No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Matisse quickly acquired a reputation as King of the Fauves. The exhibition’s organizers asked him to withdraw the painting, but the artist Georges Desvallières, founder of the salon d’automne, was a friend and ally of Matisse. His support won through and the painting remained in the show.

  Matisse wanted 500 francs for it. Gertrude and Leo offered 450. Madame Matisse told her husband to hold out for the extra 50 francs, which would mean winter clothes for their daughter. He did, and Gertrude and Leo telegrammed their acceptance. Matisse had no money and the patronage of the Steins came at a crucial time.

  The walls of 27 rue de Fleurus began to crowd with his work. Within a short space, Gertrude and Leo bought Joy of Life, Blue Nude, a cast of his sculpture The Serf, Portrait of Margot, Landscape at Collioure. But Sarah Stein was his most loyal admirer. Her apartment became a shrine to Matisse. She bought a self-portrait, Blue Still Life, Pink Onions, The Young Sailor. ‘She knows more about my painting than I do,’ Matisse said of her. She went on buying his work long after Gertrude and Leo stopped.

  saturday evening salons

  Soon after buying Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, Gertrude and Leo bought their first Picasso: The Acrobat’s Family with a Monkey. They got it from Clovis Sagot, who had a gallery, which had previously been a pharmacy, at 46 rue Laffitte, close to Ambroise Vollard’s. Picasso was only twenty-four and Sagot was the first dealer to show his work. He described Sagot as very difficult and a shark because of the deals he struck and the way he sold paintings for so much more than he paid artists for them.

  After quarrelling over it, Gertrude and Leo bought another Picasso, of a nude girl holding a basket of red flowers. Then, within months, they bought Two Women Sitting at a Bar, The Absinthe Drinker, Woman with a Fan, Woman with Bangs and Boy Leading a Horse. Their whole apartment became crowded to the ceilings with works by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Renoir – modernist paintings that now define an era. They did not insure the collection and for the most part did not frame them. Gertrude thought frames constrained pictures.

  Curtailment to their collecting came when there was nowhere left to hang any more pictures. Gertrude said their Saturday evening salons began because so many people wanted to see these paintings at all hours of the day. ‘Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance.’ She and Leo formalized the visiting to Saturday evenings. All kinds of people turned up: young painters, writers, collectors, dealers, tourists. They looked at the pictures while Leo held forth about them, and these visitors mingled with Monsieur and Madame Matisse, Picasso and his partner Fernande Olivier, Marie Laurencin and her lover, Guillaume Apollinaire.

  Ambroise Vollard called the Steins ‘the most hospitable people in the world’.

  People who came there out of snobbery soon felt a sort of discomfort at being allowed so much liberty in another man’s house. Only those who really cared for painting continued to visit.

  Unwittingly, Gertrude and Leo created a private museum of modern art. There was no systematic intention to their collecting beyond love of each work. What they looked for in each picture they bought was integrity of expression and a new way of seeing and saying.

  William James visited: ‘Another world of which I know nothing,’ he said. Gertrude’s American lesbian friends Ethel Mars and Maud Squire, both artists, were regulars at the salons. Their partnership was lifelong. They met at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, then went to Paris together in 1903. Both wore extravagant make-up and coloured their hair – Ethel’s was orange. Maud Squire showed her work at the autumn salon. Gertrude wrote a poem about and for them, ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’.

  Gertrude and Leo attracted as much interest as the pictures on their walls. Gertrude, in brown corduroy, sat in the studio in a high-backed Renaissance chair next to the large iron stove. Leo, in Japanese silk, sat with his feet high up on a bookcase because of his troublesome digestion and ‘expounded and explained. People came and so I explained because it was my nature to explain,’ he said. He talked of Renoir’s feeling for colour ‘as the stuff of art’, Degas’ intellect and control, Cézanne’s treatment of mass. While he held forth, Gertrude studied people’s characters so as to fit them into a ‘characterological system’ for The Making of Americans.

