Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures

It is perhaps apt that a woman best known for such aphorisms as ``a rose is a rose is a rose'' should be rendered in them. Stendahl has constructed a ``photo-biography'' of the ``Mother of Modernism''-360 photographs, 100 of which have never before been published, are interspersed with timelines and excerpts culled from Stein's works and letters, and the words of others, including Hemingway and Harold Acton. The chapters of interest to most readers will be those focusing on the Paris years, when Stein opened her house at 27, rue des Fleurus to Fauvist and Cubist painters (Picasso, Gris and Picabia, among others) and later to the American writers of the ``Lost Generation.'' Here are Cecil Beaton and Man Ray's photographic portraits of Stein and her studio, including the throne-like chair in which she presided over her Saturday night salons, and the enviable view from the desk at which she wrote her novel Three Lives: it faced a wall upon which hung Matisse's Le Bonheur de Vivre and Cezanne's Portrait de Mme. Cezanne. Though there are some redundancies, Stendahl has put together an impressive book on an impressive woman, about whom she rightly observes, ``In the context of [today's] performance art and new forms of writing, Stein's work seems less and less alien. If we were to see her today... dressed in her army coat and leopard hat, how seamlessly she would fit into the contemporary artists' scene.'' (Oct.)