Gertrude Stein

Stein's birthplace and childhood home in Allegheny West

Stein, the youngest of a family of five children, was born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (which merged with Pittsburgh in 1907), to upper-middle-class Jewish parents, Daniel Stein and Amelia (née Keyser) Stein.[9][10] Her father was a wealthy businessman with real estate holdings. German and English were spoken in their home.[11] Gertrude's siblings were: Michael (1865), Simon (1868), Bertha (1870), and Leo (1872).[12]

Stein at three years of age

When Stein was three years old, she and her family moved to Vienna, and then Paris. Accompanied by governesses and tutors, the Steins endeavored to imbue their children with the cultured sensibilities of European history and life.[13] After a year-long sojourn abroad, they returned to America in 1878, settling in Oakland, California, where her father became director of San Francisco's streetcar lines, the Market Street Railway.[14] Stein attended First Hebrew Congregation of Oakland's Sabbath school.[15] During their residence in Oakland, they lived for four years on a ten-acre lot, and Stein built many memories of California there. She would often go on excursions with her brother, Leo, with whom she developed a close relationship. Stein found formal schooling in Oakland unstimulating, but she often read: Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Scott, Burns, Smollett, Fielding, and more.[10]

When Stein was 14 years old, her mother died. Three years later, her father died as well. Stein's eldest brother, Michael Stein, age 26,[12] then took over the family business holdings, moved his four siblings to San Francisco,[16] where he now was a director of the Market Street Cable Railway Company, and in 1892 arranged for Gertrude and another sister, Bertha, to live with their mother's family in Baltimore.[17] Here she lived with her uncle David Bachrach,[18] who in 1877 had married Gertrude's maternal aunt, Fanny Keyser.

In Baltimore, Stein met Claribel and Etta Cone, who held Saturday evening salons that she would later emulate in Paris. The Cones shared an appreciation for art and conversation about it and modeled a domestic division of labor that Stein would replicate in her relationship with Alice B. Toklas.[1][19]

Gertrude and Leo Stein bought Henri Matisse's, Woman with a Hat, 1905, a portrait of the artist's wife, Amelia, now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Leo, Gertrude, and Michael Stein

From 1903 until 1914, when they dissolved their common household, Gertrude and her brother Leo shared living quarters near the Luxembourg Gardens on the Left Bank of Paris in a two-story apartment (with the adjacent studio) located on the interior courtyard at 27 rue de Fleurus, 6th arrondissement. Here they accumulated the works of art that formed a collection that became renowned for its prescience and historical importance.

The gallery space was furnished with imposing Renaissance-era furniture from Florence, Italy. The paintings lined the walls in tiers trailing many feet to the ceiling. Initially illuminated by gaslight, the artwork was later lit by electric light shortly prior to World War I.[14]

Leo Stein cultivated important art world connections, enabling the Stein holdings to grow over time. The art historian and collector Bernard Berenson hosted Gertrude and Leo in his English country house in 1902, facilitating their introduction to Paul Cézanne and the dealer Ambroise Vollard.[26] Vollard was heavily involved in the Cézanne art market, and he was the first important contact in the Paris art world for both Leo and Gertrude.[10]

The joint collection of Gertrude and Leo Stein began in late 1904 when Michael Stein announced that their trust account had accumulated a balance of 8,000 francs. They spent this at Vollard's Gallery, buying Gauguin's Sunflowers[27] and Three Tahitians,[28] Cézanne's Bathers,[29] and two Renoirs.[30]

Stein in her Paris studio, with a portrait of her by Pablo Picasso, and other modern art paintings hanging on the wall (before 1910)

The art collection increased and the walls at Rue de Fleurus were rearranged continually to make way for new acquisitions.[31] In "the first half of 1905" the Steins acquired Cézanne's Portrait of Mme Cézanne and Delacroix's Perseus and Andromeda.[32] Shortly after the opening of the Salon d'Automne of 1905 (on October 18, 1905), the Steins acquired Matisse's Woman with a Hat[33] and Picasso's Young Girl with a Flower Basket.[34] In 1906, Picasso completed Portrait of Gertrude Stein, which remained in her collection until her death.[35][36]

Henry McBride (art critic for the New York Sun) did much for Stein's reputation in the United States, publicizing her art acquisitions and her importance as a cultural figure. Of the art collection at 27 Rue de Fleurus, McBride commented: "[I]n proportion to its size and quality... [it is] just about the most potent of any that I have ever heard of in history."[37] McBride also observed that Gertrude "collected geniuses rather than masterpieces. She recognized them a long way off."[37]

By early 1906, Leo and Gertrude Stein's studio had many paintings by Henri Manguin, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Honoré Daumier, Henri Matisse, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.[38] Their collection was representative of two famous art exhibitions that took place during their residence together in Paris, and to which they contributed, either by lending their art or by patronizing the featured artists.[39] The Steins' elder brother, Michael, and sister-in-law Sarah (Sally) acquired a large number of Henri Matisse paintings; Gertrude's friends from Baltimore, Claribel and Etta Cone, collected similarly, eventually donating their art collection, virtually intact, to the Baltimore Museum of Art.[40]

