#VoicesfromtheStacks
Gertrude Stein :Camera Work & Tender Buttons
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector.
Her most well known books include Q.E.D., about a lesbian romantic affair, one of the first coming out stories; Fernhurst, Three Lives, The Making of Americans, as well as Tender Buttons, pictured here.
Inspired by the Cubist movement, this book from 1914 shows Stein writing abstract poems using not only descriptions of objects, but also sequences of sounds to create a verbal image of an object. The poems are listed under the three subheadings of Objects, Food and Rooms. While many critics find the poems too fragmented and dense to be comprehensible, Stein was quoted in saying that this work was completely "realistic" in the tradition of Gustave Flaubert. "I used to take objects on a table, like a tumbler or any kind of object and try to get the picture of it clear and separate in my mind and create a word relationship between the word and the things seen."
Two quotes from her works that have become widely know today: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," and "there is no there there".
She was friends with many of the other influential writers and artists of the time, and hosted “The Stein salon” in her Paris home, where many of these figures, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis would gather.
Picasso and other artists would paint or sculpt portraits of Stein, who in turn would often return the favor by painting a verbal portrait of the artists in various publications, such as her articles on Matisse and Picasso in the special 1912 edition of Camera Work. You can see this edition of Camera Work, as well as the whole run of the publication, at Special Collections.
