The San Francisco Chronicle called it “a little silly and naïve,” and was it? Four Saints was supposed to be a highlight of the two landmark shows on Gertrude Stein – Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories and The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde (both discussed in these pages). In a nine-week run the exhibitions attracted over 400,000 visitors. (Only Chagall drew more people in the history of SFMOMA, I was told.) A whole flurry of lectures, classes, panels, performances marked the “Summer of Stein,” and the new production of Stein’s first operatic collaboration with American composer Virgil Thomson, premiered in 1934, was eagerly awaited.
Read the review at http://www.scene4.com/1011/renatestendhal1011.html

27, rue de Fleurus September 2011

Usually the glass door only allows a glance into the far-away courtyard, well locked away by a modern door code – not like in my old Paris days, when all you had to do was push the door button and sneak past the concierge.
But magically, a Monsieur distingué came out just at that moment and politely held the door open for us. It was once again a strange feeling of moving through time, more so than ever, having just looked at all the photographs of rue de Fleurus in the SF exhibitions. The covered passage Stein and Toklas had built in order to get from their apartment to the atelier unempeded by the Paris weather, had been changed by later inhabitants, making it difficult to recognize the corner. But interestingly, the name on a discreet door bell today is still a Jewish name. (More photos on my Facebook page…)

Later that day, at the café restaurant Ma Bourgogne, at Place de Vosges, Kim and I met with Elizabeth Lennard, artist of film and video installtions, whose new documentary “The Stein Family, the Making of Modern Art” will play at the Grand Palais during the Paris run of The Steins Collect, starting in October, as I already mentioned in my last post. It will be distributed in the U.S. by Microcinema International (http://www.microcinema.com). If you are like me you are already missing The Steins Collect, the onslaught of modernism shown at SFMOMA. And if you can’t catch it again in Paris (I can’t either), Lennard’s DVD will bring it all back.
Have a look as some of her images and très avant-garde plays on film: http://elizabethlennard.com/Elizabeth_Lennard.html
Elizabeth and two other friends, filmmaker Emmy Scharlatt and painter Sonja Hopf, pointed us to a “must see” exhibition at the Jeu de Paume: photographs be Claude Cahun, another revolutionary modernist like Stein, although twenty years younger.

Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) was perhaps the first performance artist/photographer of modern times, a forerunner of gender-bending body and peformance artists like Cindy Sherman in the seventies. Sherman (in the French Wikipedia) is still regarded as a “pioneer” of post-modern photography. We had no idea how late Sherman was, in fact!
What Stein did in writing, using all the possibilities of the Enlish language to circumvent gender and dissimulate her disadvantages of being a woman, Cahun did in her obsessive mise en scènes for her own camera. Her self-portraits subvert gender at every turn, presenting her as man, woman and everything in between and beyond. Like Stein, she does it with wit and irony, sometimes making fun of gender roles (comically posing as a body-builder), sometimes turning herself into romantic-erotic metamorphoses of princes or pirates in her very own 1001 Nights, and most often she seems deadly serious. She not only cut her hair short (Stein did it in 1926) but shaved it off completely. Her pale look (in a dark undershirt with bound breasts) leaves her as indistinct as an alien, an insect, or the marble “Sleeping Muse” by Brancusi.
Like Stein, Cahun had the unconditional support of a female life-companion, artist Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), her stepsister with whom she had fallen in love at age fifteen. The two artists, with their male or male-sounding names, worked together on their photographs (sometimes double portraits) in the twenties; then Cahun, who also published her writing, joined the Surrealists and started working with photomontages and collages. Like Stein and Toklas, Cahun and Moore lived together their entire life, but these two apparently did it as artistic equals, without any apparent role division.
One other difference: Cahun and Moore were politicized and actively provoqued and sabotaged the Nazi occupiers on the island Jersey, where they had stayed during the war. Their brazen acts of resistance, trying to inspire German soldiers and military personnel to desert, got them a prison and execution sentence by the Gestapo. While Gertrude and Alice were “liberated” by the Allies, Claude and Marcel were saved from execution – to their frank regret — just in the nick of time.
It remains to be seen if French people draw parallels and distinctions between these remarkable avant-gardists, Stein and Cahun, and their life-companions.
More about Paris France to come, when I am less land-locked in the French provinces, at the Loire, with no DSL connection (another, more tedious trip backwards in time). Stay tuned.

“Gertrude Stein gone gone is gone,” to paraphrase the American press. Is it really true that she is gone? Stein had become a San Francisco neighbor, someone to say hello to across the street, back and forth between SFMOMA and CJM with a stop at Peets in between. Suddenly to have lost her presence, Gertie all packed up and shipped to DC, seems unreal. The long Summer of Stein being over, I was able to take my nostalgia to Paris for a few days. Did it help?
I keep thinking of moments that stand out for me in this Summer of Stein. There was the complaint often heard, the question often asked when I gave a talk or salon: how did Stein and Toklas survive the war? How come the Contemporary Jewish Museum hardly mentioned it? How come Seeing Gertrude Stein didn’t look at this Jewish question par excellence? The controversy brewing over Stein’s being protected by a Vichy collaborator even exploded in a panel discussion where I had to come to her defense against wild accusation of Nazi sympathies by local author Fred Rosenbaum. I maintain there is a flew of misunderstandings, and that the new book on the topic, Barbara Will’s “Unlikely Collaboration” is heavily tendentious and tries to grind an axe against Stein (like Janet Malcolm in her vicious Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, and other authors before her). But that deserves a post on its own, stay tuned.
On a more charming note, at my North Beach Gallery Canessa salon, an audience member told the story of visiting the site of Nathalie Barney’s parallel salon to Stein’s, and getting her caretaker, Berthe, to show her around long before Paris Was A Woman filmmaker Greta Schiller arrived with her crew. I imagine this audience member had stepped into an ancient limo at the strike of midnight that day…
Another member reported she used to have Stein’s quote “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” on her bedroom wall already as a child, and her father told her there was nothing special about it — anyone could have made that up. Ah well, but nobody did, did they? Not even Shakespeare with his “rose by any other name.” Google counts some 1, 221 rose poems in Western literature, and they are long and they are short, but only one of them recreates the rose as the modernist and post-modernist rose of our time.
What also stands out for me, no matter how much you know and have read about Stein: there is always another treasure trove to discover. Did you know that in the last 15 years some 30 academic studies have been published on Stein — and 70 dissertations written on her? One of them, Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater by Sarah Bay-Cheng, reminded me that there are some 70 plays written by the author! Just in time, on my Paris visit, I met artist/performer/filmmaker Elizabeth Lennard who has done many of these plays and even plans to produce one at the end of the Paris run of The Steins Collect at the Grand Palais: a play with 500 characters! Who but Stein could have come up with such an idea? How is Lennard going to solve that little casting hurdle? Employ the audience!

In Stein’s Operas and Plays you can see for yourself, and you can also read up on Four Saints in Three Acts as you won’t have understood more than a few words in the Yerba Buena performance of the “opera installation,” sung without supertitles and lacking the kind of direction that would have let you in on the fun and wit of it. The veritable Stein opera, as I said in my last post, happened next door to The Steins Collect, at SFMOMA, in David Clearbout’s video piece, “The American Room” which had all the radical modernist qualities Stein would have called “peaceful and exciting.”
I confess that my nostalgia made me rent the old hippy movie I Love You, Alice B. Toklas with Peter Sellers as a stiff who needs some hash brownies to get a life. Very sweet and silly and just right to console one after having seen Midnight in Paris a few times too many.
And finally, the good-bye in San Francsico was sweetened for me by learning that museum gift stores do sell books: all together nearly 1000 copies of Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures flew off the shelves, straight into the Summer of Stein…

 

LAST CHANCE STEIN, LAST CHANCE DAVID CLAERBOUT
Put on your running shoes and take a bag of patience: lines will be HUGE this weekend – the last days before Seeing Gertrude Stein and The Steins Collect close in SF (See my previous posts). These are the biggest shows ever at both museums (only Chagall beat out the Steins in SFMOMA’s history). Some 400,000 visitors, I heard from the administration. A record. The right time for a new look at modernism — modernism incarnate in Gertrude, Gertie, Gert. You’ll have to run far after Sept. 6 to still catch them: the next stop for Seeing Gertude Stein is Washington, DC — from Oct. 14 to Jan. 22, 2012 at the National Portrait Gallery (perfect place for a portrait of Stein). The Grand Palais in Paris is next for The Steins Collect, but if you can’t run across the Atlantic (no Jesus, anyone?) there’s New York! The Metropolitan Museum of Art will pick it up in February.
If you’ve missed Stein’s opera, Four Saints in Three Acts (with a good dozen saints and four acts), don’t despair. It wasn’t up to snap; it wasn’t exciting like Stein ought to be. The true modern excitement happened right next door, on the same floor at SFMOMA — the video installation called David Claerbout: The Architecture of Narrative. Clearbout works in a Steinian spirit of narrative, architectural narrative, unhinging the media of video and photography and, at the same time, he, too, warps the experience of time in the most fascinating asthetic ways. I sat, mesmerized, through the 24 minutes of “The American Room” (2009-2010), a piece that shows a singer’s recital in an intimate concert room at a place like the White House, surrounded by security guards, security cameras, and American flags. You can read an inspiring article by Kenneth Baker to get a glimpse: Claerbout uses ideas, formal principles and even language (he is “caressing” images) the way Stein used them. I will have to go back for a second look to write more about it before it closes on Sept. 6 as well.

