Author | Matthew Stadler |
---|---|
Language | English |
Publisher | Grove Press |
Publication date | December 6, 1999 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (paperback) |
Pages | 272 |
ISBN | 0802136621 |
Allan Stein is a 1999 novel by Matthew Stadler. [1] Its epigraph is a quotation from writer Gertrude Stein: "What is the use of being a boy if you grow up to become a man, what is the use?"
The novel won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Fiction and the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. [2]
In the novel's first section, the protagonist loses his teaching job due to a false accusation of seducing a 10th-grade student. He then seduces the student, and having done so, departs on a trip to France. In France he assumes the name of a friend, 'Herbert', and pretends to be a curator looking for lost drawings of Allan Stein.
The protagonist uses his new identity to become close to the son of his hosts, a moody 15-year-old named Stéphane. The narrator projects onto Stéphane an idealized memory of his own childhood, when he visited France with his mother at age 16. Enchanted by Stéphane's mother as well as her son.
After two weeks, the narrator succeeds in making Stéphane his lover, and the two run off together to the South of France. But Stéphane returns to his parents when he discovers that the narrator has lied about his name. It is only at this point that the reader discovers the real name of the narrator: Matthew.
Allan Stein was a real historical character: he was Gertrude Stein's nephew and the subject of a portrait by Pablo Picasso in 1906, when Allan was 11. On choosing this obscure figure as the subject of his book, Stadler has said, "Allan was a kid surrounded by powerful adults, and my work has always focused on kids living in the midst of adult projections."
In a 1999 interview, Stadler explained that this plot-turn offered him a way to look more closely at the relationship between an author and a fiction. He said that giving the fictional narrator his own first name left him "overwhelmed emotionally. I recognized that my inability to arrive at a right relation to these fantasies came from how nervous, hesitant, and defensive I felt about my presence as a writer of this. To have a character address me directly was very chastening."
This self-reckoning, he says, helped him conclude what had become a four-book inquiry. "I had been working for four books around this question, trying to achieve some kind of relation to the image of the boy. Allan Stein brought together so many strands of my work, I thought maybe I could neutron bomb the whole boy-mythology construct by somehow exhausting the territory of my fantasy."
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.
Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a book by Gertrude Stein, written in October and November 1932 and published in 1933. It employs the form of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. In 1998, Modern Library ranked it as one of the 20 greatest English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century.
"William Wilson" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in The Gift, with a setting inspired by Poe's formative years on the outskirts of London. The tale features a doppelgänger. It also appeared in the 1840 collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, and has been adapted several times.
Henri-Pierre Roché was a French author who was involved with the artistic avant-garde in Paris and the Dada movement.
The Rose Period comprises the works produced by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso between 1904 and 1906. It began when Picasso settled in Montmartre at the Bateau-Lavoir among bohemian poets and writers. Following his Blue Period – which depicted themes of poverty, loneliness, and despair in somber, blue tones – Picasso's Rose Period represents more pleasant themes of clowns, harlequins and carnival performers, depicted in cheerful vivid hues of red, orange, pink and earth tones.
"Pablo Picasso" is a song written by Jonathan Richman for the proto punk group the Modern Lovers. The song was recorded in 1972 at Whitney Studios in Los Angeles, and produced by John Cale, but was not released until 1976, on the Modern Lovers' self-titled debut album. The recording featured Richman, Ernie Brooks, Jerry Harrison (bass) and David Robinson (drums), with Cale playing the repetitive hammered piano part.
A Boy's Own Story is a 1982 semi-autobiographical novel by Edmund White.
Claribel Cone (1864–1929) and Etta Cone (1870–1949), collectively known as the Cone sisters, were active as American art collectors, world travelers, and socialites during the first part of the 20th century. Claribel trained as a physician and Etta as a pianist. Their social circle included Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. They gathered one of the best known private collections of modern art in the United States at their Baltimore apartments, and the collection now makes up a wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Their collection was estimated to be worth almost a billion US dollars in 2002.
Matthew Stadler is an American author who has written six novels and received several awards. Stadler has compiled four anthologies about literature, city life and public life. His essays, which have been published in magazines and museum catalogs, focus on architecture, urban planning and sprawl.
The Adventures of Picasso is a 1978 Swedish surrealist comedy film directed by Tage Danielsson, starring Gösta Ekman, as the famous painter. The film had the tag-line Tusen kärleksfulla lögner av Hans Alfredson och Tage Danielsson. At the 14th Guldbagge Awards the film won the award for Best Film.
Jeune garçon au cheval is an oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. The painting is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was painted in Picasso's Rose Period from 1905 to 1906, when he was still a struggling artist living in Paris. The painting is a study for a much larger composition that Picasso never completed.
The Salon is a graphic novel written and illustrated by Nick Bertozzi. Originally published in installments on the website Serializer.net in 2002, it was eventually published in its entirety by St. Martin's Press in April 2007.
Sarah Stein was an American art collector. With her husband Michael Stein, the older brother of Leo Stein and Gertrude Stein, she lived in Paris from 1903 to 1935. She supported and popularized the painter Henri Matisse.
Francisco Riba-Rovira also known as Francesc or Paco, was a Spanish painter, from Catalonia.
In 1935, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, 53, temporarily ceased painting, drawing, and sculpting in order to commit himself to writing poetry, having already been immersed in the literary sphere for years. Although he soon resumed work in his previous fields, Picasso continued in his literary endeavours and wrote hundreds of poems, concluding The Burial of the Count of Orgaz in 1959.
Portrait of Gertrude Stein is an oil-on-canvas painting of the American writer and art collector Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso, which was begun in 1905 and finished the following year. The painting is housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is considered one of the important works of Picasso's Rose Period. The portrait has historical significance, due to the subject's role in Picasso's early life as a struggling artist and eventual commercial success. It also represents a significant transitional step in the artist's move towards Cubism.
Young Girl with a Flower Basket is a 1905 oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso from his Rose Period. The painting depicts a Parisian street girl, named "Linda", whose fate is unknown. It was painted at a key phase in Picasso's life, as he made the transition from an impoverished bohemian at the start of 1905 to a successful artist by the end of 1906. The painting is listed as one of the most expensive paintings, after achieving a price of $115 million when it was sold at Christie's on 8 May 2018. It is currently the fourth highest selling painting by Picasso.
Famille d'acrobates avec singe is a 1905 painting by Pablo Picasso. It depicts a family of travelling circus performers during an intimate moment. The work was produced on cardboard using mixed media: gouache, watercolour, pastel and Indian ink. It is held by the Gothenburg Museum of Art in Gothenburg, Sweden. The work was painted at a key phase in Picasso's life, as he made the transition from an impoverished bohemian at the start of 1905 to a successful artist by the end of 1906.
Portrait of Ambroise Vollard is an oil-on-canvas painting by Pablo Picasso, which he painted in 1910. It is now housed in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The painting is a representation of the influential art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who played an important role in Picasso's early career as an artist. It is painted in the style of Analytical Cubism, which Picasso pioneered.