While numerous artists visited the Stein salon, many of these artists were not represented among the paintings on the walls at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Where Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso's works dominated Leo and Gertrude's collection, the collection of Michael and Sarah Stein emphasized Matisse.[41] In April 1914 Leo relocated to Settignano, Italy, near Florence, and the art collection was divided. The division of the Steins' art collection was described in a letter by Leo:

The Cézanne apples have a unique importance to me that nothing can replace. The Picasso landscape is not important in any such sense. We are, as it seems to me on the whole, both so well off now that we needn't repine. The Cézannes had to be divided. I am willing to leave you the Picasso oeuvre, as you left me the Renoir, and you can have everything except that. I want to keep the few drawings that I have. This leaves no string for me, it is financially equable either way for estimates are only rough & ready methods, & I'm afraid you'll have to look upon the loss of the apples as an act of God. I have been anxious above all things that each should have in reason all that he wanted, and just as I was glad that Renoir was sufficiently indifferent to you so that you were ready to give them up, so I am glad that Pablo is sufficiently indifferent to me that I am willing to let you have all you want of it.[42][43]

Leo departed with sixteen Renoirs and, relinquishing the Picassos and most of Matisse to his sister, took only a portrait sketch Picasso had done of him. He remained dedicated to Cézanne, nonetheless, leaving all the artist's works with his sister, taking with him only a Cézanne painting of "5 apples".[14] The split between brother and sister was acrimonious. Stein did not see Leo Stein again until after World War I, and then through only a brief greeting on the street in Paris. After this accidental encounter, they never saw or spoke to each other again.[14] The Steins' holdings were dispersed eventually by various methods and for various reasons.[44]

After Stein's and Leo's households separated in 1914, she continued to collect examples of Picasso's art, which had turned to Cubism, a style Leo did not appreciate. At her death, Gertrude's remaining collection emphasized the artwork of Picasso and Juan Gris, most of her other pictures having been sold.[45]

Gertrude Stein's personality has dominated the provenance of the Stein art legacy. It was, however, her brother Leo who was the astute art appraiser. Alfred Barr Jr., the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, said that between the years of 1905 and 1907, "[Leo] was possibly the most discerning connoisseur and collector of 20th-century painting in the world."[46] After the artworks were divided between the two Stein siblings, it was Gertrude who moved on to champion the works of what proved to be lesser talents in the 1930s. She concentrated on the work of Juan Gris, André Masson, and Sir Francis Rose. In 1932, Stein asserted: "Painting now after its great period has come back to be a minor art."[14]

In 1945, in a preface for the first exhibition of Spanish painter Francisco Riba Rovira (who painted a portrait of her), Stein wrote:

I explained that for me, all modern painting is based on what Cézanne nearly made, instead of basing itself on what he almost managed to make. When he could not make a thing, he hijacked it and left it. He insisted on showing his incapacity: he spread his lack of success: showing what he could not do, became an obsession for him. People influenced by him were also obsessed with the things which they could not reach and they began the system of camouflage. It was natural to do so, even inevitable: that soon became an art, in peace and war, and Matisse concealed and insisted at the same time that Cézanne could not realize, and Picasso concealed, played, and tormented all these things. The only one who wanted to insist on this problem was Juan Gris. He persisted by deepening the things which Cézanne wanted to do, but it was too hard a task for him: it killed him. And now here we are, I find a young painter who does not follow the tendency to play with what Cézanne could not do, but who attacks any right the things which he tried to make, to create the objects which have to exist, for, and in themselves, and not in relation.[47][48]

Plaque at 27 rue de Fleurus

The gatherings in the Stein home "brought together confluences of talent and thinking that would help define modernism in literature and art". Dedicated attendees included Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Gavin Williamson, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, Francis Cyril Rose, Bob Brown, René Crevel, Élisabeth de Gramont, Francis Picabia, Claribel Cone, Mildred Aldrich, Jane Peterson, Carl Van Vechten and Henri Matisse.[3] Saturday evenings had been set as the fixed day and time for formal congregation so Stein could work at her writing uninterrupted by impromptu visitors.

