Gertrude Stein: a Family Saga Meets the Birth of Modernism

Step into 27 rue de Fleurus, the Paris home of Gertrude Stein, a woman who survived wars, loved fiercely, and shaped the 20th century. 

Hear about her regular visitors Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. They attended her salon on Saturday nights – she championed them before anyone believed in them. Her salon was their sanctuary and her vision helped launch modernism and changed art forever.  

Among the many stories we’ll hear about Gertrude, is the one that started in 1903 when a young Spaniard named Pablo Picasso and an American named Gertrude Stein meet in Paris. Neither spoke the other’s language, yet they’re about to change each other forever. It all starts with a portrait – one of the most revolutionary paintings in history. Picasso paints and Gertrude sits; ninety times she comes to his studio and ninety times he stares. He’s trying to capture something beyond her face. When he finally finishes, he’s created a mask – a face like a Bronze Age idol. Fierce. Unknowable. Immortal. 

Writer, collector, and modernist muse – here’s the inside scoop on Gertrude Stein as told by a Stein family member. 

Nick Stein is an award-winning television producer and show-runner whose non-fiction work spans more than four decades and nearly every major network — National Geographic, Discovery, History, A&E, ABC and NBC. He created Amazing Games, an ESPN series exploring the world’s most fascinating sports and competitions through an anthropological lens. He produced the Nat Geo/NBC Millennium Special, narrated by John Lithgow. And for four years during the Obama administration, he ran National Geographic’s highly rated 60-part series Border Wars, where he and his crews embedded with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the DEA, local police and the U.S. Coast Guard — along the U.S./Mexico border, as well as in Puerto Rico and South Florida. 

Those years in the border zone left their mark, leading Stein toward meditation and a whole new direction. Trained and certified at UCLA’s Mindfulness Nick Stein Awareness Research Center, he taught resilience practices to law enforcement — Border Patrol agents, CBP officers and chaplains. For many years after that, he trained various police departments from San Francisco to Boston. He has also brought that work to tech startups and legacy corporations, including the Ford Motor Company. 

Stein lives in Santa Barbara with his wife, Susan McGuire, a psychotherapist and Jungian analyst. He is the author of Mindfulness as a Second Language, from Speak Happiness Publishing. And he indulges a mild obsession with his famous cousin, Gertrude Stein — living proof that a Stein is a Stein is a Stein is a Stein.