident Buddha has become a
tired and rather tragic old woman.”
{ STORY 4 | Celebrity Stein }
Death
Gertrude Stein 1874 –1946
Alice B. Toklas 1877–1967
When Stein was diagnosed with cancer in July 1946, the disease was far advanced, and she died just two
weeks later, at the age of seventy-two. It is said that she died holding the first copy of Brewsie and
Willie, her play about two American soldiers, inspired by her listening to soldiers converse about the war
and their lives. In October 1946 there was a small funeral service for her at the American cathedral,
followed by her interment at Père Lachaise cemetery, in the Jewish section, not far from Edith Piaf and
Amadeo Modigliani. Francis Rose, whom Toklas asked to design a tombstone for the grave, drew
inspiration from the house at Bilignin, with its beautiful terrace garden.
Alice lived another twenty-one years, dying at age eighty-nine in 1967. She oversaw the publication of
Gertrude’s unpublished manuscripts. Although Alice earned public recognition for her own talents, she
sometimes struggled financially as a widow. In 1954 she published The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook,
including favorite recipes (her infamous “Haschich Fudge” among them), crediting them to restaurants,
friends, and servants, and interweaving with them stories from her travels with Stein. A second
cookbook and then her memoir, What is Remembered, followed, and eventually a volume of her letters.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
The correspondence confirms that in her late years Toklas became a grand lady, impressing those who
had once thought her as insubstantial as Stein’s shadow.
Toklas converted to Catholicism. She had arranged for a Catholic mass to be said after her death and for
burial alongside Stein in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Her name was added to the back of the
monument designed by Francis Rose. “Gertrude Stein” appears on the front of the stone in large letters,
while in much smaller type on the back it says, “Alice B. Toklas / San Francisco April 30, 1877 / Paris 7
Mars 1967,” her birth date in English and her death date in French.
Gertrude had appointed Carl Van Vechten the literary executer of her estate and asked that all of her
unpublished manuscripts be published. Gertrude and Alice decided to give all their correspondence and
papers to Yale University, where they are archived and remain.
STORY 5: LEGACIES
“I got out of bed and headed for the drawing table with the thought, ‘Art. Literature. Marijuana.
Homosexuality. Paris. Fun.’ and drew the first two strips of Gertrude’s Follies.”
—Tom Hachtman, artist, interview, 2009
Stein continued to attract admirers and fans after her death, especially among young American artists
finding their own voice and place in avant-garde modernism. This final story, Legacies, explores Stein’s
continuing lively presence in American art and the role of artists in making her the grande dame of
transatlantic modernism. Immediately following her death, the interdisciplinary cadre of artists
associated with Black Mountain College, in the North Carolina mountains, and Judson Church, in New
York City, embraced Stein’s linguistic play, theater pieces, and operas. In the 1970s, first pop artists and
then feminist and queer artists looked to Stein as a role model, a foremother of avant-gardism who
believed herself a genius and stood by her same-sex partner without embarrassment or fear. Andy
Warhol chose Stein as one of ten influential twentieth-century Jews for an art project, underscoring her
ethnicity. Other postmodernists have emphasized her crossing of boundaries between media and her
multiple voices—some obscure, others popular. Over the past fifty years, scholars and artists have made
her Everybody’s Stein.
Today, Stein’s collaborators include troublemakers, paradigm shifters, activists, global art stars, cultural
critics, feminists, performing artists, and queers whose interventions, interpretations, and
appropriations contribute to the expansion of her aura of cultural authority. Many of them consider
themselves Stein’s progeny. They have variously interpreted, appropriated, covered, cited, parodied,
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
emulated, critiqued, misquoted, analyzed, and revitalized Stein’s works and have inhabited or
rehabilitated her persona. Experimental practices in the arts extend Stein’s reach into the twenty-first
century. Artists today continue to adapt Stein and interpret her for contemporary audiences.
POSTHUMOUS THEATER AND COLLABORATIONS CASE
Posthumous Collaborations
“Everything in modern theater has been touched by Stein’s reorganization of the English language.”