  I made enormous charts, and I tried to carry these charts out. You start in and you take everyone that you know, and then when you see anybody who has a certain expression or turn of the face that reminds you of some one, you find out where he agrees or disagrees with the character, until you build up the whole scheme.

  Gertrude and Picasso

  On their first visit to Picasso’s studio, Gertrude and Leo spent 800 francs buying his paintings and Leo commissioned several drawings of himself, but it was Gertrude who became Picasso’s intimate friend and championed him as a genius equal only to herself.

  They became very close, and in the winter of 1906 he asked to paint her portrait. Thereafter, most afternoons for three months, Gertrude travelled, in the horse-drawn bus that connected the Left Bank with Montmartre, from her fine apartment in rue de Fleurus to Picasso’s messy studio in the Bateau Lavoir, the ‘laundry boat’, the artists’ workshops at 13 rue de Ravignan in the 18th arrondissement, carved out of what had once been a piano factory. There was no heating, a single water tap for all the studios, and on stormy days the building swayed. The poet Max Jacob coined its name. He also had a studio there, as did Apollinaire, Braque, Juan Gris, Modigliani…

  Picasso lived there with Fernande Olivier, the model in many of his works. She had run away from an abusive husband when she was nineteen. Some winter days the studio was so cold she stayed in bed and for two months could not go out because she had no shoes. She thought intellectuals in France regarded women as incapable of serious thought and she complained she was referred to only as ‘la belle Fernande’, not as a person in her own right.

  Marie Laurencin was the only woman artist in Picasso’s ‘group’ at the Bateau Lavoir. When training as a porcelain painter in Sèvres, she had met Braque and through him Picasso and Apollinaire. She felt overshadowed by them all: ‘If the genius of men intimidates me’, she wrote, ‘I feel perfectly at ease with everything that is feminine.’ Each time she and Apollinaire quarrelled she went back to her mother, who was as antipathetic to men as she became. Only when Marie Laurencin broke from ‘the genius of men’ did she become successful in her own right as a painter, designer and illustrator.

  Gertrude posed for Picasso sitting in an old broken armchair with one of its legs missing. She described him as like ‘a good-looking bootblack… thin, dark, alive with big pools of eyes and a violent but not rough way’, but she was critical of his selfishness towards Fernande Olivier. He was, she said, a genius with a weak and indecisive character whose work transcended his personality.

  Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905–6) © Peter Barritt / Alamy

  Her portrait took eighty to ninety sittings because they talked so much. Gertrude thought their artistic intention similar – to change ways of expression in art – she in words and he in paint, to move on from strictures, structures, conventions, expectations and limitations; to take risks and break moulds.

  In spring 1907, Picasso painted out Gertrude’s head. ‘I can’t see you any longer when I look,’ he said. They had become so absorbed in each other in conversation he had lost artistic detachment. He then went to Gósol in Spain for the summer with Fernande Olivier. Gertrude went to Fiesole with Leo. When Picasso returned in the autumn, he painted Gertrude’s face from memory as if it were an imposed mask. People told him she did not look like that. In time she will, he said, and this was true. His portrait captured a constant of many photographs of her: a stillness of thought, a sense of her dwelling inside herself and looking out from somewhere deep behind her eyes. The portrait seemed to endorse May Bookstaver’s criticism of Gertrude’s face as being unlived in. It was as if she lived elsew
here. Gertrude liked the portrait throughout her life: ‘For me it is I and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I for me,’ she said.

  Leo was scathing. In his view, Picasso created a stylistic incoherence by leaving the rest of the painting unmodified. His criticism underscored his total disaffection with the work of Picasso and Gertrude, a rejection of them as individuals and artists. Before long he was calling both their efforts ‘godalmighty rubbish’, ‘haemorrhoids’ and ‘cubico-futuristic tommy rotting’. Gertrude sided with Picasso. ‘I was alone at this time in understanding him’, she said. ‘Perhaps because I was expressing the same thing in literature.’ They both, she claimed, were chroniclers of the twentieth century, dismantling components of reality and reconstructing them in individual ways. She said they both sought ‘to express things seen not as one knows them but as they are when one sees them without remembering having looked at them’.

