Was Gertrude Stein a Collaborator?

lareviewofbooks:

RENATE STENDHAL

on Gertrude Stein’s latest revival and the enduring
questions about her wartime years. 

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories
Contemporary Jewish Museum
May 12 - September 6, 2011

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde
SFMOMA
May 21 - September 6, 2011

Barbara Will
Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma
Columbia University Press, September 2011. 320 pp.

Janet Malcolm
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
Yale University Press, September 2008. 240 pp.

Charles Glass
Americans in Paris: Life and Death under the Nazi Occupation
Penguin, February 2011. 544 pp.

W.G. Rogers
When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person
Greenwood-Heinemann Publishing, January 1973. 253 pp.

Gertrude Stein
Wars I Have Seen
Random House, 1945. 259 pp.

Gertrude Stein has had a renaissance and, right on its heels, a controversy. Two epochal recent exhibitions in San Francisco, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (now at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.) and The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde at the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art (now at the Paris Grand Palais and soon to open at the New York Metropolitan Museum) have run into criticism for not sufficiently addressing Stein’s survival of World War II. Stein and her long-time partner Alice Toklas held out in the French countryside while France was occupied by the Nazis. So why weren’t they deported like other American enemies, Jews, and lesbians? Stein was apparently protected by a close friend of hers, Bernard Faÿ, an official in the Vichy Government who turned out to be a fascist and Nazi collaborator. Her collection of “degenerate” art, all of those pieces by Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne left behind in Paris, were saved as well.

Questions about Stein’s wartime survival have been addressed in many books. A few years ago they were raised again, more aggressively, by Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007). When Malcolm’s book came out nobody seemed to care, but now that Stein has had a comeback, the controversy has gained urgency. It was triggered by an article in the Bay Area Jewish Weekly that accused the Contemporary Jewish Museum of using Stalinist methods to preserve an idealized image of Stein. At the same time, Barbara Will’s new book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma (2011) tries to show the “real” Stein in just one color: black. Visitors and bloggers who had never before read or studied Stein became enraged by certain details snapped up from the agitation: What? Stein had a Nazi friend? Stein said Hitler ought to get the Nobel Peace Prize? Stein a collaborator! Worse, Stein a Nazi! The scandal recently got to the Washington Post, prompting critic Phil Kennicott to review Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories and openly declare his “hatred” for her.

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(Source: lareviewofbooks)