—Judith Malina, Living Theatre
When Stein achieved posthumous cult status in American experimental theater, her influence in a range
of disciplines increased. In 1951 New York City’s famed Living Theatre presented the inaugural
production of Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. It attracted support from the poets’ Paul
Goodman and William Carlos Williams, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the composer John
Cage (who personally staffed the theater’s ticket booth). The Judson Poets’ Theater, which its founder,
the composer Al Carmines, described as “a child of the Living Theatre,” featured Stein’s works
throughout the 1960s. Visual artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Red Grooms, Andy Warhol, and Nam
June Paik were inspired by Stein’s works at Judson, and Robert Wilson recalls that encountering Stein
there at this time “changed my way of thinking forever.” Having since directed and designed several of
Stein’s works, Wilson describes his engagement with her as a “creative dialog.”
Robert Galster (Active 1950s)
Four Plays, Living Theatre, New York, 1951
Paper flyer
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
Judith Malina and Julian Beck, founders of the Living Theatre, held the unofficial premier of their off-offBroadway troupe in the living room of their Greenwich Village apartment, where they staged two plays
by Gertrude Stein. Beck handcrafted the programs, using materials from their domestic environment—
brown paper bags and scraps of colored stationary. He conceived making the sets for this production’s
official opening at Cherry Lane Theatre from similarly utilitarian materials. “The setting,” he recorded,
“underlines the solid and basic language that Miss Stein used as a medium.” The Living Theatre served
for decades as the incubator of the new ideas and talents that fed the experimental theatrical scene in
Greenwich Village. The Judson Poets’ Theater, in particular, benefited from the Living Theatre’s
innovative repertoire and absorbed key collaborators into its own company.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Robert Galster (Active 1950s)
Ladies’ Voices, Living Theatre, New York, 1951
Paper flyer
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
Four Plays, Living Theatre, New York, August 14–17, 1951
Handmade collage program on paper bag backing
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
In Circles, Judson Poets’ Theater, New York, October 6, 1967
Program
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
This program for the musical play In Circles, a plain photocopy, evidences the no-frills philosophy of the
Judson Poets’ Theater. The performance (the work was an adaptation of A Circular Play, A Play in Circles,
by Gertrude Stein) transpired on a nearly bare stage, where Al Carmines banged out his score on an
upright piano and sang. He set Stein’s prose to ragtime, tango, waltz, barbershop, jazz, and other
popular rhythms, each night performing a different opening number based on Stein’s text. In Circles
anchored the theater’s repertoire and became one of the company’s longest-running productions. It
opened at the Judson church on Washington Square in 1967 and ran through 1968, moving twice to
larger Greenwich Village venues. The Judson Poets’ Theater staged a total of 222 more or less
consecutive performances of In Circles, still the longest run of any work by Stein.
Robert Galster (Active 1950s)
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Living Theater, 1951
Flyer
Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana, Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
{ STORY 5 | Legacies }
Queer Stein
During her lifetime, Gertrude Stein inspired her gay followers and fans by living openly as a lesbian and
by coupling homoeroticism with modernist aesthetics. Her writing evokes same-sex desire poetically—
rarely explicitly—and because it resists making sense in any fixed or categorical way, it has attracted
devotees for whom queer theory and postmodernism are foundational. Queer artists today appreciate
Stein’s literary strategies of repetition, appropriation, quotation, and the elevation of the mundane and
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
use them, as she did, to transform the conventional and commonplace into something extraordinary—
and implicitly sexy.
{ STORY 5 | Legacies }
Popular Stein
Gertrude Stein saw no contradiction between elite literary genius and popular celebrity. She craved
recognition as both and in time realized her ambition, leaving a legacy both to scholars, who continue to
study her life and writings, and to the trade press, which continues to publish paperback editions of
Stein’s works, popular biographies of Stein, and fictional accounts of her life for new generations of
readers. Stein also surfaces in visual work destined for broad audiences, including caricatures, cartoons,
and pop art initiatives that embroider her legend and celebrate her famously magnetic personality.
Thomas Hachtman (American, born 1948)
Gertrude’s Follies
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980
Museum purchase
Tom Hachtman (American, born 1948)
Gertrude Steinem, 1984
Airbrush on paper
Margaret and Bruce Kellner
Against the backdrop of the 1970s women’s rights and gay liberation movements, the cartoonist Tom
Hachtman created Gertrude’s Follies, a popular comic strip featuring Stein and Toklas. This
“schizographic,” which merges signifiers of Stein (the clothing and pose familiar from Picasso’s Portrait
of Gertrude Stein) with those of Ms magazine’s founder Gloria Steinem (the aviator glasses, long blond
hair, and cigarette), is one of many spin-offs Hachtman’s strip engendered.
Gertrude Stein (Born United States, 1874–Died France, 1946)
Illustrated by Clement Hurd (American, 1908–1988)
Companion volume by Edith Hurd (American, 1910–1997)
The World is Round / The World is Not Flat, 1986
Books, box, and balloon
San Francisco: Arion Press
Closed: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of George Hellyer in honor of Ira Yeager [1999.137.13]
Open: Hans R. Gallas Collection
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
The 1986 special edition of The World is Round by Arion Press was designed for collectors. Stein’s text
was unchanged but this edition was round like a globe with Hurd’s illustrations in blue ink on white
paper. The book’s cover is rose red (not a pink) and has blue lettering. The square box in which the book
is packaged is pink with blue lettering, a sly nod to the pink pages with blue type that Stein had insisted
upon for the first edition. There were two extras in the box: a balloon to remind us that this is a book
about and for children, and a small square red book, The World is Flat written by Edith Thatcher Hurd,
that gives an historical account of her husband’s and Stein’s working together on the first edition.
Gertrude Stein and Clement Hurd never met but they had a lively correspondence about their joint
project.
Ward Schumaker (American, born 1943)
Paris, France, 2000
Book
Ward Schumaker, San Francisco, CA
In 2000, the Yolla Bolly Press of Covelo, California, created a contemporary edition of Paris, France,
Stein’s 1940 rumination upon the habits and national character of the French, discussing, among other
things, their food, dogs, fashions, and adoption of American-styled modernities like cocktails,
automobiles, and electric stoves. The Yolla Bolly edition revitalized the book through graphics,
typography, handsome paper, elegant design, and an afterword by George Plimpton. The idea came
from Ward Schumaker, a well-known Bay Area book-artist, who provided the book’s delightful drawings.
For the cover image—and for another inside the book—Schumaker drew an image of Stein in her
familiar pose of talking with her right arm raised to her head. Under the image, as if hand written,
appeared words from the book. “I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely
conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free.” The quote stresses the irony of one of
Stein’s staunchest beliefs in her later years that tradition grounded people, making them feel safe and
comfortable and free to be radical in thought and art.
Donald Evans (American, 1945–1977)
Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. Type of 1964, 1972
Watercolor on paper
Collection Bill Katz, New York
Donald Evans created these faux postage stamps to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Tender Buttons,
which Stein completed in 1912 and published in 1914. Stein’s Tender Buttons is like a gathering of cubist
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
collages, each short piece juxtaposing words in free association, sometimes evoking mundane objects
and events and snippets of dialogue. The book is a cult classic in gay and lesbian communities, in part
because readers have seen in its dwelling on domestic spaces and objects an encoding of lesbian
sexuality. Evans, a gay man who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, counted Tender Buttons among the
works that affirmed his own aesthetic and sexual transgressiveness.
Donald Evans (American, 1945–1977)
50th Anniversary of “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson” by Gertrude Stein, 1972
Watercolor on paper
Collection Bill Katz, New York
Devorah Sperber (American, born 1961)
After Picasso (Gertrude Stein), 2006
5,024 spools of thread; stainless steel ball, chain, and hanging apparatus; clear acrylic viewing sphere;
metal stand
Collection of the Artist, Studio, New York
LOOK THROUGH THE ACRYLIC SPHERE TO VIEW THE ARTWORK
In a series of monumental installations, Sperber replicates masterpieces using spools of colored thread
as pixels. She presents canonical works such as Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein upside down,
and they appear abstract until viewed through an acrylic globe, which, like the human eye or camera
lens, inverts and focuses the image. In this way, Sperber incorporates the mechanisms by which the
brain makes sense of the visual world into the artistic experience she creates for her viewers.
David Levine (American, 1926–2009)
Gertrude Stein, 1966
Pen, ink, and pencil on paper
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., The Joseph H.
Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981
This was one of the 3,800 signature drawings Levine created for the New York Review of Books, where
this drawing originally illustrated “A Portrait of Gertrude Stein,” an essay by Virgil Thomson that was
based on his autobiography. David Levine’s pen-and-ink drawing captures Stein at the height of her
literary fame, posed in medallion-like profile. Her hair is clipped close to the skull, and she wears a mantailored touring suit. This pose was codified in photographs taken after 1926 (when Toklas cut Stein’s
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
hair) by a string of “official” photographers: Man Ray, George Platt Lynes, Carl Van Vechten, and the
press photographers assigned to cover her U.S. lecture tour. Levine’s Stein is defined, not by her setting
or her accessories, but by her expressive physiognomy, the caricaturist’s stock-in-trade.
