“I was born in San Francisco, California.”
Gertrude Stein was a Jewish-American writer who lived in France for over 40 years, becoming an intrinsic part of the Parisian art world in the early 1900s. Part of an avant garde artistic movement that thumbed its nose at past artistic structure, she was intimate with artists, both painters and writers, such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, George Braque, Guillaume Appolonaire, Henri Rousseau, Ernest Hemingway, Mildred Aldrich and many others, who were frequent visitors to her 27 rue de Fleurus location. She attempted her own literary movement, writing many works that were deemed “incomprehensible”, but received a small following. Her autobiography is perhaps a more gentle exposure to her “art”.