Modern Is Modern Is ...

WE want our great artists and writers to be one thing or the other: saints or sinners, angels or devils. Either way, they should be heroes, with decisive achievements and expansive souls.

Gertrude Stein, one of America’s greatest writers, made every effort to fill the bill, first through her work, then through her life. Whether she comes down on the saint or sinner side, though, has long been a question. And it’s being raised again by two museum exhibitions in this city, across the Bay from where Stein grew up, in Oakland. Both suggest that, “Rose is a rose is a rose” aside, we still don’t know Stein very well.

In the eight years between 1903 and 1911, when she was in her late 20s and early 30s, she wrote her masterpiece, “The Making of Americans,” the first major modern experimental novel in English, predating by a decade the mature work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and offering an analog to Cubism.

The book is huge, almost a thousand printed pages. She wrote it out in longhand, making no revisions, usually working through the night, alone. And she wrote in a language no one had ever read before. It was in plain English, but rich with moral weight and haunted emotion, and conventional up to a point, then not. Eventually it lifts off from the syntax and logic we know, and all traces of narrative — names, places, events — drop away.

Forward direction ends; time stops, or rather freezes in an eternal present where nothing new happens because everything is happening all the time.

Stein was trying to create eternity — “the everlasting,” she called it — in prose. And given the demands the book makes on a reader’s attention, she, in a way, succeeded. “The Making of Americans” has a reputation for being unreadable, which it isn’t, though its difficulties have to be experienced to be believed, and its greatness has to be believed in for reading to continue.

Stein couldn’t find a publisher for the book until 1925, when she was over 50, by which time she had written many other things, become an art collector in Paris and found a life partner. “The Making of Americans” clinched her high reputation in elite literary circles. But hungry for fame, she now wanted more of it, and of a different, wider kind. So she shifted out of vanguard mode, turned on the charm and produced “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.”

Written under the name of her longtime lover, “Autobiography” is a book-length advertisement for Stein herself as she wanted the world to see her: not only as a genius-writer, but also as the primary shaper of early Modernism in Paris and as a pioneer of a gay sensibility.

The book took just weeks to turn out, and it’s a breeze to read. In Alice’s voice Stein name-drops, dishes, fabricates (“God, what a liar she is,” her older brother, Leo, fumed) and self-promotes with a gee-whiz American wit of a kind Andy Warhol would later perfect. In the end it’s all a performance, but one that works.

The book became a best seller in the United States, the land to which Stein, after 30 years in Europe, maintained a vehemently patriotic attachment. And she became what she had long desperately wanted to be: a cultural hero, a pop star.

For better and for worse the pop-star Stein — the one played by Kathy Bates in the new Woody Allen movie, “Midnight in Paris” — is the one people have an easy time loving: the funny, feisty, bohemian mover and shaker who looks like a butch Buddha and is good for a quotation or two.

But if we accept that Stein as our hero, what do lose? We lose Stein the great writer. And we lose the truth about the history of which she was a part.

The two remarkable Stein-related exhibitions, just a few blocks apart, try to restore some of that truth by approaching her from two angles: as an art patron in one case, and as a social personality in the other. Both shows seriously question Stein’s own solitary-genius account of herself in these roles.

 Of the two “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is by far the more spectacular visually, but narrower in theme. Here we meet Stein the art entrepreneur in Paris as expected, except that she is by no means alone. A year before she arrived in 1903, Leo was already there and acquiring Cézanne and Renoirs, and he let her tag along. Soon they began to buy together — the show in part reconstructs their collection — with Leo often taking the lead in decisions. And there were other Steins on hand. An older brother, Michael, and his wife, Sarah, lived nearby and were also buying, in particular Matisse, with whom they became friends. 

In short, the show demonstrates that Gertrude Stein was not, as she would ask the world to believe, the single-handed shaper of new art. Artists she patronized later on her own were pretty bad, bush-league Surrealists mostly. But in the early days she did something right: she put her cards on Picasso at the dangerous, critical moment when he was moving into Cubism.

He and she had formed a close friendship, one that produced, among other things, his famous portrait of her, in which she leans forward like some grave genderless deity receiving a confidence. (The painting is on loan from the Met, where the show will appear next year.) The path from this point to Cubism was relatively short, and one that Leo did not want to go down. An aspiring figurative painter of a conservative bent, he found Picasso’s increased fracturing of forms enraging.

Gertrude had precisely the opposite take: For her, Cubism was an exhilaration, a vindication, a learning tool. It was destructive, and subversive in a way she understood. It shattered conventions of realism and beauty, and, with its cutting up and rearranging of ordinary things to create multiple perspectives, it altered perceptions of time and space. These were effects she was trying to achieve in writing.

If her loyalty to Picasso at this juncture had ulterior motives — her appreciation of art usually did — it still established her as a significant force in Paris Modernism.

Her allegiance also contributed to a rancorous and permanent break with Leo, who moved out of 27 Rue de Fleurus, though there were other factors in the rift, which was permanent. Gertrude was having some enviable success with her writing, which Leo despised. And Alice Toklas had moved in as Gertrude’s lover.

The exhibition called “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, focuses on the relationship of the two women, and takes another step in dispelling the stand-alone-genius Stein myth by bringing Toklas fully into the picture.

The nuanced archival display begins with a wide range of photographs of the young Gertrude (she rarely spoke about her childhood); the undergraduate at what is now Radcliffe (where she studied psychology with William James); and the medical student at Johns Hopkins, where she specialized in nervous diseases of women, but left before getting her degree.

There is evidence that Stein had a history of depression. Being brainy, bulky and gay must have made her feel like a misfit pretty much everywhere she went. And writing, which she had begun to do, can be a lonely occupation, particularly if you’re inventing a mode that gives you little hope of readers. “I write for myself and strangers” is a repeated refrain in ”The Making of Americans,” which was composed in part before Stein and Toklas met.

The meeting was in 1907, when Toklas, a San Francisco native, was visiting Europe. The women began a partnership that became a celebrity marriage. It was also, in many ways, a collaboration.

Toklas was the one who cut Stein’s hair short, who fashioned the Stein “look,” a kind of theatrical creation. When Stein wrote using Toklas’s name, it was because their lives really were, in essential features, of a piece. 

Stein and Toklas have, of course, been gay inspirations for generations. They were, within the era’s conventions, astonishingly forthright about their relationship. They were often photographed together at home, playing out gender roles, Stein in corduroys, Toklas in floral prints. Many of their friends were gay. “We are surrounded by homosexuals; they do all the good things in the arts,” Stein wrote to a friend.

The homosexuals she spoke of, though — and admired and collaborated with — were almost all male. Apart from Alice women had a scant presence in her life. In part the reasons were practical. Stein was always on the alert for people who could be helpful to her, particularly in advancing her career, and almost all those people in power to do so, in that era, were men.

This bias toward male authority was part of a deeply conservative streak in Stein’s character, one that manifested itself in many ways, some of them perilous. In her 2007 book “Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice,” the writer Janet Malcolm documented the bizarre lives that Stein and Toklas, both Jews, lived in occupied France during World War II, when they maintained friendships with men who had close ties to the Vichy government or were anti-Semitic Nazi collaborators.

It’s possible that the women knew little or nothing about such links; certainly neither ever made a point, before or during the war, of acknowledging they were Jewish. But what is one to make of Stein’s alleged approval of Francisco Franco? Or her championing of the Vichy leader Marshall Pétain, whose speeches she agreed to translate? Or her oddly neutral reaction on learning about the Nazi death camps? Or for that matter, a lifelong show of American patriotism that feels over-insistent and knee-jerk, as if she were picking a fight.

The Contemporary Jewish Museum show addresses this briefly in wall text, but it’s an aspect of Stein’s character that demands further study. Her wartime denial may simply have been driven by fear, which drives even strong-minded people to otherwise unaccountable thinking. And Stein, for all her public bravado, was well acquainted with fear. References to it saturate “The Making of Americans.” And she addresses it in her very last work, her libretto for Virgil Thomson’s opera “The Mother of Us All,” about the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, where the heroine sings: “Men have kind hearts when they’re not afraid but they are afraid, afraid, afraid.”

So what, in the end, are we left with in Stein? Neither a saint nor a sinner, but many things in between. A culture-broker who did less than she claimed but still did a lot. A woman who made lesbian love an acceptable fixture of populist lore, but who chose men for company. A nationalistic American who gave fascism a pass.

Interestingly, Warhol presents certain similar challenges to philosophical orthodoxy. He was, after all, a portraitist at one time or another to political, social and economic fascists of every stripe. Like Stein, he also wore his queerness like a badge, though he didn’t necessarily assume that it came with responsibilities.

For many artists Warhol is a hero of a specific kind: a model of moral ambiguity, of values and attitudes that cannot be clearly defined, and so can’t be pinned down and dismissed as a product of one particular viewpoint in a particular time, and so consigned to the past.

Perhaps the same can be said of Stein. Ambiguity — moral, temporal — is certainly the very substance of “The Making of Americans,” her great lonesome novel. It is the work that Stein’s pop-star persona has distracted us from, that is as experimental now as when it was written; that hardly anyone reads; that offers both Stein and her readers a way to live; that I’ve been reading for years, and will continue reading, and will never finish.