By Donald H. Harrison
SAN FRANCISCO – The writer Gertrude Stein was a woman of collaborations, alliances, and partnerships. The unorthodox web she wove gained her fame in the art world, celebrity in the popular media, and made her an icon among lesbians and gays.
Her life is exhaustively chronicled in the “Seeing Gertrude Stein” exhibit on display through September 6th at the 63,000-square-foot Daniel-Libeskind-designed Contemporary Jewish Museum here.
Visitors first learn how appreciative artists and photographers viewed Stein. With inherited wealth, Stein and her brother, Leo, became early collectors of avant-garde artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. The brother and sister hosted salons at their shared apartment in Paris, where these and other artists came to mingle. As the fame of Picasso and Matisse grew, so too did the reputations of the Stein siblings as art connoisseurs.
Eventually, Leo and Gertrude quarreled, resulting in their permanent estrangement. But Gertrude’s relationship with the art world was secure. Appreciative artists found her bulky body an ever so tempting subject for portraiture and Stein, typically dressed with a touch of masculinity, was happy to oblige. It was a symbiotic arrangement, according to the exhibit’s curators Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer. Stein’s presence in the art world was confirmed and embroidered upon every time her portrait appeared in the collected works of one of her artists. On the other hand, the arrangement was also good for the artists, showing them to be collected by the same person who knew and collected Picasso and Matisse.
When various artists who had cultivated Stein’s favor had exhibits of their works, she often would write the gallery notes and commentaries about the exhibit, further enhancing their mutual reputations.
Not only was Stein a patron of the arts, she also was a word artist herself, who was not afraid to write in a style that seemed to many as abstract as Picasso’s. Loving repetitious phrases, including her “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” Stein essayed on numerous topics including about the artists, writers and other creative people whose lives intersected hers. Although raised Jewish, she found stories of Catholic saints magnetic, collaborating with composer Virgil Thomson to produce the opera Four Saints in Three Acts. The libretto for this opera contained the memorable line, “Pigeons on the grass, alas.”
Stein had star power. According to the museum’s narration, “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 also paid homage in the 1945 opera Mother of Us All to suffragette Susan B. Anthony.
“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,’” according to the museum’s printed narration.
Operas were but one product of Stein’s creation. She also wrote various books, stories, and a children’s tale. Perhaps her most famous oeuvre was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, an intentionally mis-titled book about her own life as a lesbian, art collector, and writer. Alice B. Toklas was Stein’s lover and life-long companion, who later became famous in her own right for her cookbooks, especially the one in which she provided a recipe for hashisch fudge.
While the bulky Stein presented an almost masculine personae – some suggested that she was a Jewish Buddha – Toklas was a very feminine partner, the supportive homemaker and wife to Stein. The pair were open about being lesbians decades before gays and lesbians generally came out of the closet, and their relationship lasted some three decades until Stein’s death.
In so many ways, Stein was a larger-than-life figure, and this exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum ably reflects her life and impact.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com File: US Canada West 09