Salon · Notre-Dame-des-Champs / Luxembourg · 6e arrondissement

27 Rue de Fleurus

The buildingStill standing

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowA private home

The building stands, private and plaqued.

Gertrude Stein's apartment and salon — the drawing room of modernism, where Ernest Hemingway was instructed, encouraged, and eventually indicted as part of a lost generation.

Address: 27 Rue de Fleurus, 75006 Paris
Years: 1903–1938

Illustration The entrance of 27 rue de Fleurus today, cream stone façade and black ironwork gate

The doorway today, private and plaqued.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

Gertrude Stein moved into the flat and adjoining atelier at 27 rue de Fleurus in 1903 with her brother Leo, and together they papered its walls with the twentieth century before the twentieth century knew what it looked like: Cézannes bought when they were affordable, Matisses bought when they were scandalous, and Picassos bought when Picasso was unknown. Alice B. Toklas arrived in 1910, Leo left in 1913, and the Saturday evenings — part salon, part tribunal — became the most consequential room in modern art.

Hemingway arrived in March 1922 carrying a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson, and the studio became his graduate school. Stein read his early work, told him to cut and compress, taught him about rhythm and repetition, and dispensed judgments he transcribed for the rest of his life — including, fatefully, the garage owner's phrase she aimed at his generation: une génération perdue. He put it at the front of The Sun Also Rises; she never quite got the credit back.

The friendship curdled the way apprenticeships do, and by the time Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast the portrait of the rue de Fleurus had acquired its knives — repayment, in cruelty, for a debt he elsewhere admits is real. Stein and Toklas left for the rue Christine in 1938, before the war. The building stands, private and plaqued, around the corner from the Luxembourg; the paintings that hung in the atelier are now scattered across the museums of the world, worth more than the whole street.

Key facts

The salon: 1903–1938; Saturday evenings from around 1906
Hosts: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (Leo Stein until 1913)
What it was: Apartment and atelier — the picture gallery and proving ground of modernism
Neighborhood: A block west of the Jardin du Luxembourg
Notable visitors: Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Apollinaire, Fitzgerald, Pound, Anderson
Today: Still a private residence; a plaque names Stein, 'writer and patron of the arts'

Documentary photographs

Archival and present-day photographs, reproduced with rights verified.

The Stein family in the courtyard of 27 rue de Fleurus, circa 1905 — The Steins in the courtyard of 27 rue de Fleurus, c. 1905 — Leo, nephew Allan, Gertrude, Theresa Ehrman, and Sarah and Michael Stein, in the first years of the collection.c. 1905 · Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley · Public domain

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in the atelier at 27 rue de Fleurus, photographed by Man Ray in 1922 — Stein and Toklas in the atelier at 27 rue de Fleurus, photographed by Man Ray, 1922 — the paintings floor to ceiling, the two of them at either side of the hearth.1922 · Man Ray · Public domain (US)

Gertrude Stein sitting on a sofa in her Paris studio, 1930 — Stein on the sofa in the rue de Fleurus studio, 1930 — beneath the collection the room was famous for.1930 · Wide World Photos, Library of Congress · Public domain

The entrance of 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, today — 27 rue de Fleurus today — the doorway the whole modern movement once knocked at.2011 · Alinea, Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

The commemorative plaque for Gertrude Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus — The plaque at 27 rue de Fleurus: Gertrude Stein lived here with her brother Leo, then with Alice B. Toklas — and the artists and writers came from 1903 to 1938.Mu, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

The building at 27 rue de Fleurus, photographed in 2014 — The building at 27 rue de Fleurus, 2014 — the atelier stood through the courtyard, behind the street facade.2014 · David McSpadden, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of the doorway of 27 rue de Fleurus, an arched iron gate under a carved keystone — The gate at number 27 — the most consequential doorway in modern art.Editorial illustration

The entrance of 27 rue de Fleurus today, cream stone façade and black ironwork gate — The doorway today, private and plaqued.Editorial illustration

