Title: The Liberation of Gertrude Stein: War and Writing
Abstract: It is an unlikely title for a history of art, and yet, if we had read it when and where it first appeared, in England, in mid-June of 1940, in a little volume by Gertrude Stein called Paris France, we would perhaps have given it our grim approval. 2 Paris had just fallen to the Germans, who now occupied virtually all of Northern and Central Europe. A couple of weeks earlier, a quarter of a million British soldiers had been evacuated from Dunkirk, and Germany's designs on England were obvious. German militarism and the ambitions of its leaders had done much to twist the century into its misshapen, modern form. We could have agreed that "From Bismark to Hitler" was an apt title for a great many books--even those concerning subjects that writers of an earlier era might not have thought belonged under the aegis of a chancellor. Nevertheless, we should pause over the deliberate and forceful incongruity of Stein's wry suggestion. Particularly coming from this writer who had lived so fully, for so much of her life, in contemptuous disregard of explicitly political matters and the business of governments, who openly maintained her scorn for the "gross têtes," the "big heads [who] are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people," the idea that Bismarck and Hitler might preside, not only over millions of people, but over her discussion of art, seems to constitute a terrible concession by Stein of her aesthetic domain (PF, 28). [End Page 405]
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 30
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