On the day the internet went dark in protest of Washington power brokers’ attempts at corralling online piracy (SOPA), I boarded a train to head into the heart of the dragon. Living a mere two hour rail ride from DC, and an hour away from cousin Anita in Richmond, she suggested we board our separate early morning Amtrak trains and spend the day together in our nation’s Capitol. And instead of protesting something, we did a very civilized lady’s lunch and museum tour. What fun, what a delicious lark!
We met up at the bookstore in Union Station, and boarded the metro to Chinatown and The National Portrait Gallery. A part of the Smithsonian, it seemed there were more guards there than visitors. But we were on a mission; we targeted the “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” exhibit on the second floor and roamed freely for hours. An avant garde writer and collector of artists and intellectuals in her atelier on Rue Christine in Paris, I had no idea what a gender-bending, iconoclast she was. Her portraits, by some of the most famous artists of the period between the World Wars, are spectacular.
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/exhstein.html
Stein and her brother Leo purchased Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat for 500 francs (about $100), which was lambasted by critics in 1905. That was the beginning of the famous ex-pat’s Salon. Gertrude supported the rise of Modern Art both financially and pragmatically. “I was alone at this time in understanding Picasso, perhaps because I was expressing the same thing in literature,” she said. Her poems and stories were built in a kind of rocky, jagged style. Listening to her voice in one room of the exhibit, I felt she may have been an early rapper! After virtually marrying Alice B Toklas, who is featured in many photographs almost as a shadow, and cutting off her hair to look like a man, they opened their hearts and their home to art.
Art is no longer for the wealthy collector. Museums bring masterpieces to our cities, and the internet brings art to our fingertips. If we as a nation begin to censor the internet, what will be next? Right now we only owe China billions, might we not start to resemble it as well? Many of our scientists have had to leave this country in order to pursue their research. Our artists need freedom to exist, to create. Let’s nurture them.
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