Don't Mind if It Smokes

Essay: Novelist and poet Gertrude Stein, a champion of avant-garde practices in her lifetime, continues to inspire contemporary artists and writers

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In 1926, Gertrude Stein took to the stage at Oxford University to deliver a lecture - later published as 'Composition as Explanation' that she hoped would change the course of her floundering reputation. Stein, then aged 52, was widely celebrated: writers and artists thronged to her Paris home to marvel at her modern art collection and enjoy her biting wit. Yet, she felt her true career had stalled before it had started. Her non-representational writing — which sought to divest words of their conventional meanings and to create a sense of immediacy through non-sequitur, repetition and force of language - was consistently rejected by publishers and derided by critics. As consolation, she told herself that a truly radical artist could never expect to be appreciated in their own time, but would remain, as she argued in the lecture, 'an outlaw until he is a classic'. Art that pushes boundaries and shatters conventions, she continued, will inevitably appear 'ugly' before people have got used to it, with those at the vanguard 'naturally only of importance when they are dead'. One day, Stein insisted, she would be recognized as an avant-garde pioneer. 'The followers', she added wryly, 'are always accepted before the person who made the revolution.'

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