Gertrude Stein in Circles: An Exhibition Review of Stein’s Life and Fandom at the George Peabody Library

The George Peabody Library in Baltimore, Maryland is not accessible from the street; one must traverse two anterooms before entering into that magnificent, public library. It is in one of these anterooms—a very large open room with wooden floors and tall windows open to the street—that the Gertrude Stein in Circles: Spheres of Life and Writing exhibition was held from September 22, 2024 through March 2, 2025 at Johns Hopkins University. With material drawn from archives across Johns Hopkins’s holdings and other archives, the Stein exhibit upended modernist hierarchies and reveled in Stein as LGBTQ icon. We will walk in a circle through this exhibit and you will experience this spiral of Stein as I did, occasionally seeing myself in the photos reflected in the glass of an exhibit case (fig. 1). I hope that you will feel a sense of intimacy, and not intrusion, as you peer into the exhibit cases and strive to see through my reflection in the glasses—intimacy and intrusion often come to mind when thinking of archival exhibitions like this one. The image captions similarly play between literary archives and intimate moments, drawing inspiration from Stein’s “Rooms” section of Tender Buttons (1914). In the spirit of the exhibit’s circularity, these literary captions further attempt to circulate meaning between Stein’s life and her writing.

I’m not a Stein specialist, but I am Stein curious. Given my academic interest in visual culture, exhibitions relating to modernism are always worth the trip for me, and my Achilles heel is the intersection of archival materials and women artists, however these might be presented. I was alone throughout exploring Gertrude Stein in Circles: Spheres of Life and Writing; it was midmorning on a weekday. I was anticipating the mild exasperation that I usually feel related to Gertrude Stein.

I first encountered Stein through The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) as an undergraduate in Madrid, Spain, in a literature course on “Americans in Paris,” and again in the same class through Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964). Back then, Stein quickly became an aspirational role model of sorts: being a literary genius in multiple genres, wearing comfortable clothes in defiance of fashion trends, befriending and encouraging groundbreaking artists in a foreign city, and living an authentic queer life. In the early 2000s, Madrid was still grappling with and generally frowned upon public displays of queerness, and though there was permissibility in Chueca (the “gay” neighborhood) and other locales in the city, Spaniards struggled with being openly gay. Reading and learning about Stein’s lifestyle—an openly queer position she seemed to take for granted, which was my undergraduate impression—and her powerful influence across an entire artistic period via her salon gave me a sense of awe, but so did many of the women I learned about in Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (1986; more required reading from that class) like bookseller couple Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, and novelist Djuna Barnes.

It was with a sense of transgression, too, that I entered the exhibition. Encountering Stein in this space brought me back to my graduate studies, where I’d learned and came to understand that Stein’s textual difficulty did not exalt her in the field as it did with James Joyce and his Finnegan’s Wake (1939), for example, or like other canonical modernist male writers. Nor has she gained scholarly attention like similar genius and literary figure Virginia Woolf, who has an international society and two peer-reviewed journals publishing annual issues on her legacy. I am not arguing that Stein has been overlooked—but rather, I am drawing attention to the fact that for a woman who served as a main impetus of the modernist project, we scholars instead have tended to circle around Stein or turn away in ways that we have not with similar figures. Visiting a solo exhibition on Gertrude Stein and sharing those impressions with the modernist scholarly community via my personal photographs of the exhibit felt like admitting I went to see our slightly unpopular but very wealthy gay aunt: everyone knows all about her and is curious, but is anyone willing to admit it? (fig. 2) My own now decades-old queer kinship with Stein and peripheral position to modernist studies both as contingent faculty and a Spanish Civil War scholar soon eased my sense of transgression: we were already acquainted.

The title of the exhibition—Gertrude Stein in Circles: Spheres of Life and Writing—underscored the modernist circularity that would be almost a tongue-in-cheek reference for those familiar with Stein’s literary work. Seeking an example of Stein’s signature prose style of repetition with variation (spirals, as it were), I turn to one of the publications on display: an original copy of the July 1923 issue of Vanity Fair featuring the short story “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene.” Originally published in 1922 in Stein’s Geography and Plays, the story’s plot is not complicated, for, as the subtitle states, this is “The Tale of Two Young Ladies Who Were Gay Together and of How One Left the Other Behind.” Citing this story, the Oxford English Dictionary attributes to Gertrude Stein the origin of the modern use of the word—one might even say she queered—“gay” to mean homosexual with sentences like these: “They were quite regularly gay there, Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene, they were regularly gay there where they were gay. They were very regularly gay.”[1] The editors of the magazine assure the reader that those who have been “baffled” by Stein’s later “telegraphic style” will notice that the style of this story, “though queer, is exactly suited to the subject” (Vanity Fair. July, 1923. 55.) One cannot help but smile (smirk?) at the 1923 Vanity Fair editors including this arched prefatory comment. The Vanity Fair issue appeared in the exhibition’s “Queer Communities” section, revealing the curator’s awareness of the short story’s significance.

