Gertrude Stein : From cradle to grave

     Gertrude Stein (1873-1946) was like Andy Warhol, but 15 years before. According to her, "everyone could be famous for a quarter of an hour in his life". So she was desperate to see her genius recognized by the others. A genius that brought her to spot what was new, to spot which young artists were going to be very skilled before they actually become famous. She was a perfect experimentalist, that tried  new things, without really knowing what she was doing.

   How can a lesbian Jewish girl become THE avant-garde woman during the early twentieth century ?

     Gertrude Stein spent her childhood in Oakland (California), before moving to Baltimore. Bearing in a German Jewish family, she wasn't neither poor, nor rich. They were five children in her family : she had one sister and threee brothers, whose one she was very close to : Leo.

Already at the age of ten, Gertrude Stein was trilingual. She could spoke either English, either German or French.

     But a tragedy was to hit the family. Within two years, both Gertrude's parents die, letting the family on his own. Gertrude is at that time aged of sixteen. Fortunately, the eldest brother Michael took the whole family in charge and helped them to cope with these painful years.

     In 1893, Leo left to Harvard (East Coast) and his sister Gertrude decided to accompany him, while joining Radcliffe (the equivalent of Harvard, for girls), where she studied psychology, philosophy and drama, three subjects in which she was particularly skilled. 

     In 1896, she started travelling round Europe, then studied medicine when she came back. At that time, she met lots of people she was going to meet several times. They were called the "Blue Stockings". It was during this period that she had her first love (and physical) affair, with May Bookstaver (main topic of Quod Erat Demonstrandum).

     She travelled a lot the two following years, before going back to America near the age of thirty, where she started the writing of The Making of Americans and Q.E.D.

Since 1904, she used to write more and more, entered really the "world of artists". 

She settled to 27, rue Fleurus, where she lived with her brother. Meanwhile, with the arrival of Alice Babette Toklas in Gertrude's life in 1907, a big tension bore between the siblings. Alice was born slave and that annoyed Leo. He had even created a big split that would last forever between himself and the two others. 

He asserted (at that time) that "Gertrude is devoted of talents and her admirers are silly idiots". A criticism direclty targetting Alice B. Toklas.

     In 1913, Gertrude Stein met a famous American photographer, Karl Van Wechter, that contributed much to her celebrity in the United States. By the way, he was the one that shot her most famous portrait, when Gertrude Stein stand in front of the US flag.

Forced to leave Paris because of the First World War, the two lesbian women escaped to the South of France, a settlement that announced lots of travelling through the country.

With the beginning of the Roaring Twenties ( with cabarets, smoking women, Charleston, and so on and so forth...), she wrote lots of plays put to music (very funny)

     It was only the early thirities that Gertrude Stein began to publish her books, notably the famous Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1932. Her brother Leo died the same year.

     In her whole life, we can only notice one hobby Gertrude Stein had, that is to say Alice B. Toklas. Nobody understood that passion - and even that admiration - she had for her. Gertrude was loved by everybody and there was no soul on Earth that didn't want her whereas Alice was awful in all points.

     Gertrude Stein died on the twenty-seventh of July 1946, taken by a stomach cancer, as her mother.

     After her death, Alice B. Toklas became poorer and poorer, until she ended totally forgotten.

"I have been rich and I have been poor. It's better when you are rich." [Gertrude Stein]

Literary movements, introduce yourself !

    "The term literary movements is a gathering of authors and works presenting the same main ideas, in texts that can have a program value or even a manifesto value. It can be a literary school, with its doctrine, its gathering signs, its chiefs. It can also be (more flexible) a movement that, without creating a school, offers an esthetic unity and a strong ideology."

     This extract is the definition of the literary mouvements that is given in school books for high school students.

There are lots of literary movements, going from well-known to very little and unfollowed genres, that last for some very long, but for others only a few years. It exists so many of them that today, it is sometimes hard to classify some works in a particular one.

     Gertrude Stein, in her whole work, created a melting pot of many of them, depending on the books she wrote. She was the most qualified as being a master in the art of realism, surrealism and hyperrealism, including of course some other literary movements in three of them. We are going to study the links between them and the belonging of Gertrude Stein to the three main movements of our presentation. We would divide our reflection in three distinct parts, devoting an article to each of them.

Realism : A reaction against romantic sentimentalism !

     A basic difference between realism and sentimentalism is that in realism, "the redemption of the individual lay within the social world," but in sentimental fiction, "the redemption of the social world lay with the individual"

     Realism is a representation of the middle-class life. Realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation. The realist novel presented life as it was in urbanized, industrial Britain. For instance, in Gertrude Stein's short story called Fernhurst, the writer presents the College of Fernhurst as being a pleasant place. With her writing style, she describes the everyday life as it is actually, without inventing anything or emphasizing what she sees through the eyes of the narrator.

