EDWARD Steichen and his wife, Clara, moved back to Paris in 1906. He had decided to pursue painting, which he thought might be more interesting, although less lucrative, than the portrait-photography business. In the four years he’d been living in New York he had been lonely for the Parisian avant-garde. He and Clara rented an apartment on the boulevard Montparnasse, and he went back to visiting Rodin, and he painted. Almost immediately, the Steichens went around to two of the well-known salons for contemporary art: in the house of Michael and Sarah Stein and at Gertrude and Leo Stein’s at 27, rue de Fleurus. Michael, the brother of Gertrude and Leo, had followed his younger siblings to Paris, where he continued to manage their inheritances so astutely that they were all able to live comfortably and buy paintings their whole lives. Michael and particularly his wife, Sarah, had thrown themselves into collecting Matisse. Edward Steichen was very taken with Matisse and in 1908 arranged with Alfred Stieglitz that there would be a show of Matisse’s watercolors and drawings at 291—the gallery had then been up and running for three years. The first Matisse show in New York caused a fury that delighted Stieglitz. Critics who had dismissed the Rodin nudes that he had introduced the previous year now felt positively sentimental about the Rodins compared to what they saw as Matisse’s blazing, shocking nudes.
Gertrude and Leo Stein also knew Matisse and collected his work, but they had other things, too: Renoirs, Cézannes, and Picassos. Edward and Clara Steichen went to the Saturday nights of Gertrude and Leo Stein for the talk and for the pictures. Sometimes they met the Matisses there or Picasso and the woman with whom he then lived, Fernande Olivier; Steichen was always especially glad to see his great friend Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor. There were other Americans who came on Saturdays—Alice B. Toklas, who was not yet living at 27, rue de Fleurus, and the painters John Marin and Max Weber and Alfred Maurer. People would walk back behind the house to the atelier where the pictures hung, and they would look and talk, and then they would go into the house and drink and talk.
In later years, Gertrude Stein was the first citizen at these gatherings, but up until the Great War, while Leo was still living at the rue de Fleurus, he talked. Leo Stein could speak for several hours without interruption; he said it was in his nature to explain. He was an analytical thinker, and when people wrote about him they often mentioned his characteristic phrase: “define what you mean by. . . .” Picasso sketched him as a Jewish patriarch, with a long beard and glasses. Leo Stein was a natural collector—during the war, when he was living in New Mexico, he assembled an impressive collection of pre-Columbian art, something only a few people realized was valuable at the time. Then, in his usual way of doing things and undoing them, he sold it. Leo Stein had begun acquiring pictures when he arrived in Paris in 1903, and he was the first Stein to appreciate Matisse and Picasso. But the pictures at the rue de Fleurus were largely chosen by both Gertrude and Leo. Though each had his or her own visual preferences, they often bought together, and they bought with unequaled taste and timing. Those years, from 1904 to 1912 or so, were the great period in their collecting. When, in 1914, after nearly forty years of living together, they, as Leo put it, “disaggregated,” neither ever collected so well again.
Things were happening when the Steichens were coming on Saturday nights. By 1908, Alice Toklas was there more and more often. That winter, all four of the Steins were reading a series of pieces in McClure’s Magazine on Mary Baker Eddy, and Sarah Stein gave up her own painting and devoted herself to becoming a practitioner of Christian Science. New Picassos and Braques were arriving. In a few years, cubism would be fairly launched and Marcel Duchamp would be coming by and “urgently” debating one of his chief preoccupations—the fourth dimension—with a very interested Gertrude Stein.
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In 1909, Alfred Stieglitz’s father, Edward, died. When his children were young, Edward Stieglitz had moved his family to Germany partly so that they would grow up immersed in European culture, but he had never quite approved of his son’s proclivity for modern art. The death of his father was a painful loss, but it also seems to have liberated Stieglitz’s taste, and it provided him with an inheritance, which enabled him to continue paying for the gallery and supporting his friends. In 1909, Alfred Stieglitz and his wife, Emmy, arrived in Paris for a visit. Steichen took him to meet Rodin, and to Marin’s studio, and to 27, rue de Fleurus to see the pictures at the Steins’.
They sat, in the atelier, with the pictures, and Leo Stein held forth. Steichen was cheerful and easy in conversation, and Stieglitz was himself a tremendous and forceful talker, and Gertrude Stein became a great soliloquizer, but Leo Stein compelled a hearing. “I quickly realized,” Stieglitz later wrote, “that I had never heard more beautiful English nor anything clearer.” Stieglitz didn’t catch Gertrude Stein’s name when they were introduced, and later he couldn’t recall if she’d said anything at this meeting. She sat in a corner, as was her custom, on her high leather chair with her feet on a pile of sandbags. She wore her usual brown corduroy, and Stieglitz remembered her as a “dark and bulksome” presence.
