The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Gertrude Stein was studying at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore when her brother Leo informed her about an innovative French painter named Paul Cézanne. After seeing Cézanne’s paintings, Stein made Paris her home and went often to the gallery of Ambroise Vollard, the only art dealer who sold Cézanne’s work. The Stein siblings began their art collection from these visits to Vollard. For Stein, purchasing a portrait of a woman by Cézanne was important because it was “in looking and looking at this picture” that she was inspired to start writing Three Lives, a book about three women that was eventually published in 1909 (28). In her writing, Stein was passionate about making innovations at the sentence level, and she had the habit of beginning writing at eleven at night and continuing until dawn.

In the next autumn salon, Matisse displayed his famous painting La Femme au Chapeau (1905) in the Petit Palais salon of works that had been refused by the official academy. The Stein siblings bought the painting, although many onlookers mocked it, not knowing what to make of its novelty. Stein got to know the Matisses well and went often to their small, exquisitely furnished apartment in St. Michel, on the Left Bank of the River Seine. Matisse sparked innovations in painting by mixing pigments only with white and so intensifying their color values. Over time, people began to come to Stein’s rue de Fleurus residence to see the Matisses and the Cézannes.

It was at the gallery of a former circus clown named Sagot that Stein first encountered Picasso’s work. Stein and Picasso had conflicting memories of their first meeting; however, the Steins did purchase Picasso’s picture of a nude girl with a basket of red flowers. Stein’s brother Leo made a case for keeping the picture even though Stein herself did not like it at first, finding its rendering of the female body repellent. A short time later, Picasso began his portrait of Stein, who posed for him in the rue Ravignan every Monday and then walked back across Paris to the rue de Fleurus, thus maintaining her habit of walking across the city. Another painter, Felix Vallotton, also painted Stein, and she came to like posing, feeling that “the long still hours followed by a long dark walk intensified the concentration with which she was creating her sentences” (43). While he was struggling with Stein’s portrait, Picasso passed through his Harlequin and early Italian phases and then entered his avant-garde Cubist phase.

Once Stein finished writing Three Lives, she began to copy it in French school notebooks until Etta Cone, a typist, came to the rescue. Stein began her next work, The Making of Americans, on a summer holiday at the Casa Ricci in Italy. She worked on the style of long sentences that Toklas says would change the literary ideas of the next generation. Stein sought an American agent for her manuscript, but when that failed, she decided to print the book herself and sent it to the Grafton Press in New York.

Stein introduced Matisse and Picasso. Matisse then introduced Picasso to African sculpture. Picasso’s contact with this art form influenced his development of Cubism, a movement into which he conscripted André Derain and Georges Braque. However, the narrator is uncertain which painter was responsible for recognizing the artistic value of African sculpture for the Western artist. In his early days, Picasso was influenced by African art on a purely formal level, and his imagination mostly reflected his Spanish origins. Stein herself liked African sculpture but felt that it lacked the elegance of Egyptian sculpture.

Matisse and Picasso were both friends and enemies. They exchanged pictures and were eager to critique each other’s work. While Matisse was beginning to show in the autumn independents’ salon, Picasso exhibited only at the rue de Fleurus. Matisse lamented Stein and Picasso’s growing friendship and accused Stein of losing interest in his work. Matisse and Stein’s relationship cooled.