Gertrude Stein
1874-1946
- b. Allegheny, Pennsylvania to German
Jewish parents
- lived in Vienna and Paris in her
childhood and spoke only German until she was five
- family moved to Oakland, California
- studied philosophy at Radcliffe with
William James and medicine, although did not complete her degree
- produced about 500 titles in her
lifetime:
- Three Lives (1904-5) p.1909
- The Making of America (1906-8) p.1925
- Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein
(1909-12) p.1933
- Tender Buttons (1911) p. 1914
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas p. 1932
- moved to Paris in 1903 with her
brother, Leo
- Their first painting purchase with
$8000 dividend from family estate
- 1905 – bought first Picasso, beginning
of Saturday night salon at 27, rue de Fleurus, and removal of her corset
- Their collection eventually includes
works of Picasso, Vallotton, Matisse, Maurice Denis, Cezanne, Gaugin,
Manguin, and Toulouse Latrec
- 1907 meets Alice
- 1908 Alice and Gertrude secretly
married
- 1913 Leo and Gertrude split (Leo falls
in love with model of his paintings) and G and L split their collection
- 1927 Gertrude’s Caesar haircut
- 1918 salons suspended
- 1922 meets Hemingway
- Stein loved pop culture – read
detective novels, collected kitsch
Her friend, Mabel
Dodge Luhan wrote of Stein:”…Gertrude didn’t care whether a thing was bon
gout or not, or whether it was quattro cento or not, unless it
affected her pleasantly, and if it did please her she loved it for that
reason…. It made her daring in a snobbish period of art. I remember she adored
ridiculous miniature alabaster fountains with two tiny white doves poised on
the brink, that tourists bought at the shops on the Lung’Arno and she had a
penchant for forget-me-not mosaic brooches, and all kinds of odds and ends that
she liked as much as a child likes things. She didn’t care whether they were
‘good’ or not” (324 Intimate Memories).
The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Modernism
confronts in
literary terms the same experiments undertaken in other science and art all
over the world; eg
music
- eg. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (La
sacre du printemps) written for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe; premiered
in Paris 1913 at Theatre Champs Elysses and caused a riot; celebrated
pagan rite and sacrifice to spring
- music shows emphasis on rhythm over
melody and harmony, repetition of chords, irregular meter, dissonance, use
of folk melodies; seen as barbaric, primitive, untamed music
- or Erik Satie’s Parade in 1917; with
the scenario written by Jean Cocteau, the design by Picasso in which a
circus preview was held on stage
cubism
· begun
~1907 by Picasso and Braque; emphasized the 2 dimensional surface of the canvas,
rejected perspective and other techniques from the Renaissance used to make
the painting look like an imitation of nature; non-representational;
·
attempt instead to
convey impressions and show subject from all perspectives simultaneously
·
we make sense of the painting by considering
the fragments in space, rather than time
·
shift from linear, chronological perspective
to trans-historical, multiple perspective
·
eg. Picassos’s Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon
relativity
theory
- 1905 Albert Einstein’s Theory of
Special Relativity – measurements of time could vary with the physical
position of the individuals; showed that two individual, in different
locations, observing the same event, will perceive that objective physical
time passes at different rates.
- 1915 – Einstein’s Theory of General
Relativity – the universe is expanding from all points and there is no
centre; it is no longer a question of multiple frames of reference or
centres, but no centre from which one can have an unbiased view.
philosophy
·
Henri Bergson
–Introduction to Metaphysics, argues for two kinds of time – clock time
and subjective time as we experience from an individual, psychological
experience
literature
·
writing often
experimental –development of the stream of consciousness, point of view,
Stein’s attempt to write as Picasso paints, multiple perspectives, imagism
·
self-conscious
Reconsideration of
genre
- ostensibly an autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas, but instead written by Stein in an impression of Toklas’s voice
- narrative structure is rambling,
repetitive
- challenges notion of autobiography and
history as factual, authoritative with anecdotal structure
- impressionistic, a portrait rather than
a photograph
- challenges notion of subject of
künstleroman as male while showing Stein’s struggle parallel to Picasso’s
efforts to find suitable medium to express artistic vision
- provides who’s who of modernism in
Paris and elsewhere
Feminism
- critique of role of artist/genius as
exclusively male domain (5)
- critique of wife as passive support for
husband; never get Alice’s interior life, only her fascination with
Stein’s accomplishments; Alice has no goals of her own (251)
- critique of heterosexual marriage as a)
exploitative of women and b) as the only form of partnering
The role of Paris
in Stein’s endeavour
- for Strether Lambert, Paris represented
the feminine, liberty, the artistic, ‘being’
- Stein notes that hearing French all the
time made English more intense for her (70)
- her one experience of English country
living was that it was detrimental to her work (127)
- Writing is mans to express rhythm of
the visible world (119); like cubism her work is not an imitation, but an
impression; attempt to show subject matter from all perspectives
- Susie Asado – fascination with language
- poem inspired by a flamenco dancer
Stein and Toklas saw in Spain in 1913