Last week I attended the two openings for the Seeing Gertrude Stein exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and this week will attend the opening celebration at SFMOMA’s The Steins Collect (see the previous post for all the details on the shows.)
Seeing Gertrude Stein is a must-see, not only for GertrudeandAlice fans, but also for anyone who wants to get to know them better. As is usually the case at openings, the crowds were too dense to really see the exhibition (600 people had RSVP’d for the 2nd opening), so in the next few weeks I’ll be going back from time to time to get a better look.
During the openings I selected two favorite pieces and I’m sure that on future visits additional items will be joining this list. One of the pieces is a small, framed, poodle made by Picasso out of what looks like either cotton balls or actual bolls of raw cotton. The small figure was to be a “companion” for GertrudeandAlice’s poodle, Basket. The other is a small passport photo of Alice from 1907, the year she traveled to Paris and met Gertrude. I had never seen the photo before. In it Alice is wearing a jaunty black hat proofing once again that Alice really was a “hat person!”
And that brings me to GertrudeandAlice and fashion, One of the themes of the exhibition centers on their sense of sartorial style. Alice was more interested in the fashions of the day than Gertrude, but Gertrude knew how she wanted to present herself when it came to her dress and she did. Once Alice entered her world, she assumed the role of Gertrude’s stylist and many of the photographs in the exhibition show Alice’s touches as a member of the “Fashion Police!”
Dressed for literary success, photo by Cecil Beaton (London, 1936)
