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		Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) Most readers rarely understood the avant-garde prose of Gertrude Stein. Instead, they looked on her literary experiments--so often exemplified by her observation, "Rose is a rose is a rose"--with mystified amusement. But many modernist writers--among them Ernest Hemingway--took her work quite seriously, and the salons over which she presided at her Paris residence in the 1920s were a magnate for the city's Anglo-American community of expatriate literati and artists. Stein's own taste for modernism extended to painting, and her collection of pictures by such groundbreaking artists as Picasso and Matisse represented a landmark in twentieth-century art patronage. In 1933, Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas--her own memoir told in the voice of her longtime companion. Her only work to appeal to the general reader, the book sold well, and in it, she told about a French woman who turned up at one of her salons with her hair cut extremely short. Stein liked the effect and had her own hair cropped in the same manner. Photographer Man Ray took this photograph just after the change in hairstyle occurred. Man Ray (1890-1976) Gelatin silver print, 1927 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution ©2000 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society, NY / ADAGP, Paris