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Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
MAN RAY (1890-1976) Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Silver print, image area measures 3 1/2x4 1/2 inches (8.9x11.4 cm), sheet size 9 1/2x7 inches (24.1x17.7 cm.), with Man Ray's signature, date, and "Paris," in pencil, on recto. 1922
No two women epitomize twentieth-century modernism more than Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967). Raised in Oakland and San Francisco respectively, the two women met in 1907, in Paris, where Stein settled to find the same aesthetic recognition as her artistic counterparts. A writer of abstract, repetitive texts, her literary works sought to articulate consciousness and revitalize language in much the same way Cubist artists deconstructed their compositions.
With her brother Leo Stein, she amassed one of the first collections of avant-garde painting, with an emphasis on Cubism, evident in the iconic works pictured on the walls of this photograph. By the 1920s, Stein and Toklas's home at 27 Rue de Fleurus became the site of a salon frequented by the most significant artists and writers of the time, notably Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Marsden Hartley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Paul Bowles.
The resonance between Stein's writing and the experiments of the Cubist painters was at the heart of convivial, intellectually vibrant gatherings. Stein coined the term 'the lost generation' to describe some of the writers, and her judgments on art and literature were profoundly influential.
