So What ARE They Wearing for Gertrude Stein?
San Francisco Chronicle’s Leah Garchik reported in the Datebook the other day a comment overheard at a birthday party: “She doesn’t know Gertrude Stein! What kind of a lesbian is she?” I replied to Leah, “And we have to ask: What was she wearing?” Leah wrote back that she was going to the museum and “do some people watching, to see what they’re wearing for Gertrude!” The obvious thing to do.
I am waiting for Leah’s verdict. But meanwhile, I can report that San Franciscans are fashion literates. Read the rest of this entry »

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Several people had tears in their eyes, myself included, walking in a trance through the vast rooms of SFMOMA, in the stream of some 600 people who had gathered at the Donors’ opening party and walk-through. “The Steins Collect” is not just a major San Francisco art exhibition, it’s the most ambitious exhibition SFMOMA has ever shown, as director Neil Benazra proudly announced. In one word: it is huge, both in mass and in importance. The very hour when modernism was born, a good century ago, has never been so densely packed and complete in one space. This overwhelmingly broad, bold collection goes back to one American family in Paris. Among the most famous “Americans in Paris,” the Stein siblings were the first to recognize the new era, the revolution in art, and bought, supported and connected the artists through their celebrated salons. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes they did it. They pulled it off. The Contemporary Jewish Museum, arm in arm with the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery in DC (where the show will go from San Francisco) made it happen: the long-awaited exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, the first-ever attempt to portray Stein in an exhibition, is a marvel of a show.
A dozen years in the making, the exhibition is as “peaceful and exciting” as Gertrude could have wished for. Everybody – scholarly Steinians, would-be-Steinians, “Gertrude Stein who?”-Steinians, youngsters, hipsters and the rest can and will and must enjoy the portrait of the genius who has enlightened, puzzled and troubled our world for a good 100 years. Read the rest of this entry »

San Francisco In the Spring With Gertrude Stein
Soon the museum gates will open and entire families will stroll into “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” and “The Steins Collect”. What will the kids make of the fat lady who doesn’t sing?
Do they need help? Looking at the books out there, it is maybe the parents who need help. Or maybe not. There aren’t many helpers. Adult witticism and playful attempts to approach Stein don’t always fly with kids who are easily bored with teachers and well-meaning preachers of art or avant-garde. They sniff out in an instant if someone is talking down to them. Read the rest of this entry »

“Don’t Think You Can’t Be Senile At 22″ 

This week’s New Yorker reports on “Glenn Ligon: AMERICA” at the Whitney, the retrospective of an important African-American artist who made use of the “negro sunshine” Stein coined in her early novella “Melanctha” (see my previous post). The author of the review, Peter Schlejdahl, has this to say about it: “Stein was being fondly indulgent of black folks, in an old vein of white cluelessness.” It’s a striking formulation. Is it true? Was she clueless? Was she clueless as a fairly young person and less clueless later? Is there an irony at play,  highlighted in Ligon’s post-modern, post-irony neon “advertisement”? Could “negro sunshine” be the same Steinian irony that is often subtle and hard to detect, as I pointed out in her statement that “Hitler should have received the Nobel Peace Prize”?

To add a shadow of a doubt to the “old vein of white cluelessness”, here are some things Stein had to say (two decades later) about immigration:

“Building a Chinese wall is always bad. Protection, paternalism and suppression of natural activity and competition lead to dullness and stagnation. It is true in politics, in literature, in art. Everything in life needs constant stimulation. It needs activity, new blood. To the young people who, wanting to become writers, ask me for advice, I always say, ‘Don’t think it isn’t possible to be senile at 22.’ It is even very difficult to keep from becoming senile in youth. It is hard to keep one’s self open and receptive to stimulation. Doing what other people tell you and being protected form this and from that is not so good, is not stimulating. You must face life ands truggle. Satisfaction comes from overcoming opposition and sometimes from enduring things that are not supposed to be good for one.

“That is the reason why I do not approve of the stringent immigration laws in America today. We need the stimulation of new blood. It is best to favor healthy competition. (…) The French may not like the competition of foreigners, but they let them in. They accept the challenge and derive the stimulus. I am surprised that there is not more discussion of immigration in the United States than there is.We have got rid of prohibition restrictions, and it seems to me the next thing we should do is to relax the severity of immigration restrictions.” (Excerpt from a New York Times interview by Lansing Warren, 1934)

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