The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The ostensible author and subject of the autobiography, Toklas (1877-1967) was born in San Francisco, California, to a middle-class Jewish family, although the text doesn’t mention Toklas’s Jewish roots, preferring to identify her as European. Toklas’s early life was dedicated to music, her family, and her circle of friends, until an encounter with Stein’s brother and sister-in-law and the first Modernist painting to cross the Atlantic sent her in the direction of Paris.

Toklas met Stein in 1907, and the pair fell instantly in love. Toklas lived in Paris with a friend in temporary lodgings until she moved to the rue de Fleurus with Stein. Stein and Toklas’s courtship remains vague, although the autobiography specifies the parts of Stein that Toklas found attractive, such as her elegance and her overwhelming genius. Toklas was apparently drawn to the exciting atmosphere that Stein built around her and wanted to be part of it. While Toklas was reticent and more of a follower than a leader, readers get the impression that she experienced bursts of passion that could potentially transform her life. This occurred not only when she met Stein but also when she visited Avila in Spain and declared that she must live there.

Toklas is partly a foil to Stein; in other words, Toklas’s character emerges most vividly in her contrasts to Stein. For example, she was diminutive and preferred a temperate climate and going to bed early, while Stein was large and preferred the heat and working late into the night. Toklas was occupied with domestic pursuits like knitting and cooking, which Stein had no time for. She also did the essential work of typing Stein’s texts and thus internalized the projects as her own. Her devotion to these works is shown in her tireless pursuit to get them published. A true artist’s wife, her role was essential to Stein’s success. However, while other artists’ wives have been forgotten, Toklas emerges as a subject of her own in a book that mostly tells Stein’s story but still highlights the importance of the work of those in more traditionally feminine, ancillary roles. Toklas wrote her own autobiography, What Is Remembered, 30 years later, in 1963.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was a French painter known for his experiments with color and the human figure. He often distorts the human form without fully abstracting it and uses color and line in a manner that is expressive rather than naturalistic. Stein bought his picture La Femme au Chapeau in 1905, at a time when much of the public laughed at it. Stein thought the picture seemed “perfectly natural” (29). Stein and later Toklas became great friends of Matisse, “a medium sized man with a reddish beard and glasses” and “a very alert although slightly heavy presence” (13), and his wife, visiting them in their exquisitely furnished apartment overlooking Notre Dame. However, Matisse became resentful as Stein became friendlier with Picasso and seemed to neglect him. Stein became less interested in Matisse as her tastes changed and she discovered more radical painters.

While Matisse was an avant-garde figure at the beginning of his acquaintance with Stein, he soon became more part of the establishment, even setting up a painting school. In the post-armistice years, he had little contact with Stein, who continued to be drawn to novelty.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish artist who moved to France to be in the center of what was then the contemporary art world. Picasso’s art went through many phases, including the Blue (1901-1904) and Cubist (1907-1925) periods mentioned in The Autobiography. In Cubism especially, he took the idea of abstraction further than Matisse, composing his pictures in fragments and altering the logical placement of different parts (for example, reversing the conventional positions of an eye and a nose). He and Stein enjoyed a long friendship that went through periods of intimacy and estrangement. In her poetry collection Tender Buttons (1914), Stein experimented with a form of verbal Cubism in which she broke language into fragments. Thus, the relationship was one of mutual influence.

Each artist created portraits of the other in their chosen medium. Stein sat for Picasso between 1905 and 1906, and she wrote Picasso’s verbal portrait in a Vanity Fair column 20 years later. Stein further vividly describes Picasso in The Autobiography, describing what she thought of as his typically Spanish melancholy and remembering that “his eyes were […] so full and so brown, and his hands so dark and delicate and alert” (19). For Stein, much of Picasso’s ability to think differently as an artist stemmed from his connection to Spain, a place she thought of as exotic and anti-establishment. Picasso, however, was upset about Stein’s fondness for another Spanish painter, Juan Gris (1887-1927). Stein considered Gris to be her equal in the search for exactitude and a proponent of Cubism in its purest form.

The text ultimately depicts Stein’s relationship with Picasso in a positive light, insisting that they remained intimate even after the armistice years, when they had periods of estrangement and saw less of each other.

French-born Fernande Olivier (1881-1966) was Picasso’s lover between 1904 and 1911. Fernande was also Picasso’s muse and featured in over 60 of his portraits. Their relationship was tempestuous, with many break-ups and reconciliations. It finally ended when Fernande introduced Picasso to her friend Eve, who became his next lover.

The Autobiography remembers Fernande as tall, beautiful, and voluptuous, with a fondness for fashion. Toklas took French lessons from her while Stein was occupied with Picasso. Although Toklas had little in common with Fernande, she developed a friendship of convenience with her, and the text’s frequent mentions of Fernande establish her as the first consort figure Toklas got to know. The formal disappearance of Fernande from their lives, marked by a letter from Fernande to Stein, indicates consorts’ lowliness compared with their artist partners. It also shows the end of a phase in Toklas’s life as the companion of this particular “genius’s wife.”