#000067
Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein
Brenda Wineapple
Sister Brother (1996) is Brenda Wineapple's absorbing dual biography of Gertrude and Leo Stein—the siblings who, before their bitter split, were together at the center of the modern art revolution in Paris. Wineapple reconstructs their shared apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus, where the walls filled with Cézannes, Matisses, and Picassos and the Saturday salons drew the avant-garde, and she uses the sibling bond as her organizing thread. It's a story of intertwined ambition and eventual rupture: Leo the confident tastemaker who first championed Picasso, Gertrude the experimental writer who outgrew and outlasted him, until in 1914 they divided the pictures, separated, and never spoke again. Drawing on new material, including an unknown Stein manuscript, Wineapple writes with narrative flair and real psychological insight. For readers interested in modernism, the Paris avant-garde, or the strange chemistry of families, it's a rich and rewarding book.
more…less ▴
The author
Brenda Wineapple is an acclaimed American biographer and literary historian, author of lives of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Janet Flanner, and others, and of narrative studies of American political history. Sister Brother was among the books that established her reputation for literary biography.
The subjects
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), experimental writer and salon hostess, and her brother Leo (1872–1947), an early and astute collector and critic of modern art, were inseparable partners in taste until temperament and Gertrude's relationship with Alice B. Toklas drove them apart.
The book
Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1996, the biography is the first to take the sister-brother relationship as its center. It draws on new and rare material—including a previously unknown Gertrude Stein manuscript—to reconstruct their famous collection and their forty-year drama of collaboration and estrangement.
How it reads
Vivid and shrewd. Wineapple balances the art-historical stakes with the human ones, and is especially good on the ways love and rivalry can share a household.
For more context
Read alongside Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Janet Malcolm's Two Lives.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Brenda Wineapple
- Publisher
- G. P. Putnam's Sons
- Year
- 1996
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Maine