Wednesday, February 8, 2012

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose:" author and art collector Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946) was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.

Much of Gertrude Stein's fame derives from a private modern art gallery she assembled, from 1904 to 1913, with her brother Leo Stein. Carl Van Vechten (music critic for the New York Times and then drama critic for the New York Press), and Henry McBride (art critic for the New York Sun), did much to increase Stein's fame in the USA.

By early 1906, Leo and Gertrude Stein's studio had many paintings by Henri Manguin, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Honoré Daumier, Henri Matisse, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.[23]

During the 1920s, her salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus, with walls covered by avant-garde paintings, attracted many of the great writers of the time, including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, and Sherwood Anderson. She has been credited with inventing the term "Lost Generation" for some of these expatriate American writers.

About her childhood home in Oakland, she famously said, "There is no there there."

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