     Its aim against romanticism, the interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all affected the rise of realism. In the same way, in Quod Erat Demonstrandum, Gertrude Stein draws up a portrait of Mabel Neathe that is completely part of the scientific methods, because Gertrude Stein's way to describe her seems to be very straight and logical, as if she wanted to demonstrate a state of fact. Moreover, the description of Mabel Neathe calls for a moral dimension, reinforced by the effect of kaleidoscope. She is presented under many faces, but each of them could be rational.

     According to William Harmon and Hugh Holman, where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists* plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions, realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence. (A Handbook to Literature 428). This expression qualifies well what Gertrude Stein does in Fernhurst : if we analyse the different paragraphs, we are forced to admit that the "now", the action that is happening at the present time, is really important, whoever the character or the situation is.

     Relation to naturalism : it is a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Naturalism implies a philosophical position. Naturalistic writers believed that the laws behind the forces that govern human lives might be studied and understood. Again, we are facing the philosophical dimension in a literary movement. Gertrude Stein, in her whole work, tries to draw her ideologies so that the reader is brought to put everything, from the laws behind the forces that govern human lives, to be reconsidered and retought, or even rethought.
Concerning the characters, they are frequently but not invariably ill-educated or lower-class characters whose lives are governed by the forces of heredity, instinct, and passion. We can consider that Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas works under those principles. Stein is fully passionate for her lover, and in a twisty kind of way, she is governed by unexpected and at the basis unwished forces. Alice Babette Toklas has always been described as an awful person, in any sense of the word. Gertrude Stein was blinded by her instinct and her passion for her, because she was the only one that had that kind of feelings for Alice.

     As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in indistrualisation and urbanism, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture. For example, when she comes back to America in the early thirties, she wants to give to the reader a perfect view of the new American way of life. We're in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, when lots of new things appear. Moreover, the culture is going to change soon, so as the ideology. The phenomenon of the American Dream is faithfully followed in the entire world. That reinforces the interest of the reader, wherever he is. It's also the beginning of mass-immigration to non-endangered countries, such as the United States or more generally in America.

     There is a selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot. Characters are more important than the action and the plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject. Quod Erat Demonstrandum is the archetypal of this vision. Gertrude Stein, in that piece of literature, writes three distinct descriptions : Adele, Mabel Neathe and Helen. In the three of them, Gertrude Stein focuses more on the characters rather than on the plot that could exist. Their whole stories deal with who they are, sometimes morally, sometimes physically, but there is no real foundation of plot. 

     Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past. Gertrude Stein tries to "enter the descriptive people's mind". it is as if she already know who they actually are. She bases her writings on statements. She paints the reality as it is actually. For instance, when she draws up the portrait of Adele, considered to be herself, she does not emphasize anything and paints really herself as she thinks she is.
Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class. (See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel)

     Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances.
Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact. In this way, we must confess Gertrude Stein's style when she writes respects the vernacular system. It is not a poetry or a heightened story. It stays a basic novel, that mixes lots of effects and tones, but that are always plausible. She does not get out the view of awareness and truth she creates since the beginning of her writing.
Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century progresses.We see clearly that Gertrude Stein stays quite covert when she writes.There are very few intrusions of the narrator's point of view in her books. There is a symbol of fidelity that isn't broken.

     In its own time, realism was the subject of controversy. Debates over the suitability of realism as a mode of representation led to a critical exchange known as the realism war.
Complex in appearance, rich in character, diverse in outlook, teeming with ideas and operating on several levels, the realism manages in any way to cope with that controversy. It took a big place in the history of literary movements.

     Realism on BBC : In our time, Victorian Realism

     Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material. [William Dean Howells]

Surrealism : Sovereign of the language !

     The surrealism is a movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World War I and World War II, that is to say during the interwar period, that was the period of time that saw the expansion of many ideologies, and above all, the period of slackening after a tragical World War. The thoughts change. The predominant movement too.

Language has been given man that he may make surrealist use of it. [Anonymous]

      Surrealism is a mental automatism whereby we express by speaking , by writing etc.., the real working of the thought. But there is no control of the reason and without morale preoccupations. Gertrude Stein, in her work Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and other early writings, gives more importance to the moral side of the work than to the physical side of it. She draws up circonstances and situations that has no link with reason. Everything she said is first based on a certain reflection, or even on a reflected certainty. She talks about it as if she was just telling a story verbally, without knowing at the time she speaks what is going to be the morale of the topic. We didn't find that point of view before.
André Breton, a leader of the surrealism,  was explicit in his assertion that surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.

