California educators deciding how to meet the state's new requirement to include lesbian and gay Americans in history curricula could strike gold by digging into Wanda Corn's magnum opus on Gertrude Stein's life and times. Stein is a cultural—and countercultural—mother lode: She made a mark in fine arts, literature, performing arts, lifestyles and more, and her influence continues. Corn's 10-year project brings Stein's world alive in a landmark exhibition and accompanying book.
Corn, professor emerita of art history, guest-curated Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, on view at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum through September 6 and at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., from October 14 to January 22, 2012. The 400-page book of the same title (UC Press), co-written with California College of the Arts professor Tirza True Latimer, is as much historical biography as catalogue, a richly illustrated eye-opener about a singular American.
Cover: Courtesy UC Press
The authors must have felt blessed and cursed with the cornucopia of extant material on their subject, who deliberately archived everything from wallpaper samples to teacups, correspondence to clothing. Stein also is one of the most painted, sculpted and photographed writers of the 20th century—by Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, Man Ray and many others.
Stein was ahead of her time in several ways. She shared an openly lesbian marriage with Alice B. Toklas from 1910 until her death in 1946. Her experimental writings saw print a decade before James Joyce's Ulysses. Moving to Paris at age 29 in 1903, she befriended and promoted little-known avant-garde artists, most notably Picasso; the Saturday night salons she and her brother Leo held at 27 rue de Fleurus before World War I showcased the siblings' growing collection. Aspiring writers, including Ernest Hemingway in 1921, scurried for an introduction at her postwar soirées. Sometime in 1934 Stein wrote: "We are surrounded by homosexuals, they do all the good things in all the arts."
Yet, as Corn amply documents with press accounts and photos, this unconventional figure took even middlebrow America by storm on a cross-country lecture tour from 1934 to 1935.
Part of the fascination with Stein is her complexity. She would make friends opportunistically, then drop them. For all her modernism, she and Toklas reveled in routine and traditional domesticity. Intellectually radical, she was a political conservative, favoring Franco in the Spanish Civil War and, at least initially, sympathizing with Vichy France in World War II. (Corn explains that Stein and Toklas's friendship with writer Bernard Faÿ, who became a Nazi collaborator, ironically enabled the Jewish couple—and Stein's art collection—to remain safely in France through the war.) Stein was nevertheless a patriotic expatriate; at war's end she and Toklas offered hospitality to hundreds of GIs in their Paris apartment and visited troops in bases all over Germany.
