Gertrude Stein's Curatorial Impressionism

Bowler, Rebecca

Abstract

Gertrude Stein’s early work, those short and abstract ‘portraits’ of friends and of ‘types’, has been often described as impressionist, post-impressionist, and even cubist. The word ‘portraits’, of course, invites a painterly comparison. Key to both impressionist and post-impressionist art was a striving for immediacy, and Stein herself described her coming-to-form in these terms: ‘I wondered is there any way of making what I know come out as I know it, come out as not remembering. And I began to make portraits’.

Stein seeks a representation of the thing known in the moment in which it is first known, or apprehended. These early works, then, short and fragmented as they are, strive to reproduce what Jesse Matz first theorised as the double impression—the moment of perception and the immediate impress of that impression on the mind—without further mediation through memory or through association.

In Stein’s longer and later works, in which multiple portraits and layered impressions complicate the concept of an inviolate and unmediated ‘impression’, memory becomes an inevitably complicating factor in her work. The portraits also become contingent, each on the other, as affective human relationships necessarily are; the central tension between immediacy and distance, or flux and fixity, is more apparent. Stein develops, over the course of her writing life, a ‘curatorial impressionism’ in which texts, much as museum or gallery spaces, contain multiple portraits or impressions whose meanings can be read in relation to each other. Stein’s experimental approach, here, is one in which she is both artist—rendering, as far as possible, the immediate impression of the subject—and curator—making meaning through careful selection and juxtaposition of these portraits; spinning narrative through memory.

Citation

Bowler, R. Gertrude Stein's Curatorial Impressionism. In The Edinburgh Companion to Women's Experimental Literature since 1900. Edinburgh University Press. Manuscript submitted for publication

• Deposit Date: Jan 16, 2025
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Book Title: The Edinburgh Companion to Women's Experimental Literature since 1900
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1048544