GERTRUDE STEIN

 

Gertrude Stein was a US American written. She studied Psychology with William James at Harvard and medicine at Johns Hopkins University. In 1903, she went to Paris and turned her residence into a meeting point for avant-garde writers, painters, and artists like Guillaume Apollinaire and  Pablo Picasso. But that wasn’t the first time that she lived in Paris. When she was three years old her family moved to Allegheny, Pennsylvania, United States, after that to Vienna and then Paris. Her parents wanted Gertrude and her siblings to live in a world of art and creation.

 

In 1906, she met Picasso, and he made a portrait of Gertrude thoughtful, listening carefully, imposing. Nowadays it is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

 

She was a very important influence on The Lost Generation, named by Gertrude Stein. The term “Lost Generation” refers to the generation of people who reached adulthood during or immediately following World War I. Demographers generally consider 1883 to 1900 as the birth year range of the generation. The name of this generation was because of Gertrude, considered the person that initiated modern literature. The Lost generation was a group of writers that lived in Paris and different places in Europe since World War I and the Crack of 1929.

 

The home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas of Paris "brought together confluences of talent and thought that would help define modernism in literature and art." Saturday nights were established as the formal day of "The Congregation." The house was near the Gardens of Luxembourg and the point of meeting different important artists. It’s considered the first museum of modern art, in the number 27 of Rue de Fleurus, Paris. Nowadays you can visit this museum and library.

 

Stein continued collecting art, organizing salons and writing for the rest of her life. In 1946, she died in Paris. She was buried in Père-Lachaise, "the most prestigious and visited necropolis in Paris" which houses the tombs of the most important figures in France, from Molière to Edith Piaf.

 

When Alice B. Toklas died in 1967, she was buried next to Stein. Today, people can visit their tombs to pay tribute to Stein and celebrate his contributions to modern art.

 

Gertrude Stein's most notable works are Three Lives (1909), The Making of the Americans (1925), Alice B. Toklas's Autobiography (1933), Paris, France (1940), The Wars I Have Seen (1945), and The things like they are (1950).