I chose to interpret the exhibition’s overall title of Gertrude Stein in Circles: Spheres of Life and Writing as a curator’s wink to a knowing visitor, rather than thinking of this choice as overplayed, though the introduction to the exhibition on the wall states, “One thing is clear, we can’t put Gertrude Stein into a box. We get a better understanding when we examine her ‘in circles’”[2] With sections labeled “Family Orbits,” “Scientific Circuits,” “Avant-Garde Alliances,” and “Modernist Networks,” one realizes that the exhibition shows Stein in relation to others, where the whole pull and attraction of the exhibit is Stein’s stand-alone genius. The curator was concerned with placing Stein within a context, and the tension throughout the exhibition is how Stein forms the center of concern or pushes attention away, particularly in “Modernist Networks.” Certainly, Stein has enough of a gravitational pull through her literary production of verbal portraits, letters, and salon that she creates her own centripetal force. But this centripetal force and how it draws others in is key to understanding not just Stein’s queerness but how the circle imagery itself is queer.[3] In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Sara Ahmed writes, “In the case of sexual orientation, it is not simply that we have it. . . . For a life to count as a good life, then it must return the debt of its life by taking on the direction promised as a social good, which means imagining one’s futurity in terms of reaching certain points along a life course. A queer life might be one that fails to make such gestures of return.”[4] Ahmed juxtaposes the linear, expected “certain points along a life course” with a queer life that, in the moment she is writing, “fails to make such gestures of return[ing]” “the debt of its life by taking on the direction promised as a social good.” The futurity of a queer life, Ahmed underscores, is oriented differently; Stein’s queer life, in this exhibition, is in circles, and we are pulled in.

Even though Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, it is no surprise that the exhibition centered Baltimore. The larger Stein and Keyser (Stein’s maternal line) families were settled in Baltimore; it is perhaps on a family visit from Pennsylvania that one portrait in the “Family Orbits” section of the exhibition, of an infant (grumpy) Stein with mother Amelia, was taken at P. L. Perkins’s studio in Baltimore, included below from the exhibition (fig. 3).

A peripatetic family, the Steins were in San Francisco when their father Daniel died three years after Amelia; seventeen-year-old Stein and sister Bertha were sent to live in Baltimore with maternal aunt Fanny and uncle David Bachrach as oldest brother Michael assumed responsibility for the business and family. David Bachrach, born in 1845, was one of the United States’s leading portrait and commercial photographers, and took the only photograph of President Lincoln at Gettysburg giving his famous address. The portrait of his niece taken in his studio in 1900 displays a different Stein from what we’re used to: a corseted young woman leaning in to the camera, against a backward-facing chair, with a familiar but hopeful gaze for the photographer.[5] You can see this portrait yourself below, again taken from the Sheridan Libraries’ online photo album of the exhibition (fig. 4). Though Stein moved a great deal in her childhood and adolescence, the pull of Baltimore and its greater Jewish community, with the artistic talent of her own family, were fundamental influences.

The materials on display in “Family Orbits” and “Scientific Circuits” were especially gripping and revealed aspects of Stein’s personality I had not previously considered. It was charming to see Stein’s childhood handwriting in a French grammar book going through conjugations, knowing that the language would be vital to her as an adult. Her fluency was evident in a letter in another case a mere ten yards—but several decades—away; the advantage of a singular focused exhibition. Stein’s application to medical school at Johns Hopkins offers a window into early twentieth century med school applications (“Can you read at sight ordinary French and German prose?” “Yes.” was her one-word answer. She was succinct throughout her application); while enlarged photographs of Stein in the lab or otherwise at work in medical school—one photo from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library collection at Yale University; the other from the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (fig. 5)—emphasize the institution’s centrality to her intellectual formation.

Most interestingly in thinking through Stein’s juvenilia was examining the unpublished essay “The Value of a College Education,” written in 1899 when Stein was twenty five, and held at the Claribel Cone and Etta Cone Papers at the Baltimore Museum of Art. (Dr. Claribel Cone and Etta Cone, sisters, art collectors, and philanthropists were close with Stein during her Baltimore years.) The typescript of the first page was on display, and I could see Stein’s edits (fig. 6). The rest of the pages lay tantalizing beneath the first. Her typing was not good (though I, admittedly, have a limited sample to compare it to). I am not surprised Stein outsourced her typing as soon as she could.

