Stein, Gertrude

Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946). American writer, collector, hostess, eccentric, and self-styled genius, born at Allegheny, Pennsylvania, into a wealthy family. After abandoning medical studies she settled in Paris in 1903, returning only once to the USA, for a lecture tour in 1934. Her home at 27 rue de Fleurus became famous as a literary and artistic salon; many distinguished American visitors to Paris found it their introduction to modern French painting. With her brother, the art critic Leo Stein (1872–1947), who lived with her from 1903 to 1912, she was one of the first collectors of the work of Braque, Matisse, and Picasso (who painted a well-known portrait of Gertrude, 1906, Metropolitan Museum, New York); another brother, Michael (1865–1938), and his wife Sarah (1870–1953), were also collectors. Gertrude's writings, which she claimed to be a literary counterpart to Cubism, are often opaque in style, concerned with the rhythm and sound of words rather than their meaning. The best-known and most approachable of her many books is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which in fact is her own autobiography, composed as though by Miss Toklas (1877–1967), her secretary and companion from 1907. Alfred H. Barr writes that Leo Stein was ‘the critic who first felt that Matisse and Picasso were the two important artists of his time', but Leo later turned his back on their work, describing Cubism as ‘god-almighty rubbish'. Clive Bell maintained that ‘Neither Gertrude or Leo had a genuine feeling for visual art … Pictures were pegs on which to hang hypotheses.’ On her death, Gertrude's art collection passed to Miss Toklas, and when she in turn died in 1967 it was sold. Several of the paintings eventually went to leading public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York.