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Gertrude Stein and the Birth of Modernism: A Family Connection

By Jim Hendrick
Posted: 07/01/2026

Picture this: it’s Saturday night in Paris sometime in the 1920s, and Pablo Picasso is walking up to a cramped apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. Henri Matisse is already there. So are Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. None of them are legends yet — they’re just artists crowding into the home of a woman named Gertrude Stein, because that’s where the conversation was happening.

 

Filmmaker Nick Stein brought Gertrude Stein to life for Pasadena Villagers on June 11 and 18, turning a talk on one of modernism’s most influential figures into an intimate family portrait. Organized by Villager Bob Niemack, “Gertrude Stein and the Birth of Modernism: A Family Connection” used family letters, photographs, films, and memorabilia to reveal the woman behind the literary legend. “This was much more than a lecture because Nick was able to reveal the family that produced her,” remarked Jeff Gutstadt.

 

Nick Stein’s connection to Gertrude Stein is personal. She was his first cousin twice removed. His grandfather, Julian Stein Sr., was one of her favorite cousins and later managed her finances, while his grandmother, Rose Ellen Stein, corresponded with her for more than 40 years and filmed her in family home movies. Drawing on family materials, much of it never shown publicly, Nicholas Stein created a presentation that felt more like a documentary screening than a traditional talk.

 

The Paris Salon

The story began in Paris at 27 rue de Fleurus, the apartment that became one of Modernism’s most important salons. On Saturday evenings, visitors climbed the stairs to rooms lined with paintings and filled with conversation. Before they became famous, artists and writers including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sherwood Anderson gathered there. This apartment is widely recognized as the world’s first modern art gallery. “I just want to be a fly on the wall at Gertrude’s salon,” said Villager Doreen Allen. “Can you imagine the conversations?”

 

Artistic Influence

Picasso’s 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein marked an important step toward Cubism and reflected his interest in African sculpture and masks. New artistic movements were debated and nurtured at rue de Fleurus. When in 1903, she moved to Paris to live with her brother Leo Stein, they collected works of art - paintings primarily - by little known painters, buying pieces by Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Renoir, Manet, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Somehow Gertrude and Leo sensed a revolution in art.

 

Personal Life

The Stein family immigrated to America in 1841. Gertrude’s father, Daniel Stein, raised his family in relative prosperity, but Gertrude lost her mother at 14 and her father 3 years later. According to Stein, she later reflected that becoming an orphan was the moment she was “set free.”

 

She studied psychology at Harvard’s annex for women, Radcliffe College, under William James, whose ideas about the flow of thought, termed “stream of consciousness,” influenced her literary experiments. Stein developed a style based on ultimate freedom using repetition, rhythm, and association to capture consciousness rather than conventional narrative. “The moment you narrate experience, you kill it,” Gertrude Stein observed.

 

Nick Stein noted that while attending medical school at Johns Hopkins, Gertrude fully felt her attraction to women, a realization that coincided with her growing commitment to writing. In 1907, Alice B. Toklas entered Gertrude’s life. Toklas managed the household, handled visitors, typed manuscripts, and became Gertrude’s lifelong companion. Their partnership lasted nearly four decades. After Leo Stein left in 1913, Gertrude and Alice remained. During World War I, they volunteered in relief efforts and drove supplies through the French countryside. After the war, their salon shifted from a center for painters to a gathering place for writers of the Lost Generation. 

 

Gertrude Stein experimented across genres writing poems, plays, novels, and the libretto for an opera, “Four Saints in Three Acts,” created with Virgil Thomson and performed by an all-Black cast on Broadway. It became an unexpected success.

Nick Stein read Gertrude’s playful poem “A Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story.” Its repetitions and unusual phrasing drew smiles and puzzled looks, but he explained that it reflected her search for new ways to express intimacy and emotion.

 

Her literary fame grew with the Random House release of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Publisher Bennett Cerf arranged a seven-month American lecture tour that introduced her to audiences eager to meet the woman who had championed modern art long before museums embraced it.  “What is now considered great art was ignored when Gertrude was collecting,” observed Jocelyn Keene. 

 

Wartime Years

The presentation then turned to the difficult years of World War II. After the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940, Gertrude refused to leave France, but she and Alice moved to a village in southern France. As Jewish lesbians under the Vichy regime, they faced serious danger but were protected in part by Bernard Faÿ, a long-time friend with influence in the Vichy government who shielded them from deportation to the death camps. 

 

Gertrude Stein died in Paris in 1946 at age 72 following surgery. Alice Toklas lived until 1967. They are buried side by side in Paris. After Alice’s death, many of their paintings were sold and eventually entered major museum and private collections.

 

Legacy

Today, Gertrude Stein’s influence endures. Her books remain widely studied and debated, her image has appeared on a U.S. postage stamp and coffee mugs, and a street in Paris bears her name.

 

Audience members were especially interested in the personal dramas behind the legend. “It’s extremely interesting to hear about the rivalries between artists; even Gertrude and Hemingway had a falling out,” observed Villager Holly Thiercof. 

For Village members, the afternoon offered more than a history lesson. Nick Stein transformed a towering cultural figure into a recognizable family member—a witty, stubborn, loving, brilliant woman who helped shape modern literature and art while living amid friends, lovers, arguments, and ordinary routines. “Gertrude Stein was the queen of the art world in the 1920s,” said Ed Mervine.

 

By the end of the presentation, attendees seemed to share Nick Stein’s goal: Gertrude Stein emerged not simply as an avant-garde writer, collector, or muse, but as a fully realized person—funny, formidable, occasionally exasperating, and, as her cousin promised, impossible to forget. Stein moved beyond the mythology surrounding his relative to portray a woman shaped by loss, intellect, ambition, and unconventional love.