Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

"Gertrude Stein always speaks of america as being now the oldest country in the world because by the methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it America created the twentieth century, and since all other countries are now either living or commencing to be living a twentieth century life, America having begun the creation of the twentieth century in the sixties of the nineteenth century is now the oldest country in the world."

Gertrude Stein, Picasso

"She always says that americans can understand spaniards. That they are the only two western nations that can realise abstraction. That in americans it expresses itself by disembodidness, in literature and machinery, in Spain by ritual so abstract that it does not connect itself with anything but ritual.

I always remember Picasso saying disgustedly apropos of some germans who said they liked bull-fights, they would, he said angrily, they like bloodshed. To a spaniard it is not bloodshed, it is ritual.

Americans, so Gertrude Stein says, are like spaniards, they are abstract and cruel. They are not brutal, they are cruel. They have no close contact with the earth such as most europeans have. Their materialism is not the materialism of possession, it is the materialism of action and abstraction. And so cubism is Spanish."

By Gertrude Stein