Uncharacteristically, I found myself disagreeing with her alterations to “The Value of a College Education” essay, especially in the first sentence, where Stein had edited the particularity of Cambridge, Massachusetts versus Baltimore out of her opening, and generalized her statement to: “There is nothing more striking to a person who has come from the North to the South than the complete difference in the ideals and occupations in the two places.”[6] I am unused to having opinions about Stein’s prose beyond the usual intellectual wrestling match; the dynamic of seeing edits from Stein and disagreeing with them was novel. In my opinion, Stein’s opening sentence would have been stronger with Cambridge and Baltimore remaining in, in order to make the stronger case in the next paragraph of why “you people are in the wrong,” as she does (Stein, “The Value of a College Education”).

Not all the most interesting archival pieces were from Stein’s youth. One case displayed fliers, playbills, and other items from Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera composed by Virgil Thomson for which Stein wrote the libretto. The opera debuted in 1934 in Hartford, Connecticut at the Wadsworth Atheneum with an all African-American cast, then moved to New York City to the 44th Street Theatre. The opera was a hit, according to curator Gabrielle Dean, who wrote the accompanying exhibition book. The New York Times reviewer, Olin Downes, published two reviews mere days apart in February 1934 but with very different tones in the opening sentence: one ecstatic (“A brilliant audience, a most knowing one—an audience, indeed, that included all our choicest spirits of modern verse, music and drama—gathered last night in the Forty-fourth Street Theatre and applauded and cheered itself hoarse at the end of the first performance in this city of the opera”) versus one much more measured (“To people who look upon music as something else than a fad, a pose, a distraction of a dilettante’s hour, the type of opera and kind of thing represented by the Stein-Thomson ‘Four Saints in Three Acts’ is depressing if not irritating.”)[7] These reviews are only four days apart!

But it’s the playbill from the Wadsworth Atheneum that really grips my attention in this case, showing how the Stein-Thomson collaboration connected Stein to the Harlem Renaissance through choral director Eva Jessye and other musically talented figures. I’m drawn to the quotes, probably from the libretto, carefully penned in cursive across the actor-singers’ costumed headshots (fig. 7). The performers likely wrote them on the playbill for Stein as they signed it, evincing their familiarity with her and a certain amount of intimacy—especially: “What had that to do with hats” signed Altonell Hines. They are writing her words back to her, even nonsensically, to create this souvenir, this memory token. These stunning headshots of the performers, with these in-jokes, demonstrate more about how this avant-garde opera created a showcase of African-American talent than any The New York Times review. Though the opera itself was problematic in its portrayal of race and the all-Black cast, the playbill is a bright spot of affection for Stein from an unexpected quarter.[8]

In the center of the exhibition room, part of a set of four tall glass display cases, was one that drew my attention more than the others. This case started the “Modernist Networks” section of the exhibition and on its top shelf were four giants of modernism: Stein at the center, represented with a first edition of The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925), with an iconic blue first edition of Ulysses (1922) to its left and a thin, black-etched God’s Trombones (1927) by James Weldon Johnson to the right. Above them all, very tall and long, was Sixteen Cantos (1925) by Ezra Pound, shadowing them from the next shelf to their backs. (see fig. 8) All texts were published in the 1920s.

Now here was a visual construction of a modernist (hi)story, I thought, with Pound literally looming over these writers as an influence. It was no surprise, especially in a city like Baltimore and an institution like Johns Hopkins, to see a Harlem Renaissance writer like Johnson share the same display shelf as Joyce and Stein.[9] The deliberate equity among the three was refreshing, visually. It was also likely the only room in the world where a novel by Stein would displace a first edition of Ulysses for the center focus. The dark serif font cut into the tan cover like a tattoo, the title stood out so, especially next to the robin’s egg blue softness of Joyce. The curator’s choice to queer the usual modernist publishing hierarchies through this rearrangement defamiliarized all three works to me. I realized that while I was aware The Making of Americans was massive, I had never seen an actual physical copy, much less this first edition. I had taught excerpts of the novel from the The Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990). Reading The Making of Americans is not the same rite of passage that Ulysses is, and seeing the editions together made visible to me how arbitrary that critical choice had been.[10] 

The majority of the materials on display in the exhibit were drawn from the collection of Robert A. Wilson, a Johns Hopkins alumnus who once owned the famed Phoenix Book Shop in Greenwich Village, which his The New York Times obituary described as “a sanctuary for new poetry, an important trading post for first editions and a hangout for his, and his customers’, literary idols.”[11] Wilson collected really anything related to Stein, all sorts of materials, from different imprints of texts to memorabilia created by the queer community in celebration of an icon who remained closeted her whole life. These materials all now form the Robert A. Wilson Collection of Gertrude Stein Materials at the Sheridan Libraries. While the exhibit and its accompanying catalog do not make this plain, it’s evident that this exhibition was to showcase the collection and augment it with other items from John Hopkins’s and Baltimore collections: a real shining moment to highlight the centrality of this holding for modernist scholarship and for telling the story of Gertrude Stein.