If you miss all of it, you can still partake in Fashion à la Stein. My friend Shana Penn of the Taube Foundation recently pointed me to a French clothes boutique, Lilith, on Fillmore that carries a line of Stein-inspired gilets and hats and cuffs and other fabulous design inventions for girls who are boys and bois and girls and girls à la Alice. http://www.sanfranciscodress.com/records/page/850/lilith.html — have a look. It’s more expensive than the museums and catalogues, but looking doesn’t cost a penny!
Lilith is fun and will make you want to go right back to Paris, or at least to Midnight in Paris at a cinema near you.

SLUTTING IN SF: GERTRUDE STEIN ON SLUTWALK?

San Francisco had its first SlutWalk last Saturday, and was Gertrude Stein along for the ride?
Good question. Controversial question, as most questions are regarding Stein.
Now that the avant-garde has collectively declared “Gertrude Stein is Twitter”, would she have been amused by the “deets” posted online? By “No means no yes means yes wherever we go however we dress”? One thing is for sure, she would have had the right outfits already in 1908, those sexy body wraps and curderoy robes held together by only one pin – one delicate, moveable pin for the moveable feast.

My friend, cartoonist Tom Hachtman, even ventured out where no man had gone before. We have to admit, however, that Stein was not very interested in the cause of women. She was fully emancipated quite on her own, way ahead of the Victorian minions around her. She had her own cause and she was winning it, hands down, coming out as the most famous and most influential of all modernist writers in America. Yes, even “coming out” as much as that was possible before the term was invented. Therefore, when she died in 1946, she might not have felt the need to join in the seventies when feminists rediscovered her “genius” and marched through Paris to “Take Back the Night.”
Now, had it been “Midnight” – as in “Midnight in Paris” – who knows?
What, we may wonder, would she have done with the word SLUT? She had already slyly played with the word “gay,” writing A Long Gay Book (in addition to her many lesbian odes). She would no doubt have been highly amused by the new usages of “queer.” Both gay and queer have overtones and undertones of meaning that allow Steinian word play. But does SLUT?
At least she would have created a new noun (she loved using nouns and repeating them, which she called “caressing”) for those who walk on SlutWalks. A Twitter word like “Slutter,” to start with. Let’s paraphrase her “Completed Portrait of Picasso” with its “shutters shut” – and we don’t have far to walk:
“Slutters slut and open, so do queens. Slutters slut and slutters and so slutters slut and slutters and so, and so slutters. And so slutters slut and so slutters slut and so slutters and so. And so slutters slut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.”
There you have it. Unless you think Stein would have been on the opposite side of the controversy, turning a foxy eye at our present “raunch culture” of women’s and girl’s (un)dress, staying at her desk at home, mumbling under her breath something about “internalized abuse of Girls Gone Wild,” or “pornification of protest.” And rolling her eyes, writing a sequel to her long, long poem “Patriarchal Poetry,” something like “Patriarchal Sluttery”?

 

The “Summer of Stein” in San Francisco coincided with the “Summer of the Ring.” Gertrude Stein and Richard Wagner are certainly odd bed-fellows and yet, there they were, one of them at the museums with two epochal shows(see my previous posts), the other at the opera house with the sixth-ever complete Cycle of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at San Francisco Opera, heating up the atmosphere with equal excitement. Read the rest of this entry »

Lesbians holding hands a No-no at “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories”

 

Two hand-holding women were forced out of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco by a zealous guard. In San Francisco! Where did this dinosaur of a guy come from? Some Texas or Arizona hinterlands? The scandal made press headlines, created a big public outcry, and today a hand-holding action at the museum proves in modern-day color what we have always known about Gertrude Stein: Even a hundred years later, Stein is always good for a controversy. She is still too avant-garde for some and many Americans. Read the rest of this entry »