  Her portrait and their conversations formed a bond between them. Leo’s disaffection marked a fissure in the deep romance of his and Gertrude’s childhood, a romance that Leo had thought would last for ever. This fissure became open fracture when Alice B. Toklas arrived at 27 rue de Fleurus.

  Alice B. Toklas arrives

  At 5.12 on the morning of Wednesday 18 April 1906, movement along the San Andreas fault line caused a massive earthquake in San Francisco. The city’s water mains were destroyed and uncontainable fires broke out, which spread until it rained; 28,000 buildings were destroyed, 3,000 people killed, and 250,000 made homeless. Tents were set up in Golden Gate Park; cooking in houses was prohibited.

  No. 922 O’Farrell Street, where Alice B. Toklas lived, was spared, though the chimneys came down and the water pipes broke. The house, built of stone in the 1850s, was on a safe rocky hill in a suburb known as the Western Addition. Alice, who was twenty-nine, lived there with her widowed father and grandfather and young brother, Clarence. Her mother had died when she was eighteen and she gave up studying music at Washington University to look after them all. She became ‘the responsible daughter and granddaughter in a household of men’, the only woman, the housewife. Much was demanded of her and she hated it. With an allowance for household expenses, she had to plan menus, order supplies, provide meals and do whatever was asked of her. There was, too, ‘a procession of visiting male cousins many of them very old’.

  At table, she kept quiet while the men talked about politics and economics. ‘When I went to dine’, wrote her friend Annette Rosenshine, an artist,

  I felt most keenly the pall that hung over the dining room; the stale smell from the chain of after-dinner cigars… Alice and I sat meekly swallowing our food never attempting to venture an opinion, nor were we encouraged to do so. Quickly we fled at the first opportunity to Alice’s room to re-establish our lost identities.

  Alice, Annette and a writer, Harriet Levy, who lived next door at 920 O’Farrell Street, were Jewish, lesbian, interested in artistic expression, uninterested in finding husbands and, after its devastation, keen to leave San Francisco. Annette had studied and exhibited at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in Mason Street. The building was destroyed the day after the earthquake by the fires that raged. Harriet was a close friend of Gertrude’s sister-in-law Sarah Stein, who had also studied art at the Institute.

  Sarah and Michael Stein owned rental houses in San Francisco and when safe to do so they came from Paris to assess the damage. To impress her American artistic friends, and share a taste of the salon d’automne, Sarah Stein took three Matisse paintings with her; one was the portrait of Madame Matisse with a green stripe down her nose. Harriet Levy invited Alice to see these pictures. ‘Since the startling news that there was such stuff in town has been communicated, I have been a very popular lady,’ Sarah Stein wrote to Gertrude. Alice, intrigued by Matisse’s portrait and tales of salon life, voiced her wish to go to Paris. Sarah Stein invited her and Harriet to travel back with her, but Alice had no money and felt responsible for her brother, Clarence.

  The following year, Clarence was twenty-one and Alice thirty. San Francisco remained in a parlous state, without infrastructure or adequate hospital provision and with outbreaks of bubonic plague. Harriet agreed to lend Alice the money for her fare. They sailed together at the beginning of September 1907.

  The day they arrived in Paris, 9 September, they visited Sarah and Michael Stein at their apartment in rue Madame. Alice was aware of vast rooms, tall windows, oak furniture, Persian rugs, paintings on every bit of wall, and Gertrude:

  She was a golden presence burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair. She was dressed in a warm brown corduroy suit. She wore a large round coral brooch and when she talked, very little, or laughed, a good deal, I thought her voice came from this brooch. It was unlike anyone else’s voice – deep, full, velvety, like a great contralto’s, like two voices. She was large and heavy with delicate small hands and a beautifully modelled and unique head.

