Gertrude Stein
1874-1946
Gertrude Stein was born February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, was raised in Oakland, California, and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1897. She attended Johns Hopkins to obtain a medical degree, but left before graduation. In 1903, she and her brother Leo moved to Paris, where both started collecting art. Gertrude collected modern art by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and others, and hosted infamous literary salons for writers such as Ernest Hemmingway and other members of "the lost generation." She and her brother had a falling out over the value of modern art; Gertrude Stein henceforth lived with Alice B. Toklas, her life partner and transcriptor. Gertrude Stein was a physically large woman who wore her size comfortably; Alice B. Toklas was a thin woman who wore a moustache.
As an artist, Stein experimented with cubist ideas as applied to writing in Tender Buttons, and "automatic writing," which involved suspending a pencil from the ceiling on a thread to capture the unconscious directly on the page. Some of her 40 works include novels, such as Everybody's Autobiography, Three Lives, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The Making of Americans, Wars I Have Seen; and the opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, with its famous lyric, "Pigeons on the grass, alas." During WW I, Stein taught herself to drive so she could deliver medical and food supplies to the front lines. In the 30s, she returned to the United States for a lecture tour and searched for her childhood home in Oakland; when she could not find the house, she coined the phrase, "There is no there there." Gertrude Stein called herself a genius, a brazen act for a woman, then and now. She died on July 29, 1946, in Paris.
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