It was Stein's partner Alice who became the de facto hostess for the wives and girlfriends of the artists in attendance, who met in a separate room. From "Alice Entertained the Wives" (New York Times, 1977): " 'I am a person acted upon, not a person who acts,' Alice told one of Gertrude's biographers (...) When guests showed up, Alice was called upon to entertain their wives. The ladies were, of course, 'second‐class citizens' "[49]

Gertrude attributed the beginnings of the Saturday evening salons to Matisse, as people began visiting to see his paintings and those of Cézanne: "Matisse brought people, 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."[50]

Among Picasso's acquaintances who frequented the Saturday evenings were: Fernande Olivier (Picasso's mistress), Georges Braque (artist), André Derain (artist), Max Jacob (poet), Guillaume Apollinaire (poet), Marie Laurencin (artist, and Apollinaire's mistress), Henri Rousseau (painter), and Joseph Stella.[51]

Hemingway frequented Stein's salon, but the two had an uneven relationship. They began as close friends, with Hemingway admiring Stein as a mentor, but they later grew apart, especially after Stein called Hemingway "yellow" in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.[10] Upon the birth of his son, Hemingway asked Stein to be the godmother of his child.[52] While Stein has been credited with inventing the term "Lost Generation" for those whose defining moment in time and coming of age had been World War I and its aftermath, there are at least three versions of the story that led to the phrase, two by Hemingway and one by Stein.[53]

During the summer of 1931, Stein advised the young composer and writer Paul Bowles to go to Tangier, where she and Alice had vacationed.

Carl Van Vechten, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1934

Stein's writing can be placed in three categories: "hermetic" works best illustrated by The Making of Americans: The Hersland Family; popularized writing such as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; and speech writing and more accessible autobiographical writing of later years, of which Brewsie and Willie is a good example. Her works include novels, plays, stories, libretti, and poems written in a highly idiosyncratic, playful, repetitive, and humorous style. Typical quotes are: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"; "Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle";[54] about her childhood home in Oakland, "There is no there there"; and "The change of color is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable."[55]

A reader wrote to Stein in 1933 asking her to explain the rose quotation received a reply from Toklas as her secretary: "The device rose is a rose is a rose is a rose means just that. Miss Stein is unfortunately too busy herself to be able to tell you herself, but trusts that you will eventually come to understand that each and every word that she writes means exactly what she says, for she says very exactly what she means, and really nothing more, but, of course, nothing less."[56]

These stream-of-consciousness experiments, rhythmical essays or "portraits", were designed to evoke "the excitingness of pure being" and can be seen as literature's answer to visual art styles and forms such as Cubism, plasticity, and collage. Many of the experimental works such as Tender Buttons have since been interpreted by critics as a feminist reworking of patriarchal language. These works were well received by avant-garde critics but did not initially achieve mainstream success. Despite Stein's work on "automatic writing" with William James, she did not see her work as automatic, but as an 'excess of consciousness'.[57]

Though Stein collected cubist paintings, especially those of Picasso, the largest visual arts influence on her literary work is that of Cézanne. Particularly, he influenced her idea of equality, distinguished from universality: "the whole field of the canvas is important".[58] Rather than a figure/ground relationship, "Stein in her work with words used the entire text as a field in which every element mattered as much as any other." It is a subjective relationship that includes multiple viewpoints. Stein explained: "[T]he important thing... is that you must have deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality."[59]

Her use of repetition is ascribed to her search for descriptions of the "bottom nature" of her characters, such as in The Making of Americans where the narrator is described through the repetition of narrative phrases such as "As I was saying" and "There will be now a history of her." Stein used many Anglo-Saxon words and avoided words with "too much association". Social judgment is absent in her writing, so the reader is given the power to decide how to think and feel about the writing. Anxiety, fear, and anger are also absent, and her work is harmonic and integrative.

Stein predominantly used the present progressive tense, creating a continuous presence in her work, which Grahn argues is a consequence of the previous principles, especially commonality and centeredness. Grahn describes "play" as the granting of autonomy and agency to the readers or audience: "rather than the emotional manipulation that is a characteristic of linear writing, Stein uses play."[60] In addition, Stein's work is funny, and multilayered, allowing a variety of interpretations and engagements. Lastly, Grahn argues that one must "insterstand... engage with the work, to mix with it in an active engagement, rather than 'figuring it out.' Figure it in."[61] In 1932, using an accessible style to appeal to a wider audience, she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; the book would become her first best-seller. Despite the title, it was actually Stein's autobiography. The style was quite similar to that of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which was written by Toklas. Many critics speculated that Toklas actually had written The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, despite Toklas repeatedly denying authorship.

[62]

Several of Stein's writings have been set to music by composers, including Virgil Thomson's operas Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All, and James Tenney's setting of Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose as a canon dedicated to Philip Corner, beginning with "a" on an upbeat and continuing so that each repetition shuffles the words, e.g. "a/rose is a rose/is a rose is/a rose is a/rose."[63]

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. When someone commented that Stein didn't look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will."[64] Stein wrote "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso" (1923) in response to the painting.

Félix Vallotton, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1907

While living in Paris, Stein began submitting her writing for publication. Her earliest writings were mainly retellings of her college experiences. Her first critically acclaimed publication was Three Lives. In 1911, Mildred Aldrich introduced Stein to Mabel Dodge Luhan and they began a short-lived but fruitful friendship during which the wealthy Mabel Dodge promoted Gertrude's legend in the United States.