Stieglitz was already an admirer of Matisse, but he was unprepared for Leo Stein’s assertion that the really great thing about Matisse was his sculpture, which Stein felt was greater than Rodin’s; nor was Stieglitz ready for Stein’s conclusion that Rodin and Whistler were second- if not third-rate artists and that the great artist of the coming century was Picasso. Stein talked for a glowing hour and a half, and as they left Stieglitz asked Stein if he would write some of that down so that Stieglitz could publish it in Camera Work. Stein replied that he couldn’t think of it, that the ideas were all much too unformed, and he never did. Instead, three years later, in 1912, Stieglitz published some of the very first works by Gertrude Stein to appear in print and the first in America. Gertrude Stein was radiantly pleased by the publication of her studies, “Matisse” and “Picasso,” which, Stieglitz later explained to a friend, he had accepted “as soon as he had looked them over, principally because he did not understand them.” Entering, in her own way, into the commerce of artists’ portraits of artists, she said of Matisse, among other things, “This one was one, some were quite certain, one greatly expressing something being struggling.” And of Picasso: “This one was one who was working.”
“Certainly” was always one of Gertrude Stein’s favorite words, and one she frequently used to contradict itself—the piece on Matisse also included the line “some were certain that he was not greatly expressing this thing.” Gertrude Stein loved paradox; she liked work about which people were simultaneously certain that it was great and certain that it was awful, though about her own work she brooked no uncertainty. Leo Stein was also in the business of indexing his certainty, which was part of the reason he found William James’s work so troubling and so important, for in these matters Leo Stein was a doubter and a worrier and Gertrude Stein was a steamroller.
Part of the reason Stein felt liberated by her relationship with Alice Toklas was that Alice Toklas was certain. In her own autobiography, What Is Remembered, Toklas said of their first meeting that Stein “held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since then.” Stein’s voice was “deep, full, velvety like a great contralto’s, like two voices,” and “she was large and heavy with delicate small hands and a beautifully modeled and unique head.” Stein mentioned in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas a particular trait of Toklas’s: she had a sort of little interior bell that went off in the presence of genius. It had only ever gone off three times: for Picasso, for Alfred Whitehead, and, supremely satisfyingly, for Gertrude Stein.
Picasso’s unflagging certainty may have been what initially attracted both Steins to him and what made him later impossible for Leo Stein and necessary for Gertrude Stein. But in 1909, when Steichen brought Stieglitz to visit, they were all pretty sure about Picasso, and they convinced the up-until-that-point-unconvinced Stieglitz. The flow of certainty at 27, rue de Fleurus was, in fact, very like that which emanated from Stieglitz at 291. The Steins and Stieglitz, Jewish German-American sons and daughters of clothing merchants, did much to sustain the avant-garde in Paris and in New York. Two years later, in 1911, after he had returned home, Stieglitz did the first solo Picasso show in America at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. Stieglitz offered the whole show, eighty-three drawings, watercolors, and etchings, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for two thousand dollars, but the museum turned him down. Stieglitz liked and purchased a cubist drawing from 1910 whose form he felt was reminiscent of his photograph Spring Showers (1900), an image of a tree surrounded by a metal fence, a street sweeper cleaning behind. In the end, as was not unusual for shows at 291, Stieglitz bought one of two pictures sold.
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That afternoon, when Leo Stein had finished talking, Stieglitz and Steichen left the rue de Fleurus and took a cab. Stieglitz was exhilarated; Steichen was worried. Leo Stein had denigrated Rodin and Whistler and hadn’t even mentioned Steichen’s painting, which Steichen felt left him nowhere. In Stieglitz’s account of this conversation, Steichen said, “I would rather have you and Stein approve of my work than any other people in the world.” Stieglitz, impatient with Steichen’s insecurity, said, “Do you paint for yourself or to please others? What has Stein, or what have I, to do with your paintings?” Maybe Stieglitz was a little harsher with Steichen after having been with the Steins; the Steins’ certainty might have abashed the older photographer, too.
Steichen never fully understood how Stieglitz and the Steins could be so uncompromising. Just before the beginning of the Great War, Leo Stein moved out of the rue de Fleurus and went to Italy, a defection for which Gertrude Stein could not forgive him. When he left, he took the Renoirs and left the Picassos, an arrangement that suited them both; they argued over Cézanne’s apples. Later, Leo Stein wrote at least two letters attempting a rapprochement, but Gertrude Stein never replied. Both Steins were in Europe for the whole of the Second World War, spared the concentration camps by age, American citizenship, the goodwill of collaborators, and blind luck. Even after the war, they didn’t write; each checked with a cousin to see if the other had survived.
The day that Stieglitz visited, the air at the rue de Fleurus must have fairly quivered with judgment and finality; even the paintings would have throbbed with it. Stieglitz preferred not to revisit certainties. Perhaps that’s why he never went back to the rue de Fleurus. In 1911, when he was in Paris again, he turned down an invitation to a Saturday evening there. He told Steichen that he didn’t want to change his memory of that afternoon in a single particular.