An iconic life: Gertrude Stein: A complex pioneer of modernism

BRENDA HAAS

Gertrude Stein definitely lived a storied life. Remembered as a language innovator, lesbian role model, feminist pioneer and literary anarchist, she hosted avant-garde authors and artists such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso in her Paris apartment.

But along with her progressive lifestyle, the Jewish-American experimental writer and art collector also developed ties with a powerful Vichy government official and Nazi collaborator during World War II — a close friendship that presumably saved her life and her exceptional art collection. That darker part of her biography has been long overlooked in her legacy. The youngest of five children, Stein was born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, in the US state of Pennsylvania, to wealthy immigrant parents of German-Jewish ancestry. The Stein family briefly moved to Europe while Stein was an infant and she spent her early years in Austria and France. Her family returned to the US in 1879, first settling in Baltimore, Maryland, and later Oakland, California, where she spent her youth.

In 1893, Stein enrolled at Radcliffe College, the women’s liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was the parallel institution to the then all-male Harvard College. She studied psychology at Radcliffe for four years, graduating in 1897. One of her lecturers was William James, a thinker renowned as “the father of American psychology” and brother of the novelist Henry James. He led her to explore the phenomenon of the stream of consciousness, which is seen as having marked her modernist writing style.

Stein later enrolled at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. Though she first did well, she eventually lost interest and didn’t graduate. Instead, she moved to Paris, where her brother Leo was already living and collecting art.

Savvy art lovers, the siblings collected paintings by well-known artists like Cezanne, Renoir, Manet and Gauguin. But they also bought works by then “unknown” painters. This included early Cubist paintings by Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris, as well as expressionist pictures by Henri Matisse. A 1968 article in The New York Times described their apartment on 27 Rue de Fleurus on the left bank of the Seine River as the “first modern art museum.” Stein hosted Saturday evening salons that drew not only the European avant-garde artists whose works hung in her home from floor to ceiling but also American writers. Calling them the “Lost Generation,” Stein’s literary guests included Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound. “Everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began,” Stein later wrote in “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.”

Picasso started to work on a portrait of Stein shortly after they first met in 1905, in gratitude for her patronage. Stein famously sat up to 90 times for the Spanish master before he was satisfied with capturing her personality — not her looks — on canvas.

Many saw little resemblance to Stein in what was a foretaste of Picasso’s experiments in cubism. Picasso allegedly replied, “Never mind, in the end she will manage to look just like it.”