Mabel was enthusiastic about Stein's sprawling publication The Makings of Americans and, at a time when Stein had much difficulty selling her writing to publishers, privately published 300 copies of Portrait of Mabel Dodge at Villa Curonia.[45] Dodge was also involved in the publicity and planning of the 69th Regiment Armory Show in 1913, "the first avant-garde art exhibition in America".[45]

In addition, she wrote the first critical analysis of Stein's writing to appear in America, in "Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose", published in a special March 1913 publication of Arts and Decoration.[65] Foreshadowing Stein's later critical reception, Dodge wrote in "Speculations":

In Gertrude Stein's writing every word lives and, apart from concept, it is so exquisitely rhythmical and cadenced that if we read it aloud and receive it as pure sound, it is like a kind of sensuous music. Just as one may stop, for once, in a way, before a canvas of Picasso, and, letting one's reason sleep for an instant, may exclaim: "It is a fine pattern!" so, listening to Gertrude Stein's words and forgetting to try to understand what they mean, one submits to their gradual charm.[65]

Stein and Carl Van Vechten, the noted critic and photographer, became acquainted in Paris in 1913. The two became lifelong friends, devising pet names for each other: Van Vechten was "Papa Woojums", and Stein, "Baby Woojums". Van Vechten served as an enthusiastic champion of Stein's literary work in the United States, in effect becoming her American agent.[3]

Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein (1922) by Man Ray

Stein met her life partner Alice B. Toklas[95] on September 8, 1907, on Toklas's first day in Paris, at Sarah and Michael Stein's apartment.[96] On meeting Stein, Toklas wrote:

She was a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair. She was dressed in a warm brown corduroy suit. She wore a large round coral brooch and when she talked, very little, or laughed, a good deal, I thought her voice came from this brooch. It was unlike anyone else's voice—deep, full, velvety, like a great contralto's, like two voices.[97][98]

Soon thereafter, Stein introduced Toklas to Pablo Picasso at his Bateau-Lavoir studio, where he was at work on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

In 1908, they summered in Fiesole, Italy, Toklas staying with Harriet Lane Levy, the companion of her trip from the United States, and her housemate until Alice moved in with Stein and Leo in 1910. That summer, Stein stayed with Michael and Sarah Stein, their son Allan, and Leo in a nearby villa. Gertrude and Alice's summer of 1908 is memorialized in images of the two of them in Venice, at the piazza in front of Saint Mark's.[78]

Toklas arrived in 1907 with Harriet Levy, with Toklas maintaining living arrangements with Levy until she moved to 27 Rue de Fleurus in 1910. In an essay written at the time, Stein humorously discussed the complex efforts, involving much letter-writing and Victorian niceties, to extricate Levy from Toklas's living arrangements.[99] In "Harriet", Stein considers Levy's nonexistent plans for the summer, following her nonexistent plans for the winter:

She said she did not have any plans for the summer. No one was interested in this thing in whether she had any plans for the summer. That is not the complete history of this thing, some were interested in this thing in her not having any plans for the summer... Some who were not interested in her not having made plans for the summer were interested in her not having made plans for the following winter. She had not made plans for the summer and she had not made plans for the following winter... There was then coming to be the end of the summer and she was then not answering anything when any one asked her what were her plans for the winter.[100]

During the early summer of 1914, Gertrude bought three paintings by Juan Gris: Roses, Glass and Bottle, and Book and Glasses. Soon after she purchased them from Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's gallery,[101] the Great War began, Kahnweiler's stock was confiscated and he was not allowed to return to Paris. Gris, who before the war had entered a binding contract with Kahnweiler for his output, was left without income. Gertrude attempted to enter an ancillary arrangement in which she would forward Gris living expenses in exchange for future pictures. Stein and Toklas had plans to visit England to sign a contract for the publication of Three Lives, to spend a few weeks there, and then journey to Spain. They left Paris on July 6, 1914 and returned on October 17.[102] When Britain declared war on Germany, Stein and Toklas were visiting Alfred North Whitehead in England. After a supposed three-week trip to England that stretched to three months due to the War, they returned to France, where they spent the first winter of the war.

With money acquired from the sale of Stein's last Matisse Woman with a Hat[103] to her brother Michael, she and Toklas vacationed in Spain from May 1915 through the spring of 1916.[104] During their interlude in Majorca, Spain, Gertrude continued her correspondence with Mildred Aldrich who kept her apprised of the War's progression, and eventually inspired Gertrude and Alice to return to France to join the war effort.[105]

Toklas and Stein returned to Paris in June 1916, and acquired a Ford automobile with the help of associates in the United States; Gertrude learned to drive it with the help of her friend William Edwards Cook.[106] Gertrude and Alice then volunteered to drive supplies to French hospitals, in the Ford they named Auntie, "after Gertrude's aunt Pauline, 'who always behaved admirably in emergencies and behaved fairly well most times if she was flattered.'"

Stein with Ernest Hemingway's son, Jack Hemingway, in 1924. Stein is credited with bringing the term "Lost Generation" into use.

