Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector.
Background
Gertrude Stein was born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania to Jewish parents, Daniel, a wealthy businessman, and Amelia Stein. When she was three years old, her family moved to Vienna and Paris and returned to America in 1878. They settled in Oakland, California.
Education
Stein attended First Hebrew Congregation of Oakland's Sabbath school.
In 1892, after the death of her parents, she went to live with her mother’s sister, Fanny, in Baltimore. Here, she met the Cone sisters, Claribel and Ettaa, connoisseurs of modern French art.
She attended Radcliffe College, from 1893 to 1897 and was a student of psychologist William James under whose supervision Stein and fellow student, Leon Mendez Solomons, performed experiments on normal motor automatism, a phenomenon hypothesized to occur in people when their attention is divided between two simultaneous intelligent activities such as writing and speaking.
Encouraged by James, she reluctantly joined Johns Hopkins Medical School. But she left the course midway.
In 1903, she relocated to Paris with her brother Leo hoping to pursue an art career. Their residence had an adjacent studio where here they accumulated the works of art into a significant collection.
Every Saturday, her residence hosted talents in modern literature and art, like Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse.
She completed Q.E.D. in 1903 but was suppressed by the author until it was published in 1950 as Things as They. The story is based on the lesbian triangular love that happened at John Hopkins.
In 1904, Stein began Fernhurst, a fictional account of a scandalous three-person romantic affair involving a dean, Carey Thomas, a faculty member, Mary Gwinn, and a Harvard graduate, Alfred Hodder.
By early 1906, Leo and Gertrude Stein's studio had many paintings by Henri Manguin, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Honore Daumier, Henri Matisse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin.
Between 1908 and 1913, she wrote descriptive essays which were word portraits catalogued in Mellow. People like Picasso, Matisse and others who used to attend the Saturday Salon were subjects of the portraits.
In 1909, she published her first book, Three Lives. It was made up of three independent stories, The Good Anna, Melanctha, and The Gentle Lena, all set in Bridgepoint, a fictional town.
In 1914, Leo relocated to Italy, and the art collection was divided. He departed with 16 Renoirs and most of Matisse, leaving Picasso to his sister. She now turned her focus on Cubism.
Then she published Tender Buttons a small book separated into three sections - Food, Objects and Rooms. It is one of the great modern experiments of Cubanism in verse, a collection of confusing gibberish.
Everybody's Autobiography, published in 1937, is a continuation of her own memoirs and a sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Both were written in a less experimental, more approachable style.
In 1938, she wrote Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights as a libretto for an opera. When it was premiered at Beaver College, she was hailed as the Bard of Bedlam.
Gertrude Stein died on July 27, 1946 at the age of 72 after surgery for stomach cancer at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine. She was interred in Paris in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Carl Van Vechten her literary executor, helped to publish all her unpublished works after her death.
Gertrude Stein publicly endorsed General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War and admired Vichy leader Marshal Philippe Pétain. Some have argued for a more nuanced view of Stein's collaborationist activity, arguing that it was rooted in her wartime predicament and status as a Jew in Nazi-occupied France. Similarly, Stein commented in 1938 on Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky: "There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing."
Views
Quotations:
"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."
"This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition."
"Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."
"It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing."
"Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen."
Personality
A woman with deep black eyes and a supremely self-assured manner, Gertrude Stein was frequently intimidating, impatient with disagreement and prone to alienate associates.
Physical Characteristics:
Gertrude Stein's appearance is striking, especially in her calm, self-possessed carriage and in her unusual head. The most remarkable touch is her thick hair, close-cropped, which must give strong resistance to a comb. It was black, but is mingled almost equally throughout with gray, and the result intensifies distinction. It also makes her seem masculine, an impression confirmed by her low-pitched voice, her decided features and her energetic manner. Her eyes are dark and large and there is in their forceful expression something of the ascetic, suggesting years of meditation.
"She wears a woolen skirt of medium length, a silk over the jacket of mixed tone and what would be termed sensible shoes. When she laughs, as she often does at the mental confusion produced in her auditor by many of her remarks, her face and body become mobile, and there is something impish in her expression."
Interests
art collecting
Politicians
Francisco Franco, Philippe Pétain
Writers
Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson
Artists
Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse
Connections
Gertrude Stein realized that she was a lesbian while studying medicine at Hopkins. She met her life partner Alice B. Toklas in 1907, on Toklas' first day in Paris, at her brother, Michael’s apartment.