Fembio Special: European Jewish Women
Gertrude Stein
born on February 3, 1874 in Allegheny near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
died on July 27, 1946 in Paris, France
US-American writer
150th birthday on February 3, 2024
Biography
“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” a sentence paradigmatic for modern, avant-garde literature, was imprinted on her letterhead. In 1904, Gertrude Stein, who had studied psychology, medicine and philosophy in America, moved to Paris to live with her brother Leo. The two art lovers had the financial means and an eye for the paintings of the modern “wild” artists — cubists and fauvists — and within a short time the Stein residence housed “the best gallery of paintings in Europe” (Ernest Hemingway).
Every Saturday, the siblings received guests in their soon-to-be legendary salon, including Apollinaire, T. S. Eliot, Gide, Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Braque, Matisse and Picasso, whose works Gertrude Stein particularly appreciated. She pursued in literature the revolution he had initiated in painting. She was a Picasso of language: she wrote the way the cubists painted. Her portraits were verbal still lifes.
Gertrude Stein, the American in Paris, was an outsider and yet the axis around which everything revolved in Parisian artistic circles. Although she herself was well known, her writings were not. Few could follow her experimental boldness, and for a long time the “mother of modernism” (Thornton Wilder) had to self-publish her books. It was actually a text written in a more conventional style that was her first success. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her partner of over 40 years and published in 1933, Stein described her own very unconventional life.
“Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century, and I have been the creative literary mind of the century,” she wrote in Everybody's Autobiography. Her work comprises 600 titles. Stein's immense creativity was sustained by Alice B. Toklas, who was her conversation partner, editor, secretary, housekeeper, cook and friend all in one. Did the 20th century avant-gardist perhaps have a relationship in line with the 19th century ideal of marriage? “If you are ahead of your time in your thinking, then you are naturally old-fashioned and simple in everyday life,” Gertrude Stein commented in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
(Text from 1995, translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.)
Please consult the German version for additional information (pictures, sources, videos, bibliography).
Quotes
It is very nice to be a celebrity a real celebrity who can decide who she wants to meet and say so and they come or don't come as one wishes. I never imagined that it could happen to me to become such a celebrity but it came to be and when it came, I liked it. (Gertrude Stein)
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