If Gertrude Stein’s Art Could Talk

I’ve often wished that Gertrude Stein’s art could talk. Those paintings witnessed some of the most storied gatherings in 20th-century avant-garde history: they watched, tacitly, from the grimy white walls of 27 Rue de Fleurus, while Picasso sparred with Matisse over the future of form and color, Hemingway and Fitzgerald brought their latest manuscripts for Stein’s appraisal, and Stein herself—capably guarded by her partner, Alice B. Toklas—wrote the texts that would, as she put it, mark “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.”