Seeing Gertrude Stein ─ Five Stories

"Innovative, fascinating and far-reaching, Seeing Gertrude Stein is a brilliant and original investigation into the artistic and sexual self-fashioning of a writer perhaps best-known for her role as a patron of artists from Picasso and Matisse to Pavel Tchelitchew and Christian Berard. Drawing on archived photographs, many of them unpublished, and combining art history and cultural studies, Wanda Corn and Tirza True Latimer liberate Stein from a public image long identified with the broad planes, impenetrable gaze, and archaic references of Picasso's 1907 portrait. As they analyze images of Stein within a variety of contexts--from family, domesticity, and friendship to celebrity, collaborations, and legacy--they reveal Stein, and her life-long partner Alice Toklas, as they saw themselves, and as active collaborators in shaping a unique iconography of femininity, lesbianism and modernity for the twentieth century."

--Whitney Chadwick, author of Women, Art, and Society



"This is an exciting, lucid, well-researched, and gracefully written book about Gertrude Stein's fruitful and varied engagement in twentieth century culture and aesthetics. Although I have studied and loved Stein's writing for years, this book gives me a fresh and often surprising vision of Stein as a visual artist immersed in 'the power of imagery to shape reputation and public identity.' I am sure that for readers (and viewers) new to Stein, this book will be as inspiring, fun, and illuminating as it will be to aficionados."

--Harriet Chessman, author of The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein



"Each of the five aspects (or 'stories') in Seeing Gertrude Stein offers fascinating new discoveries, unexpected objects and images, and a profound respect for archival research and the particularities of the historical past. By presenting Stein as (1) a model for artists and photographers, (2) a domestic partner (and decorator of interiors) with Alice B. Toklas (3) a mixer and matcher of people and circles of social acquaintance, (4) an object of popular media attention, and (5) a posthumous legend made and queerly remade in the decades since 1946, this book will forever change the ways in which Stein is understood and appreciated. Beautifully written and brilliantly designed, Seeing Gertrude Stein marks a major contribution to the fields of modernism, art history, visual culture, and queer studies."

--Richard Meyer, author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art

Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History at Stanford University, is the author of The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935 and Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, both from UC Press. Tirza True Latimer, Associate Professor in the Departments of Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts, is the author of Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris.