Dix Portraits

The American writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was a major figure in the avant-garde visual arts and literary spheres in the period between World Wars I and II. Stein moved to Paris in 1903 where she met Alice B. Toklas, who would remain her companion for 40 years. Their home in Paris functioned as a salon for many now-celebrated writers and artists, who became close acquaintances. Stein is recognized for coining the term the “Lost Generation” to describe American authors living abroad, including Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. She and her brother Leo were among the first collectors, patrons, and supporters of many modern and cubist artists, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. Her own work shares the goals of that of her contemporaries––for example, similar to cubist works, her writing shows a proclivity for simplification, repetition, and fragmentation. Revered and feared for both her literary and artistic expertise, Stein has, in no small part, shaped how we understand and appreciate modernism today. Stein’s best-known books include The Making of Americans (1925), How to Write (1931), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), as well as her poetry collection Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems [1929–1933] (1956). Lynne Tillman writes novels, including, most recently, Men and Apparitions (2018); short stories, including the collection The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories (2016); and essays and art and cultural criticism, including contributions to the catalogues Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (2018) and Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work (2017) and publications such as Aperture magazine. Her book-length autobiographical essay, Mothercare, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2022. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant for arts writing. Tillman is a professor and writer in residence in the English department of The University at Albany. She lives in New York with the bass player David Hofstra.