Gertrude Stein: biography, quotes, books

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Gertrude Stein has gone down in history as an innovator and literary revolutionary. This woman carried the idea of freedom from social norms throughout her life, creating her own. Contemporaries openly slandered her and scolded her for her rebellious disposition. But today Gertrude Stein is a model of progressive thought and a pioneer of modernism. Who is she and what role did she play in the history of contemporary art?

Biography

February 3, 1874, a girl was born in the small American town of Allegheny. She came from a we althy Jewish family and was the second child. Her father was successfully engaged in construction and real estate trade and soon made a decent capital, which the children had enough for the rest of their lives.

The girl was named Gertrude. From a young age, she showed herself as a curious child, studied well at school and, at the direction of her father, entered college, where she studied psychology and medicine. However, all this was alien to her, and relations with her father were tense. Having spent her childhood between two cultural capitals - Paris and Vienna, Gertrude Stein immediately felt a craving for beauty.

The conflict has exhausted itself with the death of parents. Gertrude and her older brother Leo were orphaned at an early age. First, their mother passed away from cancer, then their father also died. Now the young Steins, with a huge inheritance and a steady income from the family business, were left to fend for themselves.

Leo moved to Paris, where he rented a small apartment on Rue Fleurus, 27. Soon, leaving school, his sister also moved in with him. It is from this moment that the stormy creative life of Gertrude begins.

The Stynes' cozy home behind the Luxembourg Gardens soon turned into a bohemian haven. Leo was an art critic and was engaged in buying and collecting paintings by talented, but not yet recognized artists working in a new direction (cubism).

Gertrude Stein in the circle of the Parisian intelligentsia could boast of high aesthetic taste and flair. She was educated, smart and at the same time sharp-tongued, so her opinion was not only listened to, but sometimes they were afraid of her. She inspired and supported many aspiring artists and writers and gathered around her a real creative circle. Despite such public employment, Gertrude devoted time to her own writing genius, although she was not immediately appreciated by critics.

Eternal sweetheart

About the personal life of a freedom-loving American woman, it is known for sure that she preferred female society. She had many male friends, buther heart belonged only to Alice Toklas. They met in 1907 and have been inseparable ever since. Alice traveled around Europe and decided to meet her compatriot in Paris. The meeting turned out to be fateful. All of Paris was gossiping about their relationship. It was an open challenge to society. The couple were inseparable until Gertrude's death.

Grand Mother of Modernism

In literature, Stein is known as an innovator. She did not think about the lightness of style and always experimented with texts, phrases, ambiguous aphorisms. Like her artist friend Picasso, Gertrude Stein was more concerned with form than content. She was one of the first in the history of literature to use the stream of consciousness technique without punctuation marks in the narrative. It was this quality - to discover new facets of the word - that later formed the basis of modernism, and the writer herself was called the grand mother of style.

Despite the demands of the time and the traditions that have developed in literature, Gertrude Stein did not want to adapt her creations, although the sharp criticism deeply hurt the writer. She zealously desired to receive recognition during her lifetime, but her contemporaries considered her strange.

Famous books and quotes

Stine's literary work is often identified with painting. Each word in the work, like a stroke of paint, falls on paper-canvas and each is equal. The famous books of Gertrude Stein ("Ida", "Three Lives") were written largely under the influence of prominent classics (Shakespeare, Flaubert), and they also feel the relationship with the writerscontemporaries (Hemingway, Fitzgerald), with whom she was friends, whom she supported. This is a unique synthesis of European avant-garde and American flavor. In addition, poetic works, lectures on literature and the famous aphorisms of the innovative writer have reached the modern reader.

Criticism

One of her first creations, written in 1909, was the novel Three Lives. Gertrude Stein spoke about three women's destinies, three characters. The action takes place in America, at Bridgepoint. The narration is rather restrained, later it received the definition of "emotional anesthesia". Critics, using the correlation of prose with painting, pointed to the influence of the French artist Cezanne in the creation of the heroine of Good Anna. The free syntax and open sexuality of the heroine Melancta gave the right to refer to the friendship between Stein and Picasso. But the influence of the Fauvist Matisse is felt most acutely in the character of Quiet Lena.

In 1937, another significant book came out. It was a frank story about her life, which Gertrude Stein did not immediately decide on. "Autobiography of everyone" - this is the name of the work. On the pages of the book, the reader not only gets acquainted with the main milestones, people and experiences in the life of the author, but also with her self-esteem. The book details Stein's trip to the United States after a 30-year absence and the changes that have taken place in the country. The work is filled with playful and mysterious aphorisms, which Gertrude Stein was so inventive. Quotes from her works, by the way, are a separate study andpuzzle for critics.

Recognition

1940 was a turning point for the whole of France. The occupation by the Germans, the war paralyzed the creative life of Paris for a while. The situation for Gertrude was complicated by the fact that she was Jewish. She was offered to leave for a while, but, being already an elderly lady, she decided to trust fate and stay in a country house. In 1944, the alarming situation subsided, and the writer returned safely to her native Paris. However, two years later, Gertrude Stein was struck down by a diagnosis of cancer. The only thing that saved me from the pain was morphine. July 27 was a difficult operation. Her writer's heart broke…

During her lifetime, Gertrude Stein never received public recognition. For all her efforts and creative experiments, she received ridicule, betrayal and disapproval. It was only in the middle of the last century that the writer was talked about positively. Gertrude Stein's books have been translated into many languages, including Russian, and have replenished the golden fund of world art. And the writer herself was ranked among the classics of American literature.

Art Muse

Her personality was multifaceted and at the same time mysterious. Stein spoke her mind openly, was free from prejudice, but was sensitive to the criticism of others. Such a controversial person simply could not go unnoticed by the masters of art. So, Pavel Chelishchev (the Russian founder of mystical surrealism) used the image of Gertrude to paint the canvas "Phenomena". No less famous work is the "Portrait of Gertrude Stein" -creation of Pablo Picasso.

The writer appears in the cinema: in the feature film "Modernists" (1987), in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" (2011). The image of Gertrude is present in literary works: Hemingway's "The Holiday that is always with you" and Satterthwaite's "Masquerade". Stein's poetic texts were set to music in different years by American composers Virgil Thompson (1934) and James Tinney (1970). Today in New York, in Bryant Park, there is a monument to the writer.

Interesting facts

• Many artists of that time tried to get into the house of Gertrude Stein. Who turned to the writer for personal advice, who for support, who for “reasonable” criticism. Her famous guests were Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, to whom Gertrude Stein herself gave the definition of the "lost generation" - early grown-up people who could not find their place in life.
• Gertrude's older brother Leo Stein did not approve of his sister's decision to live with Alice Toklas. He expressed his protest in leaving the house on Fleurus Street and breaking off family relations with Gertrude.
• Despite the fact that Gertrude Stein was a guiding star and a rich source of theoretical knowledge for many aspiring art geniuses, she estimated her own writing talent modestly, and long hard work often did not receive any response from society at all. The disappointment was reinforced by the fact that she enjoyed the respect and admiration of her "pupils" while they were inexperienced. With receiptconfessions, they often cut off friendships and even spoke negatively about the personality of the writer.