     Surrealism is often characterized only by its use of unusual, sometimes startling juxtapositions, by which it sought to trancend logic and habitual thinking to reveal deeper levels of meaning and unconscious associations. As the surrealism craves for the transcendence of the habitual thinking, Gertrude Stein craves for it too. She puts everything again in question and let the feeling remains, that everything is not at his right place in the world. Thus it was instrumental in promoting Freudian and Jungian conceptions of the unconscious mind.

     As a matter of fact, Arthur Rimbaud was the precursor of the surrealism, notably with his poem The Drunken Boat :
La tempête a béni mes éveils maritimes.                   
The storm made bliss of my sea-borne awakenings
Plus léger qu'un bouchon j'ai dansé sur les flots        
Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves
Qu'on appelle rouleurs éternels de victimes,              
Which men call eternal rollers of victims,
Dix nuits, sans regretter l'oeil niais des falots !   
For ten nights, without once missing, the foolish eye of the harbor lights !                                                                     
    Feminists criticized the surrealistic movement because It was a really masculine movement in spite of the fact that women were present in a few paintings. They were represented as an object of desire and mystery.

Gertrude Stein, nevertheless, although she is a feminist, copes with both movements.

     The Dada movement is a cultural movement ; it was an anti nationalist, provocative movement. The movement concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.
For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests.

     Parnassianism refers to its distinction as the home of poetry, literature and learning. It is a poetic movement which had to point up the restraint, the reject of a social and political engagement of the author.
Main theory : Art for art ; art is useless , the aim is the beauty.
Precursors : Théophile Gautier, De Banville.

     Surrealist paintings : Beyond painting

     Therefore, the surrealism is opened to other forms of movements, and not only to painting. For example, it exists a few surrealist films.

Everything leads us to believe that there is a certain state of mind from which
life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable
and the incommunicable, height and depth are no longer perceived as contradictory.
[André Breton], Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929)

Hyperrealism : Opposite to abstract expressionism !

     Hyperrealist artists create realities we would
like to imagine or those we would like not to imagine, or those we have never
imagined. That is the magic of Hyperrealism.  [Tail Danai]

     Hyperrealism is an artistic style characterized by highly realistic graphic representation. Sometimes, in Gertrude Stein's work, we can even go further than the realism, because she's painting portraits or landscapes with a manner that is so close to the realism, so close to the representation we already have of it, just while imagining it, that it becomes trully hyperrealist.

     In painting and sculpture the word "Hyperrealism" describes a photorealistic rendering of people, landscapes, and scenes, just as Gertrude Stein does in her books.
Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high-resolution photograph. It is a fully fledged school of art and can be considered an advancement of photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting paintings or sculptures.

     Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information, creating a painting that appears to be very realistic like a photograph. The term is primarily applied to paintings from the United States art movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Stein, approximately fifty years before, was already using state of facts, like photographs, clichés and other a priori to aim a realistic vision of something, someone or somewhere. She used fixed situations and states of minds to develop her own thoughts.
Photorealists copy the photograph exactly to make a statement about the way we see influenced by looking at the world through the photograph.

     Hyperrealists go beyond the limitations of a single photograph to produce a picture with so much super detail that the image becomes kind of "abstract", but while staying filled with details still and all.

     Belgian art dealer Isy Brachot coined the French word hyperréalisme, meaning photorealism, as the title of a major exhibition and catalogue at his gallery in Brussels in 1973. The exhibition was dominated by such American Photorealists as Ralph Goings, Chuck Close, Don Eddy, Robert Bechtle and Richard McLean.
Since then, hyperrealism has been used by European artists and dealers to apply to painters influenced by the photorealists.

     However, Hyperrealism is contrasted with the literal approach found in traditional photorealist paintings of the late 20th century.
Hyperrealist painters and sculptors use photographic images as a reference source from which to create a more definitive and detailed rendering, one that often, unlike photorealism, is narrative and emotive in its depictions. Strict photorealist painters tended to imitate photographic images, omitting or abstracting certain finite detail to maintain a consistent over-all pictorial design. They often omitted human emotion, political value, and narrative elements. Since it evolved from Pop Art, the photorealistic style of painting was uniquely tight, precise, and sharply mechanical with an emphasis on mundane, everyday imagery. For instance, we can focus on an emphasizement that creates Gertrude Stein on the everyday imagery, when she speaks about Fernhurst. Her description is quite realist but we could go even deeper, until hyperrealism.

     Hyperrealism, although photographic in essence, often entails a softer, much more complex focus on the subject depicted, presenting it as a living, tangible object. These objects and scenes in hyperrealism paintings and sculptures are meticulously detailed to create the illusion of a reality not seen in the original photo. Textures, surfaces, lighting effects, and shadows appear clearer and more distinct than the reference photo or even the actual subject itself.

