Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia.
ONE OF 300 COPIES
Stein, Gertrude. Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia. [Florence: privately printed, 1912].
8vo.; deckled page edges; hand-made floral wrappers; sewn; printed label on upper panel; a few small stains. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition; 300 copies, gratis, the entire edition; an exceedingly scarce publication. Wilson A2. This copy has the publisher’s imprint at the foot of page twelve, lacking in most copies. Mabel Dodge was an American socialite, patron of the arts, and bohemian, famous for her affairs with influential people. She and Gertrude Stein were mutual admirers. On one occasion, Dodge wrote to Stein, “Why are there not more real people like you in the world?” (Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work, by Elizabeth Sprigge, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957, p. 96), and described a time when Stein sent her “such a strong look over the table that it seemed to cut across the air ... in a band of electrified steel” (Everybody Who Was Anybody, by Janet Hobhouse, New York: Putnam, 1975, p.98). With her help, and this portrait of her, Stein launched her career:
It was while staying with Mabel Dodge at her villa in Florence in the fall of 1912 that Stein had composed her portrait of Dodge, who immediately had 300 copies printed and bound them in Florentine wallpaper. Dodge’s distribution of these pamphlets among the literati in New York, along with the appearance of the Matisse and Picasso portraits in the August 1912 issue of Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work, had a marked effect on Stein’s reputation as a herald of international modernism. Dodge herself wrote an article on Stein for Arts and Decorations magazine. After a trip to London in 1913 in search of publishers and the appearance of Tender Buttons (published by the poet Donald Evans at his Claire Marie press) in 1914, Stein was regularly courted as an important member of the modernist movement. More and more visitors—including Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Lamb, Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Nancy Cunard, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia—came to the rue de Fleurus Saturday evenings to see Gertrude Stein and the Picassos rather than Leo Stein, who had come to loathe cubism. By the spring of 1914 Gertrude and Leo had divided up the treasures they had collected since their life together in Baltimore in 1897 and parted for good, Leo Stein moving to Florence and Gertrude staying on at 27, rue de Fleurus. (“Gertrude Stein.” Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The Twenties, 1917-1929. Gale Research, 1989. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. http://galenet. galegroup.com/ servlet/ BioRC)
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