Sister Brother

This volume presents an insight into Gertrude Stein's life, and provides a portrait of her gifted brother, Leo. It is the story of the relationship between a brother and a sister, shedding light on a beguiling and complex couple. The name Gertrude Stein conjures up the romanticized Paris of the 1920s. However, for almost two decades before that, Leo and Gertrude Stein had held court to writers and painters at 27, Rue de Fleurs in a salon filled with the bright, bold canvases they were purchasing. Brilliant, voluble and profoundly insecure, brother and sister spent most of their lives shoring up their images, each helping to create the other. A complementary and devoted couple, eccentric and compelling, they were constantly together from childhood to adulthood. And then their mutual dependence proved too painful. Leo denounced his sister's work, denounced the painters he had once supported and, in 1914, denounced Paris for a life of uninterrupted solitude.