- Born
- 3 February 1874Allegheny, Pennsylvania, USA
- Died
- 27 July 1946Neuilly-sur-Seine, France · aged 72
Gertrude Stein
A modernist writer and art collector whose Paris home became a meeting place for artists and writers.
Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874. She grew up partly in Oakland, studied psychology at Radcliffe and attended medical school at Johns Hopkins before leaving without qualifying as a doctor.
In 1903 she moved to Paris, where she and her brother Leo began collecting modern art. Their home at 27 rue de Fleurus became a gathering place for artists and writers. Picasso’s portrait of Stein, completed in 1906, recorded one of the friendships at the centre of that world.
Stein met Alice B. Toklas in 1907. Toklas became her lifelong partner and a crucial reader and organiser of her work. “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” (1933), written by Stein in Toklas’s voice, brought a wide readership to a writer otherwise known for repetition and experiments with language. Her early novel “Q.E.D.”, about desire between women, appeared only after her death.
During the Second World War the two Jewish women remained in France, protected by connections to the Vichy official Bernard Faÿ. Stein’s support for Marshal Pétain remains a troubling part of her political record. She died in 1946, aged 72.