Works on Paper Book Club: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

Join us for the July meeting of SFMOMA’s Works on Paper Book Club with this session’s moderator, Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Alison Guh, who has selected The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein.

Guh will open with a short talk on the book and its connections to Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal — currently on view on Floor 4 — before leading the group through a guided discussion.

We encourage everyone to read as much of the book as they can, but don’t let an unfinished last chapter stop you from joining us! Come ready to discuss — just know that all plot points are fair game.

Please note that space is limited and advance registration is required. RSVP here.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein is available for purchase in the Museum Store or for checkout at your local library.

Works on Paper Book Club

Read and discuss books chosen by SFMOMA curators, staff, or exhibiting artists at our monthly book club, Works on Paper. Selections are personal: books that inspired work, shaped thinking, or connect to ideas alive in the galleries right now. From fiction and biography to art criticism, poetry, and more, the common thread is that the book opens something up for the reader. At each session, participants sit down and explore the book of the month together with the person who selected it.

Art asks us to slow down — to stand before something and truly look. Works on Paper is a book club built on that same instinct.

About the Book

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time. “I always wanted to be historical,” Gertrude Stein once quipped. In 1932, Stein began writing the “autobiography” of her longtime friend and companion, Alice B. Toklas. The book, an immediate bestseller, guaranteed them both a place in history. An account of their life together in Paris before, during, and after World War I, it is full of the atmosphere of the changing life of the city and of idiosyncratic glimpses of such figures as Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Cocteau, Apollinaire, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, and other luminaries and aspirants who were their close friends. But at the center of the narrative there is always the titanic figure of Gertrude Stein, the self-proclaimed “first-class genius” who some dismissed as the “Mother Goose of Montparnasse,” presiding over her celebrated residence-salon-art gallery at 27, rue de Fleurus. William Troy remarked about her: “It is not flippant to say that if she had not come to exist . . . it would be necessary to invent Miss Gertrude Stein.”

About the Author

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 1874. At Radcliffe College she studied under philosopher and psychologist William James, who remained her lifelong friend, and then went to Johns Hopkins to study medicine. Abandoning her studies, she moved to Paris with her brother Leo in 1903. At 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein lived with Alice B. Toklas, who would remain her companion for forty years. Stein was not only an innovator in literature and a supporter of modern poetry and art, but also the friend and mentor to many who visited her at her now-famous home, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Guillaume Apollinaire. Her body of work includes Three Lives, Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

About the Moderator

Alison Guh is a San Francisco–based curator and writer. As assistant curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA, she was a part of the curatorial team for Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal and contributed to the accompanying publication. Most recently, she co-curated New Work: Samson Young (with Karen Cheung, interim assistant curator of media arts) and is currently organizing the 2026 SECA Art Award Exhibition (with Delphine Sims, assistant curator of photography) and Bay Area Walls: Isaac Vazquez Avila. Additionally, she has been a part of the curatorial teams for exhibitions and publications of Kara Walker, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Pacita Abad, Wu Tsang, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Michael Jang. Prior to SFMOMA, she held positions and fellowships at The Morgan Library & Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Hood Museum of Art. She received her MA in modern and contemporary art from Columbia University and her BA in art history and psychology from Dartmouth College.
 

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