Stein, Gertrude

An inscribed association copy of the first edition of Stein's second book, presented by Stein to fellow Modernist Alvin Langdon Coburn.

• Gertrude Stein (American).
• Florence, Italy: 1912.
• 12 pages.
• Inscribed by Stein to verso of front wrapper: "To Alvin Langdon Coburn / With appreciation / from Gertrude Stein."
• Bound in the original floral Florentine wallpaper wrappers with printed paper spine label, with printer's imprint at foot of page.

One of Stein's earliest writing experiments was her prose "portraits," attempting to capture the essence of her sitters just as her painter friends, like Picasso, did. Her portrait of Mabel Dodge (later Luhan) was a major step in building her style towards a cubistic mode of writing, adapting the epiphanies of visual Modernism to the written word. As Stein once said of this portrait, "Well, Pablo is doing abstract paintings in painting. I am trying to abstract portraits in my medium, words" (quoted in Rudnick, 47).

The occasion of the portrait and its private printing began with Stein and Toklas's visit to Dodge's Villa Curonia near Florence. Dodge was an American heiress, bisexual and patron of the arts who led a bold, forward-thinking, somewhat unhinged life (which was also the basis for Rachel Cusk's novel Second Place). The year of this book's publication, she returned to the US and formed a Greenwich Village salon that made her "the Magna Mater of twentieth-century America's first rebel generation" (quoted in Jenkins); from there she would help mount the landmark 1913 Armory Show that introduced a baffled American public to major Modernist artists like Picasso, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Matisse and more. Beginning in the 1920s, her patronage of artists in Taos (most famously/infamously D.H. Lawrence, as well as Willa Cather, Jean Toomer and Georgia O'Keeffe) was instrumental in building the Taos art colony. Dodge paid for the publication of this book and personally took on its publicity, such as it was, distributing copies across her connections in the avant-garde world of New York City, thus "introducing Stein's post-impressionist prose to an American readership" (Jenkins). Thanks to Dodge, Stein's work found early admirers like Mina Loy and Carl Van Vechten.

This copy is inscribed to photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, whose innovative style led to American pictorialism and who began, in the 1910s, to experiment with abstract photography. Coburn was one of the photographers regularly featured in Stieglitz's groundbreaking photographic journal Camera Work—which would publish two of Stein's other portraits (of Matisse and Picasso) the same year as this work, itself was reprinted in Camera Work the next year. In his autobiography, Coburn described meeting Stein in Paris while working on a series of photographs of prominent women: "I think [she] has something to tell us which the world will come to appreciate, which many are now beginning to recognize, and which many in the future will value" (90). The result was the 1913 portrait that became one of the best-known images of her, in her long corduroy gown. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Toklas records that Coburn was "the first photographer to come and photograph her as a celebrity and she was nicely gratified." Given that the Portrait of Mabel Dodge had only just been published, it is possible this copy was gifted to Coburn on the occasion. Coburn said of Stein on this visit (perhaps after reading this work): "To find a new mode of expression in any form of art is an achievement and a triumph, and Gertrude Stein delighted in these fresh and spontaneous modes of approach" (90).

One of only 300 copies, issued in Florentine wallpaper wrappers, this copy crystallizing a significant moment in Stein's career and a cross-pollination of avant-garde artists.