Bigger than Picasso

Gertrude Stein complained in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) that her fellow Americans paid more attention to her than to her work. This is often the case with writers whose personalities outshine their writing. Stein’s turn from the relatively straightforward prose of her early Three Lives (1909) to the willful obscurity of a work like Tender Buttons (1914), trying to do in words what Picasso was doing in Cubist art, made her a challenging read. Edmund Wilson—who was generally sympathetic to her work and compared it to Yeats, Proust, and Eliot—noted in a 1923 Vanity Fair article that her word-portraits of Matisse and Picasso published in Camera Work made it “evident that Gertrude Stein had abandoned the intelligible altogether.” That would remain his assessment until she returned to accessibility in her entertaining, best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), in which she recounts her life through the eyes of her longtime companion.