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It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before.
Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein shares the grave with Alice B. Toklas. Of course she does.
American writer, poet, expat. Left Pittsburgh, left America, landed in Paris in 1903 and never really left. Set up shop at 27 rue de Fleurus with Alice and held court. A salon. Everyone came through. Picasso. Matisse. Hemingway when he was young and broke and hungry. Fitzgerald. They all showed up, drank her booze, looked at her art collection, listened to her talk.
And she talked. Brilliant, difficult, impossible. She wrote like no one else, experimental, repetitive, maddening. “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” People still argue about what the hell she meant. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is really her autobiography but told through Alice’s voice because why make it simple?
She and her brother Leo, they championed the artists no one understood yet. Bought their work when they were nobody. Picassos, Matisses, Cézannes hanging on the walls when these guys were still struggling. She had an eye. She had taste. She had ego the size of France.
Leo eventually split. Took his share of the collection and moved back to California. Palo Alto. So some of the greatest art of the 20th century, paintings that would later sell for tens of millions, ended up in fucking Palo Alto because of a sibling rivalry.
World War II, Gertrude stayed. Jewish woman in occupied France, and she stayed. How? Connections. Luck. Compromises that still make people uncomfortable. She survived.
Died in 1946. Alice lived another twenty years, lost and broke, the art collection sold off to pay bills.
Now they’re buried together. Stein and Toklas. Forever.
Love, genius, compromise, survival. Masterpieces in Palo Alto. It’s all connected.
Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.