During the 1930s, Stein and Toklas became famous with the 1933 mass-market publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She and Alice had an extended lecture tour in the United States during this decade. They also spent several summers in the town of Bilignin, in the Ain district of eastern France situated in the picturesque region of the Rhône-Alpes. The two women doted on their beloved poodle named "Basket" whose successor, "Basket II", comforted Alice in the years after Gertrude's death.

With the outbreak of World War II, Stein and Toklas relocated to a country home that they had rented for many years previously in Bilignin, Ain, in the Rhône-Alpes region. Gertrude and Alice, who were both Jewish, escaped persecution probably because of their friendship to Bernard Faÿ who was a collaborator with the Vichy regime and had connections to the Gestapo, or possibly because Gertrude was an American and a famous author. Gertrude's book "Wars I Have Seen" written before the German surrender and before the liberation of German concentration camps, likened the German army to Keystone cops. When Faÿ was sentenced to hard labor for life after the war, Gertrude and Alice campaigned for his release. Several years later, Toklas would contribute money to Faÿ's escape from prison. After the war, Stein was visited by many young American soldiers. The August 6, 1945 issue of Life magazine featured a photo of Stein and American soldiers posing in front of Hitler's bunker in Berchtesgaden. They are all giving the Nazi salute and Stein is wearing the traditional Alpine cap, accompanied by the text: "Off We All Went To See Germany."[107]

In the 1980s, a cabinet in the Yale University Beinecke Library, which had been locked for an indeterminate number of years, was opened and found to contain some 300 love letters written by Stein and Toklas. They were made public for the first time, revealing intimate details of their relationship. Stein's endearment for Toklas was "Baby Precious", in turn Stein was for Toklas, "Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle".[24]

Along with Stein's widely known "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"[111] quotation, "there is no there there" is one of her most famous. It appears in her work Everybody's Autobiography (Random House 1937, p. 289) and is often applied to the city of her childhood, Oakland, California. Defenders and critics of Oakland have debated what she really meant when she said this in 1933, after coming to San Francisco on a book tour. She took a ferry to Oakland to visit the farm she grew up on, and the house she lived in near what is now 13th Avenue and E. 25th Street in Oakland. The house had been razed, and the farmland had been developed with new housing in the three decades since her father had sold the property and moved closer to the commercial hub of the neighborhood on Washington Street (now 12th Avenue).

Stein wrote:

She took us to see her granddaughter who was teaching in the Dominican convent in San Raphael, we went across the bay on a ferry, that had not changed but Goat Island might just as well not have been there, anyway what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.[112]

... but not there, there is no there there. ... Ah Thirteenth Avenue was the same it was shabby and overgrown. ... Not of course the house, the house the big house and the big garden and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge naturally were not there any longer existing, what was the use ...

It is a funny thing about addresses where you live. When you live there you know it so well that it is like an identity a thing that is so much a thing that it could not ever be any other thing and then you live somewhere else and years later, the address that was so much an address that it was like your name and you said it as if it was not an address but something that was living and then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it is not a name anymore but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember.

Tommy Orange's 2018 novel There There, about Native Americans living in Oakland, takes its name from this quotation.

According to Janet Malcolm's contested account in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Stein was a vocal critic of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.[113][114][115]

Some stress Stein's queer, feminist, pro-immigration, and democratic politics,[116][117] although her statements on immigration need to be seen in context of the time and world events. In a 1934 interview published in The New York Times she stated:

That is the reason why I do not approve of the stringent immigration laws in America today. We need the stimulation of new blood. It is best to favor healthy competition. There is no reason why we should not select our immigrants with greater care, nor why we should not bar certain peoples and preserve the color line for instance. But if we shut down on immigration completely we shall become stagnant. The French may not like the competition of foreigners, but they let them in. They accept the challenge and derive the stimulus. I am surprised that there is not more discussion of immigration in the United States than there is. We have got rid of prohibition restrictions, and it seems to me the next thing we should do is to relax the severity of immigration restrictions.[118]

She publicly endorsed General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War and admired Vichy leader Marshal Philippe Pétain.[113] 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.[119][120][121][122] 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."[110]

While identified with the modernist movements in art and literature, Stein's political affiliations were a mix of reactionary and progressive ideas. She was outspoken in her hostility to some liberal reforms of progressive politics. To Stein, the industrial revolution had acted as a negative societal force, disrupting stability, degrading values, and subsequently affecting cultural decline. Stein idealized the 18th century as the golden age of civilization, epitomized in America as the era of its founding fathers and what was in France, the glory of its pre-revolutionary Ancien Régime.[8][123] At the same time, she was pro-immigrant, pro-democratic, and anti-patriarchal.[124] Her last major work was the libretto of the feminist opera The Mother of Us All (1947) about the socially progressive suffragette movement and another work from this time, Brewsie and Willie (1946), expressed strong support for American G.I.s.