It was clear that Wilson’s investment in Stein was not just in her literary genius, and collecting for monetary value, but in a true affection for her that I would guess stemmed from a sense of queer kinship with the author. In reading Wilson’s obituary, one learns that his partner of forty-five years, Kenneth Doubrava, preceded him in death by two years. Though Wilson dealt with several modernist figures professionally or crossed paths with them casually—buying Auden’s library from him when he left the States, for example—it was for Stein that Wilson maintained scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, and preserved artifacts and books. Ultimately, right now we don’t know why Wilson curated his scrapbooks or collected the range of Steiniana posters, with some examples of these (fig. 9). But we can benefit from and appreciate the queer tenderness of his efforts.

Page with clippings

A significant portion of the exhibition belongs to the “Public Reflections” and “Queer Communities” sections, which contain collectible Stein texts like Brewsie and Willie (1946), in this instance inscribed by Katherine Anne Porter in “Public Reflections,” and a 1960 photograph of Alice Toklas with Sylvia Beach and Thornton Wilder in “Queer Communities.” In these two sections of the exhibit, the ‘circle’ analogies that have pervaded the exhibit fall away explicitly, and become much more understated, which is a bit of a shame. The average visitor might overlook how reflections entail a back and forth dynamic that one might call cyclical or circular, and how community could be thought of as a social circle, even if the community is between Stein and the living people who have kept her legacy going. If there had been exhibition labels to the items, these sorts of connections and points would have been more tangible to the exhibition’s unfamiliar visitor, as would have Stein’s influence on the modernist literary period.

Stein’s public persona dominated these sections and her fans’ love for her, with respect to celebrating Stein in literary culture, came through clearly. There were announcements and fliers for shows based on Stein’s work, and one of the most interesting and varied items to me: Gertrude Stein playing cards. Another personal favorite of mine was the Stein stein, made in Japan by Fitz and Floyd in 1970. I think Stein would have been tickled by the conical usefulness of her hollowed head (and the ensuing self-reflexivity), even if the stein itself is not all that flattering. As a number of these items are from 1970s through the present day, it is fun—and vitally important—to see what early fan culture for Stein was like. The Making of Americans was the target of misogynist reviewers when it was published in 1925, but over the New Year from 1977–1978, the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City held its fourth annual marathon reading of the text, with a list of dozens of readers (fig. 11). Stein’s uptake, both in a literary sense and in her role as queer icon, was marvelous to see concentrated in one room.

I paused for a moment to reflect on the circles in the exhibition, with their variation word choice of networks, alliances, etc. This exhibition would not have been possible without Robert A. Wilson’s careful collection of Steiniana, which made me think of how necessary it is that we—fans and scholars, together—recenter, reflect on, and revivify authors in new ways, but also how impossible this exhibition would be without a queer network outside of academic spaces (essentially, Stein’s fans) creating Steiniana and Wilson on the lookout to collect it. I thought, of course, of those in the enclosed circle of the academy; and those in outer spirals who met at readings or performances, or showed off their Steiniana (how else would Wilson have acquired a handmade pillow of Stein? [fig. 12]) and how this exhibition enriched my depth of understanding of Stein by having these circles intersect. 

The curator, both in reference to Stein’s modernist textual self-referentiality and to her desire to place Stein in context with other modernist authors vis-a-vis what was available in the various archival collections, perhaps did not intend to invoke a queer life structure, a circularity rather than a linearity, a spiralesque structure of returns, but that is what happened with the exhibition’s subtitles and materials. I circle back to Ahmed’s notion from the beginning that a queer life defies the expected linear markers along a life course, and that the social good of a queer life, imagining its futurity (at least in 2007 when Ahmed published Queer Phenomenology) might be too disperse, too nebulous to be made legible to society. Queer lives create rhizomatic kinship structures that may be difficult to parse superficially in an exhibition and to reveal with archival materials. Yet, here we could plainly see the social good returned in terms of Wilson’s carefully maintained treasures in his collection, the ephemera noting different Stein events through the decades, and even my own presence.

With materials drawn from various archives within Johns Hopkins and the Cone Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Gertrude Stein in Circles: Spheres of Life and Writing succeeds in conveying Baltimore’s importance as a resource for modernist research, and how fundamental it was for Stein’s formation as an intellectual and writer. It is fitting that so much Steiniana reside at Johns Hopkins thanks to Robert A. Wilson’s gift. But this exhibition also revealed much more about the queer nature of its subject, challenged the conventional modernist hierarchies with which we still tend to measure Stein, and, importantly, highlighted what she left behind in addition to her literary production.

As a testimony to her legacy, the student-led organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and allied members of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (JHMI)—encompassing the several schools dedicated to the study and practice of medicine at the University—calls itself the Gertrude Stein Society. “One must dare to be happy” is the quote at the bottom of the society’s history page. In times like these, that is a bold dare, indeed.

Notes