  Alice wrote that promotional piece in her eighties, long after Gertrude was dead. It showed her skill as a publicist. From first meeting, she became the agent and servant of Gertrude Stein. She heard, she said, bells ringing in her head and so knew she was in the presence of genius. And Gertrude thought their meeting destined by some internal force of nature: ‘It is inevitable that when we really need someone we find them. The person you need attracts you like a magnet.’

  Alice the maidservant and more

  Alice wasted no time. Gertrude, demoralized by Leo’s scorn of her work, needed to be revered. Alice needed a home. She was an experienced and capable manager, adept at subsuming her own ego. And she was a very good cook. Whatever Gertrude wanted, Alice would provide. The paradox was that Alice, while seeming to serve, dictated the agenda. She was the casting director: Gertrude would be the genius and Alice everything else. No outsider must get too near.

  Alice B. Toklas © Culture Club / Getty Images

  Next day they walked in the Luxembourg Gardens and had tea at Fouquet’s. On the Saturday, Alice attended the salon evening at 27 rue de Fleurus. She looked at Picasso’s Melancholy Woman, his preparatory works for the Desmoiselles d’Avignon, Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, Boy with a Butterfly Net, Self-Portrait and La Coiffure, Pierre Bonnard’s The Siesta, Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse, Lautrec’s Le Divan, little paintings by Daumier and Delacroix, two Gauguins, dozens of Renoirs, Cézanne watercolours… She met Picasso, Fernande Olivier, Matisse, Miss Mars and Miss Squire. Every so often, Hélène came in and filled the iron stove with coal.

  On 30 September Alice went, at Gertrude’s invitation, to the preview of the autumn salon. Cézanne had died the previous year and there were over fifty of his paintings on show.

  ‘Right here in front of you is the whole story’, Gertrude told her. ‘It was indeed the vie de Bohème, just as one had seen it in the opera’ was Alice’s view. And at the heart of this grand opera was Gertrude:

  It was the enormous life she’d led that you could see… All the past experience gives a richness to every new vision. That’s part of the genius… I wasn’t so much younger in years. I was only two years and a few months younger. But I was so much younger in experience.

  Alice’s arrival was timely. In August 1906 May Bookstaver married a New York stockbroker and became Mrs Charles Knoblauch, and later that year Mabel Haynes married an Austrian army captain. Both Gertrude and Alice were uxorious, but not for a man. Alice would gladly have been known as Mrs Gertrude Stein. It was Gertrude who had the money, the house and sat in the captain’s chair.

  Gertrude arranged for Alice to have French lessons with Fernande Olivier and she gave her pages to read of The Making of Americans, about bottom nature and dependent independent and independent dependent characters and everyone who had ever lived.

  The Making of Americans

  By the time Alice arrived, Gertrude had filled up many exercise books in writing The Making of Americans: Alice read:

  The strongest thing in each one is the botto
m nature of them. Other kinds of natures are in almost all men and in almost all women mixed up with the bottom nature in them. Some men have it in them to be attacking. Some men have it in them to be made more or less of the mixing inside them of another nature or of other kinds of nature with the bottom nature of them. There are two kinds of men and women, those who have dependent independent nature in them, those who have independent dependent nature in them. The ones of the first kind of them always somehow own the ones they need to love them, the second kind have it in them to have power in them over others only when these others have begun already a little to love them, others loving them give to such of them strength in domination.

  The book had no chapters and some sentences were twenty lines long. It marked, Gertrude told Alice, the difference between American and English literature. English literature made the nineteenth century, America made the twentieth and she, Gertrude, made twentieth-century American literature. Gertrude explained she was:

  escaping from the inevitable narrative of anything of everything succeeding something of needing to be succeeding that is following anything of everything consisting that is the emotional and the actual value of anything counting in anything having beginning and middle and ending.

  Alice thought Gertrude’s writing more exciting than anything that had ever been written. She started typing it all up. Her routine was to go to rue de Fleurus early in the mornings and get to work while Gertrude was still in bed. She taught herself to type on a worn-out Blickensderfer typewriter: