Methods to Madness and Methods of Madness

Reading Gertrude Stein as a first time reader of her work made me feel nauseous. Not necessarily because her writing put a bad taste in my mouth; it was more so due to its simple complexity. Even now, days later I struggle to grasp exactly which straw Stein is describing.

Stein's influence is imprinted all over the modernist movement, and includes brushes (no pun intended) in art as well as literature. She opened a private art gallery with her brother, Leo Stein, that gained a huge following and even grander reputation. From 1903 to 1914, Stein featured many modernist art pieces. Through her efforts to be published, Stein met a woman named Mabel Dodge Luhan. She helped plan Stein's 1913 Avant Garde Art Exhibit, and was also a catalyst behind the publication of Stein's earlier works. In her book "Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose", Luhan described Stein's work in far better fashion than I could nearly a century later.

"In Gertrude Stein's writing every word lives and, apart from concept, it is so exquisitely rhythmical and cadenced that if we read it aloud and receive it as pure sound, it is like a kind of sensuous music. Just as one may stop, for once, in a way, before a canvas of Picasso, and, letting one's reason sleep for an instant, may exclaim: "It is a fine pattern!" so, listening to Gertrude Steins' words and forgetting to try to understand what they mean, one submits to their gradual charm."

Stein also knew Picasso. Before he delved into Cubism, Picasso drew a portrait of Stein, whose Paris based salon housed some of the artist's early works and helped established the modernist art movement.

Stein even recounts the occasion in her work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She said, "Picasso had never had anybody pose for him since he was sixteen years old. He was then twenty-four and Gertrude had never thought of having her portrait painted, and they do not know either of them how it came about."

Published in 1914, Tender Buttons does much to solidify and advance the modernist movement in literature. It features the categories Objects, Food, and Room. Each is a decisively and deceivingly layered description in motion. It reads more like poetry, or song lyrics. Something intended for the ears but not necessarily the eyes. In the first section, Stein writes, "All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading." I for one have no idea what that means, but it is deep and far removed from the center; something I'm sure Stein desired to the extent that her work isolates the reader. It did to me, anyway.

Stein accomplished a lot as a an author and activist in the modernist movement. While Tender Buttons may not be every reader's cup of tea, her influence and style are still important

Works Cited

Luhan, Mabel. "Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose." Arts and Decorations Mar. 1913. Web.

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. London: Penguin, 2001. Print.

Stein, Gertrude. "Objects." Tender Buttons. S.l.]: Dodo, 2006. Print.