Art

Art is an important theme found throughout “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”, forming not only a way to contextualize events in terms of the passage of time, but to explore art for its meaning and its evolution, in both fine art and the written word. Gertrude Stein collected fine art and her home at the rue de Fleurus reflected the modernist style of art of Stein’s generation. The philosophies of art are illustrated, questioned, reevaluated, and re-imagined by the figures of Stein and Toklas’s social circles.

Cubism, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, pervaded the art world prior to World War I and revolutionized modern painting and sculpture. In cubist art, objects are broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form. Such was the writing style of Gertrude Stein. Stein applied the principles of modern art to literature and in doing so opened the...