Vampire: The Scandals of Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was a "genius". So says the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, the Met and many others. But was she? Largely unknown until the 1933 publication of her autobiography, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which was Stein’s life through the eyes of her lesbian lover, as written by Stein, #GertrudeStein was little more than an American art collector in #Paris for the majority of her life. The Autobiography of #AlicebToklas is an almost complete control of narrative from the one person who could tell it. Today, with all of the exhibits and fanfare it would seem as if Stein was some sort of artistic contemporary as F. Scott Fitzgerald, when the reality was Gertrude Stein was a glorified art dealer, a medical school dropout, a confused woman from a very rich family who relied on her stepfather’s #Bachrach photography network to push modern art to America.

Sources:

Arthur Lubow, "An Eye for Genius", Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/an-eye-for-genius-the-collections-of-gertrude-and-leo-stein-6210565/

Janet Macolm, "How Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas Went to Heaven", The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/11/13/strangers-in-paradise

Claudia Roth Pierpont, "The Mother of Confusion", The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/05/11/the-mother-of-confusion

#thelostgeneration #lostgeneration #parisfrance #ruedefleurus #alicetoklas #ernesthemingway #leostein #picasso #renoir #gauguin #gertrudesteindocumentary #gertrudesteinbiography #artdocumentary #artcollector