Gertrude Stein and the "Modernism/Fascism Nexus"

Gertrude Stein's political views have long been the subject of dispute and fascination. Her life-long conservatism, her public support for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and those embarrassing statements she made (er, ironically, some say) in support of Hitler getting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938 have been chronicled, debated, and then debated some more.

TruthOut now jumps in with an absorbing article about Stein's relationship with the Vichy regime in southern France during WWII. The article draws on material from a recent book by Dartmouth professor Barbara Will and points to a couple of summertime exhibits (at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum) that both glossed over these cobwebby corners of Stein's biography.

The article quotes Professor Will:

The full story of the relationship of modernist writers to fascist and pro-fascist regimes is just beginning to be told and Stein offers a fascinating case study of this relationship... It is hard to get at the complexities and dilemmas of this modernism/fascism nexus if we only see a sanitized 'Saint Gertrude' image of Stein. She was a complex, layered, in some ways heroic, but in some ways despicable individual. The fact that her writing is so obscure has allowed people to say almost anything about her and up to this point the discussion around her has been mostly hagiographic. Looking at the facts of her life, her politics, even her aesthetic principles (which are more conservative than you would think) allows for a much fuller and more realistic picture of Gertrude Stein to emerge.

Here's more.