I’ve often wished that Gertrude Stein’s art could talk. Those paintings witnessed some of the most storied gatherings in 20th-century avant-garde history: they watched, tacitly, from the grimy white walls of 27 Rue de Fleurus, while Picasso sparred with Matisse over the future of form and color, Hemingway and Fitzgerald brought their latest manuscripts for Stein’s appraisal, and Stein herself—capably guarded by her partner, Alice B. Toklas—wrote the texts that would, as she put it, mark “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.”
Only the paintings bore witness to her intense, solitary writing sessions, conducted in the studio by night, Stein flicking the pages of her notebooks with hardly a pause, until dawn birdsong disturbed her concentration. She loved to pose for photographs surrounded by her favorite artworks: a Cézanne portrait of his wife, Hortense, which taught her crucial lessons about the possibilities of shape and space, and Matisse’s Femme au Chapeau, a riot of purples, blues, and pinks that proved so offensive to its first viewers that Matisse considered destroying it for the insurance money, until Stein and her brother Leo made an offer on it. Hung highest of all was Picasso’s famous portrait of her, painted in 1905: “For me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me,” Stein wrote.