David Levine (American, 1926–2009)
Alice B. Toklas, 1974
Pen, ink, and pencil on paper
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., The Joseph H.
Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981
Levine’s drawing for the the New York Review of Books illustrated Virgil Thomson’s “Wickedly Wonderful
Widow,” a review of Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas. The letters document what Thomson
called Toklas’s “sacred duties” during her “responsible widowhood.” These included orchestrating the
publication of eight new volumes of writings unpublished during Stein’s lifetime. Toklas subsidized these
posthumous publications, Thomson reveals, “through the sale of all her Picasso drawings, pornographic
and other.”
Edward Sorel (American, born 1929)
Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell, 1988
Pen, ink, and watercolor on paper
Edward Sorel, New York
Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987)
Gertrude Stein, 1980
Color screen print
Hans R. Gallas Collection
In 1980, Andy Warhol did the series Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century based on archival
photographs. Included in the series was Gertrude Stein, despite her disinclination to foreground her
Jewish identity. The other subjects were Sarah Bernhardt, Louis Brandeis, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein,
Sigmund Freud, George Gershwin, Franz Kafka, all three Marx Brothers, and Golda Meir. As a starting
point for his portrait of Stein, Warhol used her Vichy passport photo from 1940. This passport was
required when Stein and Toklas traveled from their home in Bilignin where they stayed throughout the
war to occupied Paris to retrieve Picasso’s portrait of Stein and a few other prized possessions from
their apartment.
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Terry Berlier (American, born 1972)
Human Tuning Fork #4 (World Tuning), 2003
Mixed media sound sculpture
Courtesy of Terry Berlier, Stanford, CA
The title of this piece evokes a sound-making mechanism to tune human beings and put them in
harmony with one another on a global scale. Gertrude Stein’s novella Many Many Women provides the
script for this sound sculpture, which consists of 240 telephone speakers—one for every country or
territory in the world—wired together to form endless loops of transmission. The speakers broadcast
Stein’s mantra-like text “anyone having been that one is the one that one is.” Three different recordings
circulate. The first is of Stein’s original text read in English. The second was created using software to
translate the text successively into the languages of the countries involved in World War I and World
War II, and finally back into English, incorporating the resulting distortions. The third version of the
recording relays the text through the current year’s most prevalent languages from English to Chinese to
Spanish to Arabic to Portuguese to Japanese and back to English. Terry Berlier’s piece frees Stein’s words
from their preserve on the printed page, affirming that hers is a living language, meant to be spoken,
heard, repeated, and reconfigured endlessly in new contexts.
Louise Fishman (American, born 1939)
Angry Gertrude, 1973
Acrylic on paper
Courtesy of the artist and Cheim & Read, New York
This painting is one of a series dedicated to thirty rebellious women who shaped Louise Fishman’s
political consciousness and artistic practice. Fishman says she portrayed her personal deities abstractly,
with names instead of faces, because of the Jewish interdiction against representing the face of God, the
human face, or the body. At the time Fishman began this series, moreover, her lesbian feminist artistic
circle included primarily writers: the pathbreaking anthropologist Esther Newton, the art critic Jill
Johnston, and the author Bertha Harris. “Everybody kept journals. A record of all their experience, and I
was very jealous. I kept sketchbooks. But I loved the idea of the written word.” With feminist
deliberation, the artist identified each of her subjects, including Gertrude, by first name, omitting the
patronymic.
Glenn Ligon (American, born 1960)
Warm Broad Glow, 2005
Neon tubing with electrical wire and transformer
Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories
May 12, 2011 through September 6, 2011
Exhibition Text
Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Ligon lifted the phrase “the warm broad glow of negro sunshine” from Gertrude Stein’s 1909 novella
“Melanctha” and has incorporated it into a series of works. Stein’s story chronicles the life of a mulatto
woman as she negotiates the social constraints of segregated Baltimore in search of intellectual and
emotional fulfillment. Exceptional in Stein’s oeuvre for its African American characters and simulation of
black rhythmic speech, “Melanctha” was widely perceived in its day as the first credible portrait of black
life by a white author. Ligon hangs the phrase “negro sunshine” in the air, estranged from its literary
context in a way that Stein herself might have appreciated. Here he traced the neon lettering with an
opaque black compound called Plasti Dip so that the blacked-out writing, haloed by white light,
increases textual (and, metaphorically, racial) disorientation.