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]
