the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt sixteen)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

“Again,” wrote the poet John Ashbery in his review of the MoMA show, “we are reminded that the twentieth century, whatever else it may be, is the century of Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein.” Ashbery was part of a group of young New York artists—musicians, painters, actors, poets—who congregated in Greenwich Village dive bars (the Cedar Tavern; the San Remo). In this circle, Stein’s books were read avidly, tattered copies passed around and discussed between friends over cheap beer and Martinis. One of Ashbery’s closest friends was the poet Frank O’Hara, who as an undergraduate at Harvard had written a term paper on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which he described as “one of the most interesting things I’ve ever read by anyone.” In his poem “Memorial Days 1950”—his announcement of himself as an artist, which features an image of Picasso chopping through dead art with an axe—O’Hara described his intention to complete “several last things / Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for.” He took her as a model of immediacy and directness, drawing on her multiplicity of meaning and her American idiom, which he inflected with a cool contemporary lyricism.

To Ashbery, O’Hara and their peers, Stein offered a model of a life devoted entirely to art—an uncompromising commitment to her vision in the face of mockery, rejection, and misunderstanding. They admired the way she turned her home into a crucible of artistic innovation; they read her lectures not as self-aggrandizement but as multifaceted works of aesthetic theory. Above all, they were interested in her writing, and the possibilities it offered to theirs. To many poets, of the New York School and beyond, the way Stein took language apart, violating all the rules of grammar, offered a blueprint for their own probings of form, memory, and voice. To artists pioneering new varieties of pop art or abstraction, her repetition and her nonrepresentational use of words offered a literary equivalent to the freedom they sought in painting, sculpture, or collage. And to theatre directors, actors, dancers, and musicians, her exploration of words’ sonic quality lent itself perfectly to cross-disciplinary performance, the form perhaps most on the ascendance in postwar New York. Stein was part of more than one revolution” after her death, across an ocean, she founds readers who would take her work utterly seriously, and build on its foundations with an explosion of creativity that would shape every notion of twentieth-century art.