"When you see this, remember me."
Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories which opened May 12 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum is the first major museum exhibition to present a complex cultural biography of Gertrude Stein.
Using a wealth of little known archival material, the show features five different ways of looking at or "seeing" Gertrude Stein, through her portraits, through her domestic life with Alice B. Toklas, through her friendships, her interactions with the press and through her cultural influence which extended far beyond her death in 1946. It is built upon exciting new scholarship by lead guest curator Professor Wanda M. Corn of Stanford University and associate curator Professor Tirza True Latimer of the California College of Arts and is jointly organized with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
The show opens with a portrait gallery, showing Stein throughout her life and in many different guises. Even as a little girl, she had presence, staring directly into the camera in a family photograph. There is the late-Victorian Stein, the Bohemian Stein to the masculine Stein after she cut her hair in 1926.
One of the revelations of the exhibit is the focus on her domestic life. From the day that Alice B. Toklas entered her life until Gertrude's death 39 years later, they were inseparable. Although they started living together in 1910, they were not photographed together until 1922, with the first semi-official shot taken by Man Ray. Alice oversaw the kitchen, presided over their salon as the “wife,’ and was the creator of their style as a couple as well as a seamstress and accomplished needle woman. “You might say Toklas—who edited and typed Stein's manuscripts, managed her social and professional life, groomed her appearance, created her domestic settings, and archived her papers—invented the Stein we have come to know,” says associate curator Tirza True Latimer.
"Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.” Gertrude Stein, 1931
“The Art of Friendship” documents their ever expanding and ever changing circle of friends. Her friendships with Matisse and Picasso are well known, but less known is Stein's break with Matisse and her own brother, Leo. Her outsize ego and aristocratic temperament didn’t allow her to recognize a lot of first-rate talent. She was easily amused but just as quickly bored or offended. Hemingway, another writer not known for playing well with others, wrote ” …she only gave real loyalty to people who were inferior to her.”
She was also not a feminist, preferring the company of gay men who may have been marginalized but had more money, artistic influence and cultural clout. Nevertheless, for decades anybody who was somebody and many who were nobodies, knocked at the door of 27 rue de Fleurus. The world of the haute monde and the avant-guard and just pain ordinary Joe GI (after WW II), continued to beat a path to her door.
“Gertrude Stein arrives without a single comma.” San Francisco Examiner, 1935.
The show’s fourth story, “Celebrity Stein” deals with her 1934 visit to American. It was a tour-de-force. She had fun and the press had fun with her. Not only was she always good for a great quote, she built her reputation as American’s most famous expatriate. “I don’t care to say whether I’m greater than Shakespeare, and he’s dead and can’t say whether he’s greater than I am. Time will tell.” (Lecture at Wesleyan University, 1935). Her American tour was to make her a public figure for years to come.
Legacies looks at Stein’s ongoing presence and cultural influence, from books to music to opera. Visitors to the show can listen to recordings of Stein reading a few of her pieces There are brief snips of videos of portions of "Four Saints in Three Acts," created in collaborations with Frederick Ashton and Virgil Thompson. The much-quoted and ridiculed line "Pigeons on the grass, alas" is from this opera and has achieved a celebrity status completely on its own.
"A rose is a rose is a rose, " said Gertrude. This, like many of her quotes only shows a part of the woman. She was creative and her salon the the center of much of artistic Paris for decades. But she also capricious and contumacious, not always an easy person to have around and the subject of dislike as well as love, awe and wonder. The exhibit presents Gertrude in all her contradictory glory, probably the most famous Lesbian in Western culture (to date), a full banquet in five magnificent courses.
Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories. The exhibit runs through Sept 6th at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. 735 Mission St. SF (415) 655-7800.
http://www.thecjm.org/index.php
Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories will be on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum during the same time period as the exhibition The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from May 21 through September 6, 2011. The Steins Collect reunites the unparalleled modern art collections of Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael Stein, and Michael’s wife, Sarah Stein. Jointly organized by SFMOMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, this major touring exhibition gathers approximately 200 iconic paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and illustrated books by not only Matisse and Picasso, which form the core of this presentation, but also by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, and Pierre-August Renoir, among many others
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