Timeline

1903
Gertrude and Leo Stein take the flat and atelier; the collecting begins with Cézanne.
1905–07
Stein crosses Paris to Picasso's Bateau-Lavoir studio for the portrait's eighty or ninety sittings; finished, it comes home to preside over the atelier as the Saturday salons take their form.
1910
Alice B. Toklas moves in; Leo departs three years later, splitting the collection.
1922
Hemingway presents his letter of introduction in March; the instruction of A Moveable Feast begins.
1926
The 'lost generation' remark has already traveled from this room to the epigraph of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
1938
Stein and Toklas move to 5 rue Christine; the era of the rue de Fleurus ends.
Today
Private apartments; the plaque beside the door is the only exhibit left on site.

On the map

Related books

Recalled in the memoir

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway · 1964

Gertrude Stein's apartment and salon, where Hemingway was instructed, encouraged, and eventually told he belonged to a lost generation.

Writers who knew this place

Alice B. Toklas

American · Gertrude Stein's partner of four decades and the other half of 27 rue de Fleurus — hostess, typist, publisher, and finally the voice the salon's history was told in.

Lived here · 1910–1938

Toklas joined the Stein household in 1910 and ran it — the kitchen, the callers, and the typescripts, including the thousand pages of The Making of Americans — until she and Stein moved to the rue Christine in 1938.

— Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933); Alice B. Toklas, What Is Remembered (1963)

Hosted gatherings here · 1910–1938

Co-host of the Saturday salons by fixed division of labor: Stein sat with the geniuses while Toklas entertained their wives — pouring tea, taking measure, and missing nothing.

— Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

Gertrude Stein

American · Writer, collector, and host of the rue de Fleurus salon where modern art and the Lost Generation were curated in the same room.

Hosted gatherings here · 1903–1938

Gertrude Stein's Saturday-evening salon — Picasso, Matisse, and later the young expatriate writers, including Hemingway, who received both encouragement and the era's most quoted put-down here.

— Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933); Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)

Ezra Pound

American · Modernism's impresario — editor of Eliot, publisher of Joyce, Hemingway's line-cutter, and the era's most brilliant, most compromised poet.

Frequented by · 1921–1924

A guest at Stein's Saturday evenings — remembered in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as the visitor who broke the salon's little armchair.

— Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

Ernest Hemingway

American · Author of The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast; his pared-down style, developed in 1920s Paris, became the most imitated in American prose.

Frequented by · 1922

A regular at Stein's salon from his first spring in Paris — instructed, encouraged, and eventually told he belonged to a lost generation.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964); Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

Literary generation · c. 1921–1929

The Lost Generation gathered here

The writers remade by war and expatriate Paris — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Pound, and the rooms, presses, and bookshops that turned their encounters into literature.

Enter the movement

Art movement · 1907–1914

Cubism was seen here first

The Paris movement that broke the single viewpoint and rebuilt painting from fragments — Picasso and Braque's private experiment, seen early on Gertrude Stein's walls.

Enter the movement

Art movement · c. 1918–1930

Return to Order was seen here first

The postwar swing back to classical calm — Picasso's monumental figures, a shaken Europe's appetite for order, and the tendency Jean Cocteau's essays gave a name.

Enter the movement

Within walking distance

Apartment · Odéon / Luxembourg

58 Rue de Vaugirard

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's Left Bank apartment in the summer of 1928, facing the Luxembourg Gardens — the address of Zelda's ballet discipline and Scott's stalled novel.

Visit the place

Quarter · Montparnasse

Montparnasse

The quarter that took the painters from Montmartre around 1910 and the American writers a decade later, built around four cafés on one crossroads.

Visit the place

Café · Montparnasse

Le Select

The all-night café of the Vavin crossroads and the closest thing Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises has to a home address — the crowd always ends up at the Select.

Visit the place

Café · Montparnasse

La Rotonde

The café every taxi driver delivered Americans to — the novel's driest Montparnasse joke, and before that the painters' living room, where the patron took drawings for drinks.

Visit the place

The Friday Letter

Paris, one address at a time.

The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.