Gertrude Stein & friends: life in art.

Gertrude Stein at her salon, 1920

Invaluable

Baby Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and the family moved to Vienna and Paris, so Gertrude spoke German, French and English well. Her father moved them back to USA in 1879 but died in 1891, so older brother Michael supported them. Brother Leo moved back to Europe, immersing himself in art and in 1903 Gertrude also returned to Paris, sharing a left bank art studio. Michael sent money each month, making their bohemian life-style sustainable.

Thus Rue de Fleurus became the first permanent home for the Steins, with Gertrude remaining there for 40 years. They provided the informal focal point for contemporary art in Paris, inspiring, supporting and buying art. Their home became a salon, where art works by Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin and Cezanne shone. Saturday evenings enabled young, impoverished artists to examine the family’s notable art collection in their salon.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

 1923 

How did Leo & Gertrude become so learned about art? Art scholar Bernard Berenson introduced Leo to Paul Cézanne and helped Leo buy a work from Ambroise Vollard's gallery. In 1904 Berenson welcomed and taught the Steins in Florence. In 1905 the siblings saw the Manet Retrospective in Paris and bought Portrait of a Woman with a Hat by Henri Matisse. This purchase encouraged Matisse, just when avant-garde artists were being criticised by the press.

In 1905 Pablo Picasso met the Steins at Clovis Sagot’s informal art gallery. The first Picasso oil paintings that Leo bought was Nude on a Red Background! Then they bought some Renoirs, 2 Gauguins, a Daumier, a Delacroix, an El Greco and Cézanne water colours. The friendship with Matisse cooled only when Gertrude developed a greater interest in Picasso. Fortunately Michael Stein continued to collect Matisse.

Etta and Claribel Cone were wealthy, elegant, educated Baltimoreans who inherited vast wealth in their 20s. The Steins and Cones travelled to Florence in 1905 where Berenson introduced the Cones to Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck’s art. The Steins took Etta to Picasso’s studio while he was doing Gertrude's portrait, and she urged Etta to buy Picasso drawings.

The Steins were introducing artist to artist, patron to artist, patron to patron. In 1905-6, Leo and Gertrude invited Picasso and Matisse to their studio to meet each for the first time. In Jan 1906, Michael and Sarah Stein took Etta and Claribel to meet Matisse at his Seine flat, and both sisters bought as many works as they could. Gertrude also sold the Cones some of her prized pictures including Delacroix, Cézanne and a Stein salon group portrait by Marie Laurencin.

In the US, Harriet Lane Levy (1867–1950) had been a popular journalist in San Francisco. She’d already visited Paris before, the first being with her friends Michael and Sarah Stein. But this time she sailed to Paris with friend Alice B Toklas. They arrived in Paris in 1907, living together until Toklas met Gertrude Stein.

Toklas was invited to a weekend party at Steins’. She was besotted, soon becoming a regular visitor and going to the galleries with Gertrude. In 1910 Alice moved into rue de Fleurus home and became Gertrude's right hand woman, reader, critic, typist and publication handler! She was Stein’s lover & assistant for ever!

By 1909, photographer/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz was introduced to the Steins. By then Stieglitz knew the works of Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne well, and began to negotiate with Leo and Gertrude to exhibit their huge collection. Other young modernist painters joined in eg Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay and Guillaume Apollinaire.

New Eastern Europe Jewish artists arrived in Paris from 1904 on. Starving in their Paris garrets, Steins’ salons filled with food-drink were much appreciated. The Americans were all secularist Jews, but they wanted to help the Jewish artists, especially Max Weber, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delauney and Italian Amedeo Modigliani. The fact that the Steins, Cone sisters, Alfred Stieglitz, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Alice B Toklas spoke Yiddish or German from home must have helped the lads integrate.

Levy returned to the US in 1910, at 43, and lived her life collecting and art philanthropy. We know which artists Harriet patronised in Paris and which paintings she bought in the USA, because she became a very important benefactor at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. See Derain’s Paysage du midi 1906; Matisse’s Corsican Landscape 1899 and La Table au café c1899; and Pablo Picasso’s Scène de rue 1900.

Readers will love Paris Portraits: Stories of Picasso, Matisse, Gertrude Stein and Their Circle by Harriet Lane Levy, 2011.

Gertrude understood the radical implications of Cubism and was keen to link her status with it. Spanish cubist Juan Gris visited in 1910s, finding Stein accepted the more radical art styles that others quickly rejected. But a family rupture followed. Leo was a dedicated Matisse patron, not a Cubist fan. Gertrude and Alice visited Picasso’s studio where he was at work on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the work that marked the end of Leo's support for Picasso. In 1912 Leo took the Renoirs and many of the Cézannes to Italy, permanently! NB the Steins had established the first Museum of Modern Art at rue de Fleurus but the salon wound down with Leo leaving and war breaking out in 1914.

On her return to Baltimore in 1921, Claribel Cone rented a large flat in Etta’s building and arranged it as a private museum for their growing collection. This excellent Cone collection entered the Baltimore Museum of Art when Claribel died in 1929.

27 Rue de Fleurus, Paris

Note the plaque, next to the door

Leo Stein died in 1947, Gertrude Stein died in 1946 and Alice B Toklas in 1967. Gertrude and Alice B Toklas were both buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

The Stein collection had been constantly divided among relatives, friends, dealers and collectors, making it difficult to track. American collectors John Quinn and Albert Barnes both had access to the Stein collection and acquired significant paintings from them. In 1913, Gertrude traded large, early Picassos to dealer Kahnweiler in exchange for other paintings she wanted. Thus I’m sure the Steins were hugely successful as salonieres and patrons, more so than collectors. The 2012 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition brought together important paintings for the first time since pre-WW1 Paris.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, 2025. Wade wanted to uncover the woman behind the celebrity, as cultivated by Stein herself. But it was this very celebrity that eclipse her work. Wade found new archive material to shed more light on Stein’s relationship with Alice B. Toklas, and on the origins of her undeniably radical writing.

Wade examined the creation of the Stein myth eg posing for Picasso's portrait; central to Bohemian Parisian life hosting people eg Matisse & Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with Alice Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography. But admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan.

Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she begged Toklas to secure her place in literary history. Using unseen material, Wade uncovered the origins of Stein's radical writing, the real Gertrude Stein as she was when alone.