A compendium of source material confirms that Stein may have been able to save her life and sustain her lifestyle through the protection of powerful Vichy government official Bernard Faÿ. Stein had met Faÿ in 1926, and he became her "dearest friend during her life", according to Alice B. Toklas. Faÿ had been the primary translator of Stein's work into French and subsequently masterminded her 1933–34 American book tour, which gave Stein celebrity status and proved to be a highly successful promotion of her memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.[8] Faÿ's influence was instrumental in avoiding Nazi confiscation of Stein's historically significant and monetarily valuable collection of artwork, which throughout the war years was housed in Stein's Paris rue Christine apartment, under locked safeguard.[125]

In 1941, at Faÿ's suggestion, Stein consented to translate into English some 180 pages of speeches made by Marshal Philippe Pétain. In her introduction, Stein crafts an analogy between George Washington and Pétain. She writes of the high esteem in which Pétain is held by his countrymen; France respected and admired the man who had struck an armistice with Hitler. Conceived and targeted for an American readership, Stein's translations were ultimately never published in the United States. Random House publisher Bennett Cerf had read the introduction Stein had written for the translations and been horrified by what she had produced.[126]

Although Jewish, Stein collaborated with Vichy France, a regime that deported more than 75,000 Jews to Nazi concentration camps, of whom only three percent survived the Holocaust.[8][127] In 1944, Stein wrote that Petain's policies were "really wonderful so simple so natural so extraordinary". This was Stein's contention in the year when the town of Culoz, where she and Toklas resided, saw the removal of its Jewish children to Auschwitz.[107] It is difficult to say, however, how aware Stein was of these events. As she wrote in Wars I Have Seen, "However near a war is it is always not very near. Even when it is here."[128] Stein had stopped translating Petain's speeches three years previously, in 1941.

Stein was able to condemn the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor while simultaneously maintaining the dissonant acceptance of Hitler as conqueror of Europe.[8] Journalist Lanning Warren interviewed Stein in her Paris apartment in a piece published in The New York Times Magazine on May 6, 1934. Stein, seemingly ironically, proclaimed that Hitler merited the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Saxon element is always destined to be dominated. The Germans have no gift at organizing. They can only obey. And obedience is not organization. Organization comes from community of will as well as community of action. And in America, our democracy has been based on community of will and effort.... I say Hitler ought to have the peace prize ... because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.[8][125][126][129]

Given that after the war Stein commented that the only way to ensure world peace was to teach the Germans disobedience,[130] this 1934 Stein interview has come to be interpreted as an ironic jest made by a practiced iconoclast hoping to gain attention and provoke controversy. In an effort to correct popular mainstream misrepresentations of Stein's wartime activity, a dossier of articles by critics and historians has been gathered for the online journal Jacket2.[131]

How much of Stein's wartime activities were motivated by the real exigencies of self-preservation in a dangerous environment can only be speculated upon. However, her loyalty to Pétain may have gone beyond expedience.[126][131] She had been urged to leave France by American embassy officials, friends and family when that possibility still existed, but declined to do so. In an essay written for the Atlantic Monthly in November 1940, Stein wrote about her decision not to leave France: "it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food." Stein continued to praise Pétain after the war ended, this at a time when Pétain had been sentenced to death by a French court for treason.[8]

Author Djuna Barnes provided a caustic assessment of Stein's book, Wars I Have Seen: "You do not feel that she [Stein] is ever really worried about the sorrows of the people. Her concerns at its highest pitch is a well-fed apprehension."[107]

Others have argued that some of the accounts of Stein's war time activities have amounted to a "witch hunt".[132]

Stein died on July 27, 1946 at the age of 72 after surgery for stomach cancer at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris.[133] She was interred in Paris in Père Lachaise Cemetery.[134] Later Alice B. Toklas was buried alongside her.[135] According to the famous version of her last moments, before having been taken into surgery, Stein asked her partner Toklas: "What is the answer?" After Toklas replied to Stein that there was no answer, Stein countered by sinking back into her bed, murmuring: "Then, there is no question!"[136]

Her companion Toklas, however, has given two other versions of the encounter—neither of which agrees with the "canonical" version above. Writing in the June 2005 edition of The New Yorker, Janet Malcolm describes:

On July 27, 1946, Stein was operated on for what proved to be inoperable stomach cancer and died before coming out of anesthesia. In "What Is Remembered," Toklas wrote of the "troubled, confused and very uncertain" afternoon of the surgery. "I sat next to her and she said to me early in the afternoon, What is the answer? I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question?" However, in a letter to Van Vechten ten years earlier, Toklas had written:

About Baby's last words. She said upon waking from a sleep—What is the question. And I didn't answer thinking she was not completely awakened. Then she said again—What is the question and before I could speak she went on—If there is no question then there is no answer.

Stein's biographers have naturally selected the superior "in that case what is the question?" version. Strong narratives win out over weak ones when no obstacle of factuality stands in their way. What Stein actually said remains unknown. That Toklas cited the lesser version in a letter of 1953 is suggestive but not conclusive.[137]

Stein named writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten as her literary executor, and he helped to publish works of hers that remained unpublished at the time of her death.

