When prompted to illustrate his friend, Ernest Hemingway comments that the esteemed poet, Ezra Pound “liked the words of his friends,” a trait which he found “beautiful as loyalty but [was] disastrous as judgment” (57). Hemingway’s disparagement, here, is not unusual, but rather a common complaint he holds against a number of his modernist peers in his memoir, A Moveable Feast. In describing his short-lived friendship with self-proclaimed genius Gertrude Stein, for instance, Hemingway maintains he could not “remember [her] ever speaking well of any writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career” (18). His acknowledgment of the trends of some modernists to devaluate objective, unbiased critique, therein, calls into question the position of criticism during this period, given that writers like Stein, and even Hemingway at times, discredited the institution of professional literary reviews and opted to indulge in the personal appraisals imparted by friends and artistic peers.
The Artifice of Criticism: Building the Mythos of Gertrude Stein presents Gertrude Stein’s complicated relationship with criticism. This exhibit catalogs some of the writer’s personal collection of newspaper and magazine review clippings, postcards and letters sent by colleagues, and miscellaneous documents, all with the intent of shining a light on the authority professional literary criticism held when championing and elevating specific literary figures cultural statuses. Despite her misgivings about the institution, Stein’s ‘celebrity-like’ station in the modernist era is partially attributed to the cultural capital of prestigious reviews in ‘high-brow,’ elite spaces, thereby playing a substantial role in solidifying the building blocks of the mythos of this leading writing of the ‘Lost Generation.’