For example, in Q.E.D., the three different books describing the three women, if we gather them, take more than 80 pages. It is easy to understand how much Gertrude cared on the details. Theorically, it takes less time to present someone. She's being rather meticulous in her writings, and it permits the reader to imagine very well the different characters.

     According to Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and philosopher, hyperrealism is the simulation of something which never really existed.
As such, hyperrealists create a false reality, a convincing illusion based on a simulation of reality. In the same way, Gertrude Stein draws up portraits, beginning with a reality, a base that is common, to create characters that are so well described that they become almost an illusion.

Style and methods

     The hyperrealist style focuses much more of its emphasis on details and the subjects. Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are not strict interpretations of photographs, nor are they literal illustrations of a particular scene or subject. Instead, they utilize additional, often subtle, pictorial elements to create the illusion of a reality which in fact either does not exist or cannot be seen by the human eye. Furthermore, they may incorporate emotional, social, cultural and political thematic elements as an extension of the painted visual illusion; a distinct departure from the older and considerably more literal school of photorealism.

     Hyperrealist painters and sculptors make allowances for some mechanical means of transferring images to the canvas or mold, including preliminary drawings or grisaille underpaintings and molds.
Photographic slide projections or multi media projectors are used to project images onto canvases and rudimentary techniques such as gridding may also be used to ensure accuracy.
Sculptures utilize polyesters applied directly onto the human body or mold. Hyperrealism requires a high level of technical prowess and virtuosity to simulate a false reality.

Themes

     Subject matter ranges from portraits, figurative art, still life, landscapes, cityscapes and narrative scenes. The more recent hyperrealist style is much more literal than photorealism as to exact pictorial detail with an emphasis on social, cultural or political themes. This also is in stark contrast to the newer concurrent photorealism with its continued avoidance of photographic anomalies. Hyperrealist painters at once simulate and improve upon precise photographic images to produce optically convincing visual illusions of reality, often in a social or cultural context.

     Some hyperrealists have exposed totalitarian regimes and third world military governments through their narrative depictions of the legacy of hatred and intolerance. Denis Peterson, Gottfried Helnwein and Latif Maulan depicted political and cultural deviations of societal decadence in their work. Peterson's work focused on diasporas, genocides and refugees. Helnwein developed unconventionally narrative work that centered around past, present and future deviations of the Holocaust. Maulan’s work is primarily a critique of society’s apparent disregard for the helpless, the needy and the disenfranchised. Provocative subjects include enigmatic imagery of genocides, their tragic aftermath and the ideological consequences. Thematically, these controversial hyperreal artists aggressively confronted the corrupted human condition through narrative paintings as a phenomenological medium.  These lifelike paintings are an historical commentary on the grotesque mistreatment of human beings.

     Hyperreal paintings and sculptures further create a tangible solidity and physical presence through subtle lighting and shading effects. Shapes, forms and areas closest to the forefront of the image visually appear beyond the frontal plane of the canvas; and in the case of sculptures, details have more clarity than in nature. Hyperrealistic images are typically ten to twenty times the size of the original photographic reference source, yet retain an extremely high resolution in color, precision and detail. Many of the paintings are achieved with an airbrush, using acrylics, oils or a combination of both. Ron Mueck’s lifelike sculptures are scaled much larger or smaller than life and finished in incredibly convincing detail through the meticulous use of polyester resins and multiple molds. Bert Monroy’s digital images appear to be actual paintings taken from photographs, yet they are fully created on computers.
 
    Ron Mueck's works : Hyperrealist sculptures

     As a photo-realist painter, I have often been asked why I don’t just take a photograph. Good question, when you consider my paintings look like photographs. Well, for one thing, I’m not a photographer. To me, it is not the destination that is important—it is the journey.
The incredible challenge of recreating reality is my motivation.[Bert Monroy]

Time to conclude !

    As we explained during our reflection around Gertrude Stein, she was a master in different literary movements, especially around what concerned the realism, the surrealism and the hyperrealism. In her whole work, she kept a constant thinking and never changed her mind concerning her way of writing.
 
    As would say Gertrude Stein herself, a writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears. Of course you can use both of them to graduate our work ;)

Plagianism is a sin ! Let's talk about our sources !

First of all, our primary source of reflection has been Gertrude Stein's book Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and other early writings, but that is not our unique source.

To get information about the different subjects that are developed in our work, we dove into the unending virtual Internet, especially the Free Encyclopedia Wikipedia. 

Last but not least, we used our personal knowledges to do the work concerning the reflections.


NB : We have been given that exercise by our professor Mister Didier Girard. If there is any problem (undepending from our will), thank you to refer to him.


Ahmed-Boudouda Mériem
Kieffer Marion
Weber Paul-Etienne
Kauffmann Sébastien