Sherwood Anderson in his public introduction to Stein's 1922 publication of Geography and Plays wrote:

For me the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entirely new recasting of life, in the city of words. Here is one artist who has been able to accept ridicule, who has even forgone the privilege of writing the great American novel, uplifting our English speaking stage, and wearing the bays of the great poets to go live among the little housekeeping words, the swaggering bullying street-corner words, the honest working, money-saving words and all the other forgotten and neglected citizens of the sacred and half-forgotten city.

In a private letter to his brother Karl, Anderson said, "As for Stein, I do not think her too important. I do think she had an important thing to do, not for the public, but for the artist who happens to work with words as his material.[138]

James Thurber wrote:

Anyone who reads at all diversely during these bizarre 1920s cannot escape the conclusion that a number of crazy men and women are writing stuff which remarkably passes for important composition among certain persons who should know better. Stuart P. Sherman, however, refused to be numbered among those who stand in awe and admiration of one of the most eminent of the idiots, Gertrude Stein. He reviews her Geography and Plays in the August 11 issue of the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post and arrives at the conviction that it is a marvellous and painstaking achievement in setting down approximately 80,000 words which mean nothing at all.[139]

In his 1938 biographical novel The Green Fool, Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh describes the works of Gertrude Stein fondly as being "like whisky to me; her strange rhythms broke up the cliché formation of my thought".[141]

Stein has been the subject of many artistic works.

In Bryant Park, in New York City, there is cast replica of sculptor Jo Davidson's bronze bust of Stein. The original, created in 1923, is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.[142]

Composers Florence Wickham and Marvin Schwartz used Stein’s text for their operetta Look and Long.[143]

In 2005, playwright/actor Jade Esteban Estrada portrayed Stein in the solo musical ICONS: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol. 1 at Princeton University. In 2006, theatre director/actor Luiz Päetow created his solo, Plays, portraying Stein's 1934 homonymous lecture, and toured Brazil for several years.[144] Loving Repeating is a musical by Stephen Flaherty based on the writings of Gertrude Stein. Stein and Toklas are both characters in the eight-person show. Stein is a central character in Nick Bertozzi's 2007 graphic novel The Salon.

The posthumously published Journals of Ayn Rand contain several highly hostile references to Stein. From Rand's working notes for her novel The Fountainhead, it is clear that the character Lois Cook in that book was intended as a caricature of Stein.[145]

Stein (played by Bernard Cribbins) and Toklas (played by Wilfrid Brambell) were depicted in the Swedish 1978 absurdist fiction film Picassos äventyr (The Adventures of Picasso) by director Tage Danielsson, with Gösta Ekman as Picasso.[146]

Stein was portrayed in the 2011 Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris by Kathy Bates, and by Tracee Chimo in the 2018 season of the television series Genius which focuses on the life and career of Pablo Picasso.

Waiting for the Moon, a movie starring Linda Bassett that was released in 1987.[147]The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, a TV series starring Alice Dvoráková that was released in 1993.[148]

Stein is added to a list of great artists and notables in the popular Broadway musical Rent in the song "La Vie Boheme". She is also mentioned in the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers 1935 film Top Hat and in the song "Roseability" by the Scottish rock group Idlewild.

Composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Royce Vavrek's opera 27 about Stein and Toklas premiered at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in June, 2014 with Stephanie Blythe as Stein.[149]

In 2014 Stein was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields".[150][151][152]

Edward Einhorn wrote the play The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, a farce about their fantasy marriage that also told the story of their life. It premiered in May 2017 at HERE Arts Center in New York.[153]

The 2018 artwork Words Doing As They Want to Do by Eve Fowler involved recording trans and lesbian Californians reading Stein's 1922 work called "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene".[154]

The Gertrude Stein Society (GSS) at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, an organization for LGBTQ+ students at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, is named after her.[155]

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Gertrude Stein

• Three Lives (1909)
• White Wines (1913)
• Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (1914) online at Bartleby
• An Exercise in Analysis (1917)
• A Circular Play (1920)
• Geography and Plays (1922), includes A List
• The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (written 1906–8, published 1925)
• Four Saints in Three Acts (libretto, 1929: music by Virgil Thomson, 1934)
• Useful Knowledge (1929)
• An Acquaintance with Description (1929)
• Lucy Church Amiably (1930). First Edition published by Imprimerie Union in Paris. The First American edition was published in 1969 by Something Press.
• How to Write (1931)
• They must. Be Wedded. To Their Wife (1931)
• Operas and Plays (1932)
• Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein with Two Shorter Stories (1933)
• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933a)
• Blood on the Dining Room Floor (1933b)
• Portraits and Prayers (1934)
• Lectures in America (1935)
• The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936)
• Everybody's Autobiography (1937)
• Picasso, photo. Cecil Beaton (1938)
• Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938)
• The World is Round, UK edition illus. Sir Francis Rose; US edition illus. Clement Hurd (1939)
• Paris France (1940)
• Ida A Novel (1941)
• Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (1943)
• Wars I Have Seen (1945a)
• À la recherche d'un jeune peintre (Max-Pol Fouchet, ed., 1945b)
• Reflections on the Atomic Bomb (1946a)
• Brewsie and Willie (1946b)
• The Mother of Us All (libretto, 1946c: music by Virgil Thompson 1947)
• Gertrude Stein on Picasso (1946d)
• Four in America (1947)
• Mrs. Reynolds (1947)
• Last Operas and Plays (Carl van Vechten, ed., 1949)
• The Things as They Are (written as Q.E.D. in 1903, published 1950)
• Patriarchal Poetry (1953)
• Alphabets and Birthdays (1957)
• Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and Other Early Writings (1971)
• Stein, Gertrude; van Vechten, Carl (1986), Burns, Edward (ed.), The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913–1946, New York: Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0-231-06308-1..
• Stein, Gertrude; Wilder, Thornton (1996), Burns, Edward; Dydo, Ulla, eds., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-06774-3.
• Stein, Gertrude (1998a), Chessman, Harriet; Stimpson, Catharine R. (eds.), Writings 1903–1932, Library of America, ISBN 978-1-883011-40-6.
• ———————— (1998b), Chessman, Harriet; Stimpson, Catharine R. (eds.), Writings 1932–1946, Library of America, ISBN 978-1-883011-41-3.
• Toklas, Alice (1973), Burns, Edward (ed.), Staying on Alone: Letters, New York: Liveright, ISBN 978-0-87140-569-2.
• Grahn, Judy, ed. (1989), Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology with Essays by Judy Grahn, Crossing Press, ISBN 978-0-89594-380-4
• Vechten, Carl Van, ed. (1990). Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. ISBN 0-679-72464-8

• Paris Was a Woman (1996 documentary)[156]
• Stein's name appears in the lyrics of the Le Tigre song "Hot Topic".[157]
• The Animaniacs sketch "Baloney And Kids" has Dot Warner say she made a mask of her.
• The Bob's Burgers episode "Frigate Me Knot" revolves around the decommissioning of a US Navy frigate named for her with the hull number of DE-1025.
• Stein's books are referenced in Patricia Highsmith's book The Price of Salt (1952)
• Stein's name is referenced in the Idlewild song, Roseability.

• Lesbian poetry

• The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 28 – June 3, 2012
• The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 21 – September 6, 2011, archived from the original on 2011-06-24, retrieved 2011-06-25
• Seeing Gertrude Stein: five stories, Washington, D.C.: The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, October 14, 2011 – January 22, 2012
• Seeing Gertrude Stein: five stories, San Francisco: Contemporary Jewish Museum, May 12 – September 6, 2011, archived from the original on July 28, 2011
• Four Saints in Three Acts: Four live presentations of a new production, San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, August 18–21, 2011
• Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, San Francisco: M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, June 11 – October 9, 2011, archived from the original on June 28, 2011, retrieved July 4, 2011
• Riba-Rovira Galeria Muro, Homenage for Gertrude Stein, 2012, Valencia, ES

Look up there is no there there in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Gertrude Stein.

• Works by Gertrude Stein in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
• Works by Gertrude Stein at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Gertrude Stein at Internet Archive
• Works by Gertrude Stein at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
• Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
• Gertrude Stein Papers at the Harry Ransom Center
• Gertrude Stein and Her Circle papers at the University of Maryland libraries
• Three Lives, American Studies at the University of Virginia, archived from the original on 2009-11-13, retrieved 2009-10-06.
• Complete, authorized audio recordings at PennSound, archived from the original on 2013-07-04, retrieved 2013-07-07
• Allegheny City (Deutschtown), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, PBase, archived from the original (birth placard) on 2009-01-26, retrieved 2007-08-04.
• Stein, Gertrude, What is a masterpiece?, Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University, archived from the original (manuscript) on 2011-02-16, retrieved 2011-02-17.
• van Vechten, Carl, Gertrude Stein, archived from the original (photographic portraits) on 2018-12-15, retrieved 2019-09-27.
• Williams, William Carlos, The Work of Gertrude Stein, Center for book culture, archived from the original on 2004-08-03.
• Four Saints in Three Acts, Music of the United States of America (MUSA), archived from the original on 2014-09-01, retrieved 2013-08-16
• The World of Gertrude Stein, Ellen's Place, archived from the original on 2003-06-04.
• Gertrude Stein, Infography, archived from the original on 2010-11-18, retrieved 2009-11-10.
• Gertrude Stein, Ubu, archived from the original on 2004-02-22, retrieved 2004-03-08, featuring a reading of If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso and A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson.
• Gertrude Stein, Gradually; readings from Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Bee Time Vine, and more. Includes excerpts from Patriarchal Poetry and layered-voice readings.
• "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant Garde" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC-Arts, 2009-04-02, archived from the original (profile) on 2013-04-15.
• Gertrude Stein Reads from The Making of Americans a rare recording made in 1934 and 1935